The road built to save the desert nearly finished it off
Edward Abbey watched government engineers survey a highway into his favorite wilderness — and wrote the argument for banning the cars instead.
In the mid-1950s, Edward Abbey worked two summers as a park ranger at what was then Arches National Monument in Utah — a scatter of sandstone formations reached by a rough dirt road that kept almost everyone away. One evening a jeep pulled up to his trailer. The men inside were federal road surveyors, there to plan a paved highway that could raise visitor traffic thirtyfold.
Abbey's book Desert Solitaire turns that encounter into an argument, not a lament. He didn't object to people wanting to see the desert. He objected to the assumption that seeing it required driving through it. His proposal, laid out with total seriousness: ban private cars from national parks entirely. Build parking at the edges. Let people walk, cycle, or ride in on shuttles, and hire more rangers to guide them once they're on foot.
He called the alternative industrial tourism — comfort delivered at the cost of the thing people came for. A decade later, revisiting Arches, he found exactly what the engineers had promised: pavement, campground hookups, crowds. The road did increase access. It also, in his account, emptied out most of what access was supposed to be for.
The uncomfortable part of his argument isn't the cars. It's the implication that convenience and experience were competing the whole time, and convenience was always going to win the vote.