Edward Abbey · 1975 · road

Edward Abbey's 1975 eco-sabotage novel, the book that gave the environmental movement the word monkeywrenching. Four mismatched desert-lovers, the river guide Seldom Seen Smith, the Green Beret Hayduke, the surgeon Doc Sarvis and Bonnie Abbzug, wage a roving guerrilla campaign across the Colorado Plateau, pulling up survey stakes, torching billboards and wrecking bulldozers, with the ultimate, impossible dream of blowing up Glen Canyon Dam. A comic, furious love letter to the canyon country of the Four Corners.

1. 1
   Albuquerque

   Doc Sarvis and Bonnie Abbzug cruise the New Mexico highways by night, setting fire to the billboards that deface the desert.

2. 2
   Glen Canyon Dam

   On a river trip below Glen Canyon Dam, four misfits find common cause and a dream: to bring down the great concrete plug that drowned the canyon Smith loved.

3. 3
   The Maze

   A roving campaign of sabotage across the canyon country ends with the gang cornered in the Maze, the Land of Standing Rocks, by Bishop Love's posse and the state police.

4. 4
   Green River

   The survivors scatter to Green River, the dam still standing, the dream undimmed.