On his birthday, Howie Garber pulled off near the Quarry Trail and listened to Little Cottonwood Canyon. Wind moved through birch leaves. A cyclist passed with a child in tow. The canyon looked as it had in so many of his photographs – granite, water, autumn color – but this time Garber saw what might be lost.

He had photographed Little Cottonwood for decades. Now he wanted others to help speak for it.

Garber’s photographs anchor a collaborative book about Little Cottonwood Canyon, with work by 10 writers and 10 photographers. Scientists, skiers, conservationists and officials add essays and images that make a case for the canyon as watershed, wildlife corridor, recreation ground and contested public place at a moment when the proposed gondola has forced Utahns to weigh access against cost.

Just 25 minutes from Salt Lake City, Little Cottonwood Canyon climbs from sage and stone into firs, snowfields and granite towers. It’s both watershed and playground – source of the city’s water, cradle of its skiing and one of Utah’s most beloved wild corridors. Here, granite flushes pink in morning light, waterfalls thread cliffs and each season changes the canyon’s light.

In Albion Basin, light turns pink as breath on glass. Garber waits, motionless, a doctor turned photographer tracing the pulse of a place he’s loved for 50 years. “Experiencing powder skiing in a wilderness next to a city seemed miraculous,” he once wrote.

That September morning, the canyon was burning gold. Sunlight spilled through the maples, granite blushed with reflected fire. He drove slowly, camera beside him, each bend familiar, places he’d photographed for decades.

But the place looks different when you know what may be coming. Word came that the state had moved ahead with plans for a gondola, a billion-dollar project of cable and steel cutting through the basin he’d spent half his life trying to honor. The 250-foot towers promised to ease traffic, yet to Garber they threatened to alter the scenery that drew people here.

“Love and outrage were my motivators,” he would later write. Photographs alone wouldn’t be enough. He would need other people who knew the canyon as he did and could speak for it before it changed.

Garber’s first call was to Friends of Alta, the nonprofit founded by Alta’s first mayor, Bill Levitt, to help protect the canyon and the town around it. The group helped bring Alta and Little Cottonwood Canyon: Jewel of the Wasatch Mountains to life, covering printing and graphic design and supporting the writers and photographers who contributed.

For Garber, it was the right fit: an organization rooted in Alta’s history and long engaged in the work of protecting Albion Basin, the watershed and the larger Little Cottonwood corridor.

In the weeks that followed, Garber reached out across the Wasatch: a scientist, a mayor, a skier, a climber, a conservationist, each with a different understanding of what made the canyon irreplaceable. “If the canyon was to be defended,” he said, “it would take more than images. It would take testimony.”

Their words became a shared account of the canyon: the hydrologist tracing snowmelt to the city below, the avalanche forecaster reading weather and snowpack, the writer walking through memory with her grandfather, the advocate fighting to keep the ridgelines wild. Together, they described a canyon valued for more than lift tickets and traffic counts.

Downstream, the canyon turns to water. Snowmelt moves into the city’s water system. Every winter storm that piles high at Alta will, months later, rattle through a city pipe. Laura Briefer knows that better than anyone. As director of Salt Lake City Public Utilities, she thinks about the canyon in gallons, runoff and long-term consequences.

She first drove to Alta more than 20 years ago for a job interview with Mayor Bill Levitt. The drive up Little Cottonwood stunned her, cliffs rising without warning, light sliding through evergreens like breath. She never left. “Our well-being and the sustainment of the watershed are inseparable,” she says. “This canyon is our drinking water, our air, our refuge.”

Briefer’s work often happens far from the trailhead, in meeting rooms where the talk turns to pipes, growth and the next proposal for the canyon. She keeps the focus on water. Little Cottonwood is a working watershed, and what happens high above the valley can end up far downstream. Salt Lake City Public Utilities, the Metropolitan Water District of Salt Lake & Sandy, Sandy City, Save Our Canyons and Friends of Alta are now challenging UDOT’s gondola impact study in court. Her language is measured, but the stakes remain high.

Beneath the snow and water lies the canyon’s geologic record. Geologist Bill Parry calls Little Cottonwood “a gift from the ancient past.” At the canyon’s mouth, he points to 770-million-year-old shale layered beside granite formed deep underground, a visible record of time and heat.

He tells his students that the same granite hauled to build the Salt Lake Temple still glitters in the cliffs above the road, proof of endurance and of how much the canyon’s future now depends on human decisions.

Above Albion Basin, conservation biologist Allison Jones keeps her field notes among lupine and paintbrush blazing against lingering snowfields. Her notebook is a roll call of survival: elk, moose, pika, hummingbird. She calls the Wasatch “one of the most biodiverse mountain ranges in North America,” a refuge for more than 1,000 species of plants and 250 animals.

The scientist in her counts species; the neighbor in her still marvels. “When you understand the natural history of these canyons,” she says, “you want to protect them.” Even now, Jones hikes the same paths where Garber photographs moose at dawn, scanning talus slopes and wet meadows for signs of life.

 

In snow season, the canyon changes voices. What was quiet becomes kinetic. Wind sweeps the granite corridors, snowflakes turn to prisms and every sound – bootstep, shovel scrape, the thump of distant control work – feels amplified by the cold.

Bruce Tremper has spent much of his life studying that sound. As longtime director of the Utah Avalanche Center, he spent decades translating snow’s language for those who would venture into it. He calls Little Cottonwood “the bull’s-eye of the Wasatch,” a rare meeting of geography, snowfall and terrain. “It’s the Goldilocks zone,” he says, snow just heavy enough to float on and light enough to keep skiers coming back.

Before dawn, Tremper would climb from the Upper Guard Station with a shovel and snow saw, reading the storm history grain by grain. Each stratum told a story – warmth and wind, calm and cold, all pressed into a living archive. “Avalanches are easy,” he says. “People are hard.”

For him, skiing here begins with attention to snow, weather and terrain. Generations of skiers have returned for this snow, drawn by its consistency and depth. “The mountains will always have the last word,” he says, “but if you listen closely enough, they’ll tell you when to speak.”

Summer softens the canyon’s edges. The snow recedes, and wildflowers rise from runoff like smoke. On a warm August morning, writer Ayja Bounous rides the Peruvian chairlift at Snowbird with her 100-year-old grandfather, Junior Bounous – the man who taught Utah to ski. Their feet dangle above the same terrain he once cut into runs and she now writes about as memory.

Through the Peruvian Tunnel, they pass photographs of the canyon’s past: miners, ski pioneers, a young Junior and his late wife carving the first figure 8s in powder. On the far side, sunlight floods the exit, wildflowers spilling across open Mineral Basin.

For Ayja, the hike down measures change across generations. Her grandfather’s generation watched wilderness become recreation; hers is watching recreation give way to development pressure. “Every loss is permanent,” she writes, “and every victory temporary.” Walking beside Junior through Indian paintbrush and lupine, she sees how quickly a place can change and how long people carry a place once it gets into them.

 

Not everyone who loves Little Cottonwood comes here to ski or photograph. Some come to argue for its survival.

Grace Tyler has spent half her life at public hearings that stretch past midnight under fluorescent lights. As development director of Save Our Canyons, she carries the voices of those who can’t speak – the elk, the owl, the child not yet born who might never see these peaks as they are today. When she escapes the city and hikes the ridge above Albion Basin, she moves slowly, letting the noise fall away. “The Wasatch,” she says, “is the cornerstone of our community.”

Former Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker still calls these slopes his backyard. For decades, he has been the pragmatic optimist in the room, the one drawing lines between passion and policy. “Transit, not more cars, will save this canyon,” he says. To him, the gondola isn’t innovation – it’s amnesia. It forgets the scale and quiet that make this place sacred.

Together, Tyler and Becker make two versions of the case for protection, one rooted in advocacy, the other in policy. Both argue that the canyon’s water, habitat and scale matter more than convenience before the road changed. The debate continues in city halls and courtrooms, where citizens keep pressing the same point: once this canyon is built over, it does not go back.

Back at Alta, the peaks are sealed in white, and the air smells faintly of pine and snowlight. Garber sets his tripod near the bend where the creek widens, where the willows catch ice like lace. The gondola debate still roils below, but up here the only sound is wind brushing through fir and aspen.

He checks the light, breathes and waits. Waiting is what he does best. In a career that has taken him across seven continents, this narrow canyon has remained his compass point, the place that reminds him why beauty matters. “It’s an honor,” he says, “and the highest use of my imagery, to protect this unique and remarkable place.”

He presses the shutter. The click is nearly lost in the wind. The photograph will join thousands of others: moose in fog, wildflowers at dawn, ski tracks vanishing into storm, each one another record of what is at stake.

Below, Briefer’s water begins its long descent. Parry’s granite gleams under fresh snow. Jones’s pikas dart between boulders. Tremper’s snowpack thickens. Bounous’s wildflowers sleep beneath it. Tyler and Becker keep arguing the case.

As evening settles, the mountains fade to violet and the last light holds on the upper ridges before slipping off.

 

This story draws inspiration from Alta and Little Cottonwood Canyon: Jewel of the Wasatch Mountains, a book of essays and photographs edited by Howie Garber. The book can be purchased from FriendsofAlta.org and supports their ongoing efforts to protect the canyon’s watershed and wildlands.