When Utah photographer Dan Miller drove between Price and Moab, he often looked east to an area some call the Book Cliffs and others the Tavaputs Plateau and began wondering what, if anything, he might see there.

So he began poking around, and discovered the beauty of the place included the aptly named Desolation Canyon on the Green River, which has cut a gorge deeper than the Grand Canyon. Then he started thinking about a book on the entire Tavaputs Plateau. Miller had previously authored a book on Antelope Island the Great Salt Lake.

"I thought it would be a great book project and looked for authors," he said. "Several turned me down."

Eventually he found Southern Utah University English professor James Aton who, along with Robert McPherson, had written another book on a remote and often ignored Utah river, the San Juan, called River Flowing from the Sunrise: An Environmental History of the Lower San Juan .

Aton convinced Miller that the Tavaputs was too big and they should concentrate instead on just the Desolation and Gray Canyons. The result is a new Utah State University Press book, The River Knows Everything: Desolation Canyon and the Green ( $34.95) .

Illustrated with some of the 4,000 digital photographs Miller has taken on 16 trips down the river over a seven-year period, Aton has written the definitive guide to a place few Utahns know but which has a fascinating history.

The book covers the area's natural history, native American history, early exploration, settlement of the area from 1880 to 1950, and governance from 1950 to the present.

"I was trying to do a definitive book," said Aton. "Originally we thought about a coffee table book but I suppose my academic training propelled me to do as thorough research as possible. But I tried to write it in not such an academic style and make it a read for a more general audience. It's kind of a hybrid with the color pictures and nice layout that Dan did, but I wanted it to be properly footnoted so other scholars could see the path of my research."

Along those lines, each chapter begins with a quotation from another author including Ellen Malloy, whose book Raven's Exil e took a more literary look at Desolation Canyon, and singer John Prine.

Aton does examine modern threats to the river corridor, such as a proposed dam on the Yampa River, the last wild river in the Colorado system that feeds the Green, as well as oil and gas development on the Tavaputs Plateau. The dam would provide water for Denver.

"I was trying to write an objective history, but clearly my sympathies are with the wildness of the river, its relatively pristine features and its relative health as a riparian system," he said. "I want people to understand that and to know what's there."

The large format, cloth-bound book is a bit bulky to stick in an ammo can and take down the river. With Miller's color photographs, it does resemble a coffee-table book more than a typical academic tome.

"It's a scholarly type of book, which was not my original vision," said Miller. "But that was Jim's definite vision and background and the way it took off ... There is a message, but he tried to be factual and now to show too much of a bias."

Miller said he worked to show the beauty of Desolation Canyon and how he felt about it.

"That's a tough thing to do," he said. "This was seven years of hard labor and love."

wharton@sltrib.com