Just two months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence a small party of just over a dozen individuals left Santa Fe. Their stated goal was to forge a path that would connect the capital of Nuevo Mexico with the newly established mission of Monterey on the Pacific Coast.

The roundabout route the party took provided otherwise. The leaders of the expedition, both Franciscan priests, gave up all talk of California and resolutely set about converting the natives and missionarying. Their general route took them northward along the western slope of the Rockies just beyond today's Grand Junction, Colorado, then westward to modern-day Provo, where they (wisely, considering that the treacherous Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada still lay between them and their stated goal) gave up their stated quest and headed south towards near Zion National Park before turning eastward to skirt the northern rim of the Grand Canyon on their way back home.

In that day, it was a journey of much discovery and much danger: slot canyons, parties of raiding Comanche, constant need for food and watering holes. Even in our modern era, much of the territory they roamed remains desolate--but very beautiful.

I read this book to reconnect with a region of the United States that is close to my heart. Roberts's book is an excellent guide, tapping his decades of experience hiking the Southwest in search of Anasazi artifacts and lost vagabonds, and tying insights from a lifetime of adventure into the diaries of the expedition.

I was also surprised by how personal the book was, as it described the longest road trip in a long partnership with his wife, Sharon, and days made more precious after his two-year battle with Stage 4 cancer. The book is a fine balance of the historic, the personal, and the experiences of one of America's foremost adventure writers.

I enjoyed reading this book. The author and his wife decide to follow Escalante's route through the South West. This book is part history lesson, part travelogue and part memoir. Escalante's expedition is long forgotten and following in his footsteps can be difficult. I was not familiar with a lot of the history so I learned a lot. The author is battling cancer and realizes this maybe his last adventure so their are a lot reminisces of his younger adventures. The writing was good and I found it easy to read. Enjoy this armchair adventure

Escalante’s Dream documents the Spanish exploration of the Southwest in 1776 by the Dominguez-Escalante expedition. The expedition was led by two padres, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Francisco Vélez de Escalante. Their goal was to find a trail from Sante Fe to Monterey.

The book is written as a narrative of a modern day couple who set out to follow the route used by the padres in 1776. They follow the route in a vehicle as doing it these days on foot would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible due to all the land ownership and access issues they would face. They also chose a vehicular retracing of the route because the author is struggling with the effects of cancer treatment, so it makes way more sense to follow it that way. The author has a copy of the journal kept by the expedition and relies on those explanations to find the route. At times, the journal frustratingly lacks detail, so it is impossible to pin down some of the exact locations. The author and his wife cover distances in hours that took the padres days to cover.

Along the way, we learn many historical facts about the expedition. I found it fascinating since this is not one of the more famous expeditions you find detailed in history books. It wasn’t a large one and there were no wars fought. It was just a group trying to find a route in a desert where they had no idea what lay ahead. The expedition, it turned out, was unprepared for what they would encounter. They brought too little food and too few people. They even ended up eating their own horses because they ran out of food. They were, it seems, hopelessly lost without a clue where they were going. There were no maps, of course. They tried to find local natives to help direct them, but when they did find them, there were language barriers that prevented communication between the groups. There were also some cultural misunderstandings on the part of the Spaniards.

The route was retraced in 1976 as part of Bicentennial events and there are some markers along the way left by the historians of that time. Whether the locations are accurate is questionable due to the lack of detail in the original journal kept by the expedition.

The narrative is part modern-day retelling and part historical facts from the journal. The author encounters many people along the way, some more helpful than others. He did seem, to me anyway, to have an issue with the staff at the visitor centers and information desks where they stopped. If the staff could not answer his questions, he seemed to think they were incompetent. What he may not know is that, most of the people who staff the information desks at public parks are retired volunteers who just do it to help out. You won’t find a historian sitting there answering questions from tourists all day. It’s mostly just retired folks who enjoy helping out and want to be of service. So, I think the author needs to cut those folks some slack. He wrote several times about the lack of knowledge among those staff. Also, he’s got to be aware that this was not a huge or well-known expedition, so people who have detailed knowledge of it are going to be few and far between. As he found while passing through towns with a connection to the expedition, most people these days have no idea what happened at their location in 1776. Not unless they have specifically studied that era. So, expectation vs. reality needs to be addressed there.

I did enjoy this as a travelogue and history lesson. There are some very interesting bits, such as how the Crossing of the Fathers was named, and the etchings on trees and rocks found all these years later. Those were fascinating. At times, the narrative did seem to drag a bit, or veer off too much into modern concerns, but it did get back to the history lessons later. I enjoyed the windows into the life in the native villages the Spaniards encountered. The lack of cultural understanding was expected, but still disturbing to see what they wrote about these encounters in the journal. The places that the Spaniards went were sometimes incredibly inaccessible. Some still are to this day, which is as it should be. There should be places left where people don’t go, that keep their secrets.

If you enjoy historical travelogues, then you will like this book. I recommend it.