Island in the Sky

Island in the Sky is Muriel Marshall's portrait of Grand Mesa, the large flat-topped mountain in whose shadow she lived most of her life. The description calls it her last book, and it reads like the work of someone who knew the place from the ground up rather than from a distance.

The book follows the mesa from its geologic beginnings to its recent history as a ski area. Along the way Marshall covers the mesa's wide variety of animal and plant life. The description says she also shares her own experiences, which gives the natural history a personal frame that a pamphlet or a park brochure doesn't have.

Open Library lists Island in the Sky as published by Western Reflections, Inc. in 1999, and the record we hold gives 288 pages. Its subject headings are natural history, description and travel, and history. That combination tells you what to expect: a long, readable account of a single mountain, part science, part travel and part local memory.

Island in the Sky is for people who live near Grand Junction, Cedaredge and Delta and want the whole story of the mountain overhead, and for visitors who plan to drive or hike up on top. Naturalists, birders and wildflower people will find the plant and animal chapters useful, and regional history readers get the ski-area story. It is a big book at 288 pages by our record, so it suits readers who like to settle in with one place rather than skim a quick overview.

Muriel Marshall is the author of this book, which the description names as her last. Her earlier work includes Red Hole in Time, from Texas A&M University Press in 1988, and she wrote two other Western Reflections books on the Uncompahgre Plateau and the Adobe Badlands. We have no verified life dates or longer biography, so we offer none. See her author page for the rest.

More about Muriel Marshall →

Grand Mesa is a large mesa in western Colorado, stretching about 40 miles east of Grand Junction between the Colorado and Gunnison Rivers. Wikipedia gives its area as about 500 square miles and calls it the largest flat-topped mountain in the world. The top reaches about 11,000 feet and rises roughly 6,000 feet above the surrounding river valleys.

The geology explains the shape. A hard basalt cap formed about 10.9 to 9.6 million years ago from at least 27 lava flows, reaching more than 310 feet thick at its maximum. Because the basalt resisted erosion, the surrounding rock wore away faster. Rounded river cobbles under the cap show the area was once a valley, a case of topographic inversion.

More than 300 lakes and reservoirs are scattered across the top, many built for drinking and irrigation water. Much of the mesa lies within Grand Mesa National Forest. These are the features, from rock to water to forest, that a book covering geology, wildlife and a ski area has to work through.

Source: Wikipedia, Grand Mesa