Just outside of Santa Fe, in the land of The Milagro Beanfield War, a group of pilgrims converge on the edge of a canyon for a last chance at life.

For more than a century, Ghost Ranch has attracted people of enormous energy and creativity to the high desert of northern New Mexico. Occupying twenty-two thousand acres of the Piedra Lumbre basin, this fabled place was the love of artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s life, and her depictions of the landscape catapulted Ghost Ranch to international recognition. Building on the history of the Abiquiu region that she told in Valley of Shining Stone, Ghost Ranch historian Lesley Poling-Kempes now unfolds the story of this celebrated retreat. She traces its transformation from el Rancho de los Brujos, a hideout for legendary outlaws, to a renowned cultural mecca and one of the Southwest’s premier conference centers. First a dude ranch, Ghost Ranch became a magical sanctuary where the veil between heaven and earth seemed almost transparent. Focusing on those who visited from the 1920s and ’30s until the 1990s, Poling-Kempes tells how O’Keeffe and others—from Boston Brahmin Carol Bishop Stanley to paleontologist Edwin H. Colbert, Los Alamos physicists to movie stars—created a unique community that evolved into the institution that is Ghost Ranch today. For this book, Poling-Kempes has drawn on information not available when Valley of Shining Stone was written. The biography of Juan de Dios Gallegos has been enhanced and definitively corrected. The Robert Wood Johnson (of Johnson & Johnson) years at Ghost Ranch are recounted with reminiscences from family members. And the memories of David McAlpin Jr. shed light on how the Princeton circle that included the Packs, the Johnson brothers, the Rockefellers, and the McAlpins ended up as summer neighbors on the high desert of New Mexico. After Arthur Pack’s gift of the ranch to the Presbyterian Church in 1955, Ghost Ranch became a spiritual home for thousands of people still awestruck by the landscape that O’Keeffe so lovingly committed to canvas; yet the care taken to protect Ghost Ranch’s land and character has preserved its sense of intimacy. By relating its remarkable story, Poling-Kempes invites all visitors to better appreciate its place as an honored wilderness—and to help safeguard its future.

Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world. Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them. Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos. Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston’s Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe’s art and literary colony. Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.

North by northwest from old Santa Fe is the winding road to Abiquiu (ah-be-cue'), Ghost Ranch, and el Valle de la Piedra Lumbre, the Valley of Shining Stone: mythical names in a near-mythical place, captured for the ages in the famous paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe. O'Keeffe saw the magic of sandstone cliffs and turquoise skies, but her life and death here are only part of the story. Reading almost like a novel, this book spills over with other legends buried deep in time, just as some of North America's oldest dinosaur bones lie hidden beneath the valley floor. Here are the stories of Pueblo Indians who have claimed this land for generations. Here, too, are Utes, Navajos, Jicarilla Apaches, Hispanos, and Anglos-many lives tangled together, yet also separate and distinct. Underlying these stories is the saga of Ghost Ranch itself, a last living vestige of the Old West ideal of horses, cowboys, and wide-open spaces. Readers will meet a virtual Who's Who of visitors from "dude ranch" days, ranging from such luminaries as Willa Cather, Ansel Adams, and Charles Lindbergh to World War II scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues, who were working on the top-secret atomic bomb in nearby Los Alamos. Moving on through the twentieth century, the book describes struggles to preserve the valley's wild beauty in the face of land development and increased tourism. Just as the Piedra Lumbre landscape has captivated countless wayfarers over hundreds of years, so its stories cast their own spell. Indispensable for travelers, pure pleasure for history buffs and general readers, these pages are a magic carpet to a magic land: Abiquiu, Ghost Ranch, the Valley of Shining Stone.

Captioned color photographs portray the various scenes, places of interest, and people of Arizona and New Mexico, especially the Grand Canyon.

A revelatory, fly-on-the-wall collection of photographs and stories documenting Eddie Van Halen at work in his famed but seldom seen 5150 studio, from the 2004 reunion with Sammy Hagar through the 2007 reunion with David Lee Roth. “When kids ask me how it feels to be a rock star, I say, ‘I’m not a rock star. I’m not in it for the fame, I’m in it because I like to play.’” Eddie Van Halen A fortuitous call from a stranger in the middle of the night led to a once-in-a-lifetime assignment. The stranger was Eddie Van Halen. The assignment, as Eddie related it, was to “capture the truth. Show people how hard I work, because that’s the truth.” Having no idea where this would lead or in what form it might be shared, Andrew Bennett spent portions of the next two years relentlessly documenting everything that occurred inside Eddie’s sanctuary: from rehearsals, recording sessions, and revealing conversations, to vicious arguments, a brotherly brawl, and a wild heist attempt in the middle of the night. Bennett memorialized every square foot of that sacred space, every piece of equipment, and every guitar—including Eddie’s beloved Frankenstrat. Featuring more than two hundred photographs, and accompanied by intimate reflections on what the author witnessed, Eruption in the Canyon presents an incomparable portrait of one of the most revered artists in history.

From the acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts—the stories of Gallatin Canyon are rich in the wit, compassion, and matchless language for which Thomas McGuane is celebrated. Set mostly in famed Big Sky Country, McGuane brings us an "astonishing" (The New York Times Book Review) collection in which place exerts the power of destiny. A boy makes a surprising discovery skating at night on Lake Michigan; an Irish clan in Massachusetts gather around their dying matriarch; a battered survivor of the glory days of Key West washes up on other shores. Several of the stories unfold in Big Sky country: a father tries to buy his adult son’s way out of virginity; a convict turns cowhand on a ranch; a couple makes a fateful drive through a perilous gorge. McGuane's people are seekers, beguiled by the land's beauty and myth, compelled by the fantasy of what a locale can offer, forced to reconcile dream and truth.