Grand Canyon to Hearst Ranch

Finalist for the 2020 WILLA Literary Award, Creative Nonfiction

Inspired by her first breathtaking trip in the Grand Canyon, Harriet Hunt Burgess dedicated her life to saving land for future generations. Beginning in the 1970s, she persevered through four decades—overcoming daunting obstacles and taking extraordinary risks—to conserve hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the American West.Without Burgess, iconic and irreplaceable landscapes like the Lake Tahoe region and the California coast would be much different today. As Harriet Burgess once explained, “The land we save is our legacy. It’s what we give to our children.”



The Grand Canyon was the catalyst for Harriet’s conservation mission and the spark for Grand Canyon to Hearst Ranch. Author Elizabeth Austin has interwoven her own exhilarating and life-changing dory trip through the depths of the Grand Canyon with the compelling story of Harriet’s early life and five of her most significant conservation achievements as founder-president of the American Land Conservancy.