Jack Turner’s The Abstract Wild is a complex argument that discusses many issues and ultimately defends the wild in all of its forms. He opens the novel with a narrative story about a time when he explored the Maze in Utah and stumbled across ancient pictographs. Turner tells this story to describe what a truly wild and unmediated experience is. The ideas of the aura, magic, and wildness that places contain is introduced in this story. Turner had a spiritual connection with the pictographs because of the power, beauty, and awe that they created within him upon their first mysterious contact. Turn