As America and THE WEEKLY STANDARD celebrate the first 100 years of the National Parks Service, worth a read is writer John McPhee’s five-book series Annals of the Former World, a geologic history of the United States that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. McPhee began the series more or less by accident in the late 1970s: McPhee was writing about gold-panning in Alaska and the Yukon, and began to wonder how the gold that washes out of mountains into rivers gets into the mountains in the first place. Living in Princeton, New Jersey, he called the university and asked a geologist, who directed him to a different expert and very colorful geologist named Ken Deffeyes.

A year after McPhee and Deffeyes chatted about gold, McPhee had the idea of driving with Deffeyes to a highway “roadcut” in New Jersey, where they could “look at the blast-exposed face of the rock, read its history, and tell it in the first-person plural,” for a New Yorker piece. As they planned the excursion, McPhee wondered if it might make a better story to drive north through the Adirondacks, going from roadcut to roadcut and watching the geology evolve. Deffeyes told him no: “If you want to do that sort of thing on this continent, go west—go across the structure.”