ESCALANTE’S DREAM

On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest

By David Roberts

Who was Escalante and what was his dream? Surprisingly few historians have looked deeply into these questions, but the adventure writer David Roberts has long had a thing for expeditions, and Escalante’s was one for the ages. A Franciscan friar in his 20s at the time, Silvestre Vélez de Escalante was second in command of a group of 10 men that set off from Santa Fe in July 1776, charged with blazing a path to the new Spanish mission in Monterey. The leader of the party, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez, left the diary-keeping to Escalante, and he who wields the pen gains the glory, a fact Roberts knows well.

His own first book proves the point. “The Mountain of My Fear” detailed his ascent of the forbidding west face of Alaska’s Mount Huntington with three Harvard undergraduate buddies — one of whom, Ed Bernd, fell to his death on the descent with a diary in his pocket. The body was never recovered, nor the diary. Fifty-one years after its first publication, “The Mountain of My Fear” is indisputably a classic: terse and brooding, almost unbearably dramatic.

In the decades since, Roberts has written about polar explorations, the legends of mountaineering and his discoveries among the Anasazi ruins of the Southwest, among many other subjects. In what he hints may be his final book, he makes another journey of his own — this one by car, with his wife of 49 years, Sharon. The goal is to retrace the path of the Domínguez-Escalante expedition, which carved an irregular circle of 1,700 miles through modern-day New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona, then mostly terra incognita to Europeans.