Ellen Meloy, a naturalist and a nonfiction author whose 2002 book "The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art and Spirit" was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize last year, has died. She was 58.
Meloy died Nov. 4 at home in the small town of Bluff, Utah.
The cause was not certain, but it appeared to have been a heart attack or an aneurysm, Meloy's brother, Mark Ditz- ler, said.
An avid hiker, gardener and river rafter, Meloy was not known to have been in poor health, according to friends.
"The literary community of Utah is in shock," said Guy Lebeda, literature coordinator for the Utah Arts Council in Salt Lake City.
"Ellen was very well-known in the state," he added.
Her essays called attention to the beauty of her state, even for longtime residents, Lebeda said. "On a simple walk along a riverbank with Ellen, she'd pick up things none of the rest of us got. She was like a poet in that way."
In her three highly regarded collections of essays, Meloy used the Southwest as the setting and subject for what she referred to as "land-based literature."
"Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River" (1994) recounts her experiences traveling the river through Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. She explored it with her husband, Mark, a ranger with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management who patrolled the river for a time. The idea for the book came after she saw Desolation Canyon in eastern Utah as part of that trip.
"I had written a lot of notes on that beautiful and very wild canyon," she told the Deseret News in Salt Lake City in 2000. "My husband and I took a series of river trips, with lots of quiet time to observe."
"Raven's Exile" won the Whiting Foundation Writer's Award as well as the Spur Award, presented by the Western Writers of America.
Meloy's second collection, "The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest," was published five years later.
It began as a reflection on the history of the land and inhabitants of the Colorado Plateau and included an essay about building the house where she and her husband lived on eight acres near the San Juan River.
The book also examined the deadening effect nuclear testing and the atomic bomb had on the New Mexico desert.
"Los Alamos and its industrial complex sit atop narrow fingers of land separated by deep canyons," she wrote, pointing out the beauty of the area in contrast to the bomb that was developed there in the 1940s.
