Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy

Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy

Long believed to be disappearing and possibly even extinct, the Southwestern bighorn sheep of Utah's canyonlands have made a surprising comeback. Naturalist Ellen Meloy tracks a band of these majestic creatures through backcountry hikes, downriver floats, and travels across the Southwest. Alone in the wilderness, Meloy chronicles her communion with the bighorns and laments the growing severance of man from nature, a severance that she feels has left us spiritually hungry. Wry, quirky and perceptive, Eating Stone is a brillant and wholly original tribute to the natural world.

ELLEN MELOY was a native of the West who resided in California, Montana, and Utah before receiving a Whiting Foundation Award in 1997. Her earlier book, The Anthropology of Turquoise, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the adventure and travel category and earned the Utah Book Award and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Award. Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River and The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest are two of her other works. Meloy spent the majority of her life in wild, distant locations; she and her husband were living in southern Utah at the time of her untimely death in November 2004 (three months after finishing Eating Stone).