The Colorado Plateau is America’s western treasure, home to the country’s highest concentration of national parks, monuments, wilderness areas, and state parks, and a near-endless bounty of wild, stunning landscape. Discovering the Colorado Plateau will explore this region through beautiful maps, full-color photography, and detailed descriptions of the area’s geography, history, and geology, as well as signature activities that encapsulate the best each locale has to offer. By purposefully shifting the focus away from the national parks, this book introduces readers to the various public lands and protected areas that are as exciting and wonderful as any of the major parks.

Unlike any other book published recently about the Plateau, this book not only acts as a source of great information and imagery, but as a practical guide and a true celebration of one of America’s most beautiful and endangered lands.

Bill Haggerty is a Colorado native, an avid outdoorsman and hiker, and author of Hiking Colorado’s Western Slope (FalconGuides, 2017); Best Easy Day Hikes Grand Junction and Fruita (FalconGuides, 2015); and Haggerty’s Hikes in a Bottle, (H3J Publications/GJ Daily Sentinel, 2007) a collection of fifty-two top hikes on the Colorado Plateau chosen from thirteen years of weekly hiking columns Haggerty penned for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

Haggerty was also a contributing author to the nationally recognized “Project WILD,” an interdisciplinary environmental education program for K-12, and a contributing author to Monumental Majesty: 100 years of Colorado National Monument, published by Grand Junction Media in 2011. He hosted the popular “Bill’s Backyard,” on Grand Junction television for eighteen years, a weekly program that documented wildlife in western Colorado. He also taught journalism and mass media at Mesa State College (now Colorado Mesa University).

Haggerty has roamed the Colorado Plateau for more than four decades as a reporter, photographer, Colorado Division of Wildlife Information/Education Specialist, outdoor columnist, conservationist, naturalist, wildlife enthusiast, and public lands advocate. He lives in Grand Junction, Colorado.