The Gift of Wilderness Author:Jack Steffan It was more than four hundred years ago that a European first incredulously beheld the vast chasm, miles from brim to brim and a mile deep. that we now know as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, in northern Arizona. It has been called the most sublime spectacle in the world. Another three centuries and more passed before the canyon was really e... more »xplored, by Major John Wesley Powell. His report aroused great interest, and forty years later the area was made a national park.
But efforts of private interests to exploit Grand Canyon for their own profit have continued even to teh present. Such an effort is central to the story of this novel.
Here, through the eyes of young Jay McHugh, son of the park's chief naturalist, and those of Jay's friends, we see how a project to dam and harness the Colorado River is planned and how the boys themselves become involved in the fight against it. Linked with the promoters' scheme are Jay's adventures and the personal crisis of his troubled friend Spooky Fortune, who in the course of an eventful summer finds that for him "the gift of wilderness" is the new perspective on life that he gains from hours of time to himself amid the vastness and agelessness of Grand Canyon.« less