Choose Charming Small Hotels Italy guide to discover your dream place to stay. With this Charming Small Hotels Italy guide, you'll discover dream places to stay that are worth planning your visit around. Here you'll discover a huge selection of truly special places to stay with character, charm and the personal touch from budget to luxury. Charming Small Hotels Italy offers a calm, reasoned evaluation. We go to great pains to try to get under the skin of each hotel; to draw a word-sketch of what the hotel really is and we're not afraid to offer the negative as well as the positive points! Inside our hotel guide you'll find: *Colour photographs and a thoughtful description for each entry. *A genuinely independent review - no hotel pays to be included in our guide. *A unique focus on places with charm and character. We favour places that can offer a genuinely personal welcome. *Every entry is more than just a bed for the night: it's an experience worth going out of your way for. From chic stylish city hotels to contemporary inns, from outstanding B&Bs to captivating country houses we're sure you'll find just the place you're looking for. With each hotel hand-picked by Fiona Duncan, arguably Britain's most respected hotel critic, your visit starts here.

Amid the rock spires and red-rock canyons west of Grand Junction near the Utah state line, a young man with a checkered past single-handedly built trails at a salary of $1 a month. John Otto brought the beauty of the canyons to the attention of the local chambers of commerce and eventually the National Park Service. With the stroke of a pen, Pres. William Taft added the Colorado National Monument to the park system in 1911. Ottoas eccentricities toward bureaucrats and businessmen caused him to abandon a quarter-century of trail building in the mid-1930s. His legacy was then picked up by hundreds of young men from the Civilian Conservation Corps prior to World War II. Today their combined efforts bring thousands of hikers, bicyclists, and motorists to the same trails Otto first used to introduce people to the canyon lands a century ago and the odd rock monoliths that seem to rise hundreds of feet out of the canyon floor. Scenic vistas of the Little Bookcliffs mountain range and the great Grand Mesa complete the beautiful panorama.

The real stories behind the scenery of America's national parks For twelve years, Andrea Lankford lived in the biggest, most impressive national parks in the world, working a job she loved. She chaperoned baby sea turtles on their journey to sea. She pursued bad guys on her galloping patrol horse. She jumped into rescue helicopters bound for the heart of the Grand Canyon. She won arguments with bears. She slept with a few too many rattlesnakes. Hell yeah, it was the best job in the world Fortunately, Andrea survived it. In this graphic and yet surprisingly funny account of her and others' extraordinary careers, Lankford unveils a world in which park rangers struggle to maintain their idealism in the face of death, disillusionment, and the loss of a comrade killed while holding that thin green line between protecting the park from the people, the people from the park, and the people from each other. Ranger Confidential is the story behind the scenery of the nation's crown jewels--Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Great Smokies, Denali. In these iconic landscapes, where nature and humanity constantly collide, scenery can be as cruel as it is redemptive.

One woman's enlightening trek through the natural histories, cultural stories, and present perils of thirteen national monuments, from Maine to Hawaii This land is your land. When it comes to national monuments, the sentiment could hardly be more fraught. Gold Butte in Nevada, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks in New Mexico, Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine, Cascade-Siskiyou in Oregon and California: these are among the thirteen natural sites McKenzie Long visits in This Contested Land, an eye-opening exploration of the stories these national monuments tell, the passions they stir, and the controversies surrounding them today. Starting amid the fragrant sagebrush and red dirt of Bears Ears National Monument on the eve of the Trump Administration's decision to reduce the site by 85 percent, Long climbs sandstone cliffs, is awed by Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings and is intrigued by 4,000-year-old petroglyphs. She hikes through remote pink canyons recently removed from the boundary of Grand Staircase-Escalante, skis to a backcountry hut in Maine to view a truly dark night sky, snorkels in warm Hawaiian waters to plumb the meaning of marine preserves, volunteers near the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States, and witnesses firsthand the diverse forms of devotion evoked by the Rio Grande. In essays both contemplative and resonant, This Contested Land confronts an unjust past and imagines a collaborative future that bears witness to these regions' enduring Indigenous connections. From hazardous climate change realities to volatile tensions between economic development and environmental conservation, practical and philosophical issues arise as Long seeks the complicated and often overlooked-or suppressed-stories of these incomparable places. Her journey, mindfully undertaken and movingly described, emphasizes in clear and urgent terms the unique significance of, and grave threats to, these contested lands.

There's nowhere quite as cosy or as welcoming as the British pub, and with so many places reinventing themselves as contemporary inns there's never been a better time to stay in one. In conjunction with UK accommodation website Cool Places, this guide features the country's very best pubs where you can stay overnight - friendly, independently run places that serve great food and offer comfortable bedrooms to topple into at the end of the evening. Compiled by Rough Guides founder Martin Dunford and the Cool Places team of regional writers, each featured place has an incisive first-hand review and all the information you need for a comfortable stay - including suggestions for the best things to see and do nearby.