Ken Sanders looks back at his time spent with the legendary author.
This year marks two anniversaries that reverberate through the redrock canyons of southern Utah: the 50th anniversary of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, and the 40th anniversary of the illustrated edition produced by Salt Lake City bookseller Ken Sanders in collaboration with underground comic artist and legend, R. Crumb.
Together, these milestones recall not only a book that sparked a movement, but also a friendship born on the rivers of Canyonlands — where Abbey’s ideas about wilderness and resistance found their truest home.
Meeting Abbey
Ken Sanders first met Edward Abbey in 1976, not long after opening his first bookstore. “Ed just walked in one day,” Sanders recalls. “We recognized him instantly. I asked him to sign a few first editions, and then promptly lectured him about Heyduke and friends tossing beer cans out the window. Despite that rocky start, we became good friends.”
That friendship grew into collaborations that included wilderness calendars, and eventually, the audacious project of persuading R. Crumb to illustrate The Monkey Wrench Gang.
It took Sanders five years to convince Crumb, who initially turned him down flat. But once Crumb read the book, he was hooked. The illustrated edition, released in 1985, married Abbey’s prose with Crumb’s anarchic line drawings, creating a cult classic that still circulates among environmentalists and comic collectors alike.
Moab: Abbey’s Muse
For Abbey, Moab was more than a town — it was the crucible where his ideas about wilderness and civilization clashed and fused. Living in a trailer near Balanced Rock, Abbey made Moab his base through much of the 1970s and ’80s. From there, he could slip into Arches and Canyonlands, or disappear down the Green and Colorado rivers into the silent labyrinth of Cataract Canyon.
“Abbey wasn’t anti-progress or anti-technology,” Sanders emphasizes. “He just believed in limits. His mantra was, ‘Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.’” Abbey fought to preserve wild spaces not as museum pieces, but as living systems that sustained the human spirit as much as ecological balance.
Moab itself, with its swelling population and tourist economy, became a paradox that Abbey foresaw. He loved the place, yet he knew its beauty would one day attract the very development he railed against. That tension gave The Monkey Wrench Gang its urgency — the novel was both satire and prophecy — a warning wrapped in mischief.
River Days with Abbey
If bookstores and publishing projects tied Sanders and Abbey together professionally, it was on the river where their bond deepened. Throughout the 1980s, the two shared annual trips down the Green and Colorado Rivers, often in November when they had the canyons to themselves.
“Ed always had more time,” Sanders laughs. “He’d wander off on hikes, leaving me notes pinned to ammo cans: ‘Gone uphill to Beehive Arch, may return by moonlight. –Ed.’ That was Abbey. He might come back, he might not. The river allowed him to vanish into the desert in ways he couldn’t in town.”
Sanders remembers Abbey’s boat with equal fondness and bemusement. “It was this hard-plastic bathtub of a rowboat. Cataract Canyon is no joke — you flip there in November, you’re done. But Ed loved that boat. He had this stubborn independence about him. We’d scout the big drops, pick our lines, and hope for the best.”
Around the evening campfires, Abbey would spin stories, sometimes embellishing their trips in ways Sanders found more myth than fact. In Abbey’s essay “River Solitaire,” he cast Sanders as the no-show companion who left him stranded — an exaggeration Sanders laughs about to this day. “That was Ed. He made himself into a character, and he did the same with his friends. Truth was always filtered through his need to tell a better story.”
The Legacy of Monkeywrenching
When Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang appeared in 1975, it transformed environmental protest into something visceral, even romantic. The novel followed a ragtag band of saboteurs — loosely modeled on Abbey’s friends like Ken Sleight and Doug Peacock — as they plotted to blow up bridges, fell billboards, and sabotage bulldozers.
Sanders notes that Abbey was never a simple advocate for violence. “He grappled with the morality of it his entire life,” Sanders says. “He could joke about it — violence against machines was fair game — but he always drew the line at people and living things.”
Still, the novel gave birth to a generation of activists. Earth First! unfurled its famous black plastic crack down the face of Glen Canyon Dam in 1981, a stunt that Abbey blessed with a statement of solidarity. For Sanders, who was there, it felt like Abbey’s fiction spilling into real life. “That action,” he recalls, “was the spark that lit Earth First! on fire.”
A Half-Century Later
Now, half a century after The Monkey Wrench Gang first hit shelves, its questions remain unresolved. Moab thrives, Canyonlands and Arches groan under record visitation, and Glen Canyon Dam still holds back the silt-laden waters of Lake Powell.
Yet Abbey’s voice continues to echo, carried by friends like Sanders who keep his stories alive. At recent 50th anniversary events, Sanders has been joined by Abbey’s children, by Doug Peacock, and even by Sophie Crumb, who contributed new portraits of her father and Abbey to a limited-edition anniversary box set.
For Sanders, these celebrations are less about nostalgia than about passing on a fire. “Ed believed wilderness needs no defense — only more defenders,” Sanders says. “That’s still true today. Maybe more true than ever.”
And so, as Sanders looks back on those November trips through Cataract Canyon, he recalls less the danger of the rapids than the transformation of simply being there. “There’s something about a river trip,” he says. “By the third day, you’ve shed your other life. You’re tribal again. You’re connected. That’s what Abbey understood, and what he gave us through his words.”
Fifty years on, The Monkey Wrench Gang still asks the hardest question of all: what are we willing to do to defend the places that define us? For Abbey, the answer was found not in manifestos, but in rivers, canyons, and the friends who shared them.
Feature Image by Richard Markosian.
