"There's no place like the Desert Southwest. It's a land of parched canyons, bleached solitudes, and bulwarks of intoxicating rock. A land of sky islands, cinder cones, and mesas the size of battleships, crisscrossed by two great river drainages, the Colorado and the Rio Grande. It's the country made famous by Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and Georgia O'Keeffe, a queer world of upheaval and stark finality cooked in an unforgiving forge. The scale...