THE SAN LUIS VALLEY: SAND DUNES AND SANDHILL CRANES
Desert Places Series

Text by Susan J. Tweit
Photography by Glenn Oakley

$17.95, paper
0-8165-2424-6
University of Arizona Press


A journey into the heart of a landscape that few know, even in Colorado, an immense wedge of high-elevation desert that thrusts its way into the state from the Southwest, spawning both one of North America's longest rivers, the Rio Grande, and the continent's tallest active sand dunes, Great Sand Dunes. The book examines how humans and other species have adapted to the often harsh realities of life in its changing environments. It is also a personal meditation on the nature of home, and how particular landscapes call us to return year after year, until death alters our journey.

At the end of Tweit's pen mountains dance with the same energy and dynamism as courting cranes.
--Journal of the West

An extraordinary spring journey ... a joy to read.
--High Country News

The San Luis Valley is one of Colorado's unheralded treasures, and this charming, intelligent book does it justice.
--author and naturalist Ann Zwinger

 

From the book:

The cranes called to me one windy autumn night. I lay on the couch, absorbed in a novel when a distant sound - compelling, familiar - propelled me upright to listen. There it was again, faint but unmistakable: "khrrrrr, khrrrrr," the throaty call of sandhill cranes.

I rushed outside to search the sky. The wind hummed in the power lines; stars spangled the heavens, but I couldn't pick out the wide-winged and long-necked forms of cranes in the darkness. As my husband, Richard, came out and put his arm around me, their voices sounded again from high overhead. We listened as the cranes called back and forth, their tremulous and wild cries a vocal tether linking the invisible flock as the birds migrated through the night, carried on the wind.

The haunting calls grew fainter until at last the cranes were gone. Although we could not see the birds, we knew where they were headed in the moonless night: over the pass to the ponds and marshes that dot the high desert of the San Luis Valley.

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