The Dawn Collector: On My Way to the Natural World

by Reg Saner

Award-winning writer Reg Saner recollects, "Years ago I said that if I had a dozen lives to live, I'd live every one of them in Colorado." Saner first saw the Rocky Mountains in 1962, and since then he has never strayed far, spending his days in Boulder at the foot of the Colorado mesa. The Dawn Collector is a testament to Saner's devotion to his long-time home and its surrounding western landscape.

This collection of fourteen thoughtful and meditative essays reveals Saner's love of the outdoors and his deep concern for the American West. Saner explored on foot the wild country of the West, from just beyond his backyard to remote places that most people can only dream about exploring, and recorded his thoughts and insights here. Tiny details such as a ladybug on a dawn yucca or a coyote hunting in snow are illuminated and expanded in Saner's essays as platforms for larger ideas about nature's simultaneously comforting and wildly chaotic character.

Saner also explores in his essays how the Rocky Mountains and interior West are enduring landscapes of stark beauty that have witnessed tremendous changes during the past forty years. But Saner's writings are not an activist's call for environmental conservation so much as a thoughtful and stirring reflection on the role of human beings in a vast, powerful, and unpredictable cosmos. Accompanying Saner's writings is a gallery of his colorful photographic images that expands on his musings with a powerful visual document of the majesty and wonder of the landscape of the American West, giving full form to his statement, "That we live in a mystery has always fascinated me."

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2005

Reviews

[David Robertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An outstanding collection of 14 essays on natural history and natural philosophy by an essayist and poet living in Boulder, Colorado, who deserves much greater recognition. This collection follows an earlier collection, "The Four-cornered Falcon," whose essays are more lyrical and poetic than the essays gathered in "The Dawn Collector." The best of the writings here is probably "Desert River/Different River," in which Saner recounts a 10-day canoe trip down Utah's Green River with his son Nick; it encapsulates everything Saner embraces and believes in an engaging account of family, natural history, and natural philosophy.

[Marsha · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can keep reading chapters of this over and over. It was hard to call it finished. It rekindled my own love of these mountain paths in Boulder, the creatures that live here, our sun. I haven't met anyone else who so closely shares the things in this world I appreciate and look to for nourishment.