Fire on the Mountain

A New Mexico man faces off against the government in a battle over his land in this novel by the author of Desert Solitaire.
After nine months away at school, Billy Vogelin Starr returns home to his beloved New Mexico-only to find his grandfather in a standoff with the US government, which wants to take his land and turn it into an extension of the White Sands Missile Range.
Facing the combined powers of the US county sheriff, the Department of the Interior, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the US Air Force, John Vogelin stands his ground-because to Vogelin, his land is his life. When backed into a corner, a tough old man like him will come out fighting...
Fire on the Mountain is a suspenseful page-turner by "one of the very best writers to deal with the American West"-the acclaimed author of such classics as The Monkey Wrench Gang and the memoir Desert Solitaire ( The Washington Post).
"Abbey is a fresh breath from the farther reaches and canyons of the diminishing frontier." - Houston Chronicle
"The Thoreau of the American West." -Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove

Edward Abbey was born in Home, Pennsylvania in 1927. In 1944, at the age of seventeen, Abbey set out to explore the American Southwest, bumming around the country by hitchhiking and hopping freight trains. It was during this time that Abbey developed a love of the desert, which would shape his life and his art for the next forty years. After a brief stint in the military, Abbey completed his education at the University of New Mexico and later, at the University of Edinburgh. He took employment as a park ranger and fire lookout at several different National Parks throughout his life, experiences from which he drew for his many books. Abbey died at his home in Oracle, Arizona in 1989.