PATH OF LIGHT:
A Walk Through Colliding Legacies of Glen Canyon
by Morgan Sjogren
Path of Light treks back through time as author and explorer Morgan Sjogren retraces the 1920s expeditions led by Charles L. Bernheimer into the heart of Glen Canyon and Bears Ears National Monument. Using journals and photographs from the expeditions to recreate these historic routes, Sjogren encounters powerful perspectives and stories about land management and human rights issues that carry forth into the present. Mindful of the pervasive effects of colonization and motivated by a deeply personal care for the land, Sjogren asks what it means to be an explorer while learning from the people who have loved the land for millennia and moments. Path of Light walks towards an illuminated understanding of the landscape and its history in an effort to help preserve it for the future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MORGAN SJOGREN is a free-range writer, explorer, and defender of wild places. She is the author of Path of Light: A Walk Through Colliding Legacies of Glen Canyon, Outlandish, The Best Bears Ears National Monument Hikes, and The Best Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Hikes. Her writing has appeared in Arizona Highways, Archaeology Southwest, bioGraphic, and Sierra Magazine. She is the recipient of the 2022 Water Desk Grant for reporting on the Colorado River. A nomad by nature, Sjogren lives on the Colorado Plateau and feels most at home in the wild.
April 2023 | Nonfiction | 978-1-948814-73-7 | 375 pp | $19.95
PRAISE FOR PATH OF LIGHT
“Path of Light is a true adventure of a read.”
—DAVID GESSNER, New York Times best-selling author of All The Wild That Remains
“This book is a wealth of history and land. Its pages smell of libraries, desert, and the inside of a well lived-in vehicle. Right times, right places, right people, she’s got a knack for the journey. I’m reading this thinking, cool, I’d do that.”
—CRAIG CHILDS, author of Tracing Time, Virga and Bone, and Atlas of a Lost World
“As Sjogren retraces Bernheimer’s route a century later, she takes us on a courageous, soul-centered journey that ventures into the dark shadows of colonization and environmental destruction but ultimately emerges in a luminous place of hope and healing for ourselves and the Earth.”
—ANNETTE MCGIVNEY, author of Pure Land: A True Story of Three Lives, Three Cultures, and the
Search for Heaven on Earth; winner of the National Outdoor Book Award
“Path of Light is the best kind of book: one that haunts and compels and brings tears, wonder, and reverence for the land that inspired it.”
—KATHRYN WILDER, Colorado Book Award Winner of
Desert Chrome: Water, a Woman, and Wild Horses in the West
“The love on display in this book is infectious: love for people, for place, and for history. More than anything else, Sjogren reminds us of all the magnificent life that abounds in these red deserts; life ancient and reverberating across time, and life desperately struggling to endure.”
—CHRIS LA TRAY (Little Shell Chippewa), author of
Becoming Little Shell and One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays From the World At Large
“In landscape prose that is lovingly evocative, she grapples alongside a fascinating cast of companions with her—and our—covenant with a scarred, sacred, imperiled, and still-extraordinary redrock empire.”
—NATE SCHWEBER, author of This America of Ours:
Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild
“In this beautifully crafted book, Sjogren documents her journeys, both physical and spiritual. A fine writer, she is a true desert rat with the courage to follow the path of light no matter where it leads.”
—JACK LOEFFLER, author of Adventures With Ed: A Portrait of Abbey
“When we read Morgan Sjogren’s Path of Light, we are walking through a story, a seamless ramble through geography, history, and Native culture in the Glen Canyon and Bears Ears country of southern Utah where Sjogren and her wanderluster companions learn two truths. Hidden passages lead through unimaginable places. And water and friends are the source of life in the desert.”
—STEPHEN TRIMBLE, editor of Red Rock Stories and The Capitol Reef Reader
“Sjogren has a unique knack for transporting the reader to the stark and sensual lands she calls home so that we are on the journey beside her, whether it’s a parched search for stagnant, scuzzy water in a slick rock pothole, a sunbaked trek through the bleak beauty of Red Canyon, or a perilous and lonely slog through a dark, boulder-choked canyon.”
—JONATHAN P. THOMPSON, author of Sagebrush Empire and River of Lost Souls
“Morgan Sjogren is among the brightest emerging voices in an ongoing and increasingly urgent conversation regarding the landscape of the American Southwest. Path of Light is filled with passion, intensity, and longing that reflect and amplify similar qualities in the terrain itself.”
—ANNETTE AVERY, Bright Side Bookshop, Flagstaff