Jaeger’s 1933 guide, and for decades it was the only real one. Geology, water, weather, plants, animals, and the routes across the Mojave and the Colorado, written by a man who walked it for sixty years and taught at Riverside. There are chapters on how to travel out there that are dated in the specifics and dead on in the substance, and a list of desert place names and what they meant. He’s good on the thing everybody misses — that the two California deserts are different countries, one high and cold, one low and brutal, with a different roster of living things.
The California Deserts