Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists--from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches--braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West. What is the future of a region beset by droughts and fires, by fracking and drilling? What should be done about an ever-increasing population that seems to be in the process of loving the West to death? How might two environmental thinkers with radically different personalities--a competent, mature advocate (Stegner) and a monkey-wrenching anarchist (Abbey)--have responded to the crisis?