Edward Abbey is someone I never met, but many of my US Forest Service and National Park Service friends knew him. A couple of them are featured to some extent in some of his novels. There was a lot of agency knowledge about Abbey, like how he wanted a fire lookout job so he could write without interruption and consequently missed being the early warning of wildfires in Arizona. Kerouac on Crater and Snyder on Desolation, both in the Washington North Cascades, had set the bar high. Abbey was hard on women rangers and more than a bit pompous (for example, in one relationship-gone-south, when he demanded the next year that they had to choose: hire his ex-girlfriend or him, they chose her. This job and relationship led to his novel Black Sun.)

He hiked vast stretches of desert landscape to see what the story was for those who walked it earlier. The Camino del Diablo in Southern Arizona comes to mind. And you've read some of his novels that involved escape through harsh territory - a modern writer who compares favorably in style and familiarity with the ground he is writing about is Cormac McCarthy. Read Blood Meridian and you'll see the Abbey influence. By all accounts he was an excellent naturalist.

MLA is the Modern Language Association - a database of literary writing, criticism, and scholarship. They also put out a style manual, one I've used for years (in contrast to APA, Chicago, AP, etc.) But I think you'll also find Abbey in other databases - he crossed disciplines with the types of things he wrote about.

He wrote like few others, his style and sentences so well constructed that the page is invisible, you're seeing the story unfold in front of you as he tells it. Again, Cormac McCarthy comes to mind, though I haven't actually passed books by the two authors over each other for a scholarly comparison, it feels right as I remember the impressions from reading both.