7 books
Lawrence R. Walker and Frederick H. Landau
The scientific baseline for the Mojave in one accessible volume. Geology and how the basins and ranges got there, climate and why so little rain arrives, soils and desert pavement and cryptobiotic crust, the plants from creosote clones thousands of…
Bill Broyles
El Camino del Diablo runs across the driest corner of the Sonoran Desert, and for centuries the only reliable water on it was Tinajas Altas — a stack of natural rock basins in a granite ravine, filled by the rare…
Tom Zoellner
Zoellner walked eight hundred miles across Arizona, roughly the diagonal, and used the walk to work through the state he grew up in. Chapters alternate between the trail — heat, water, private land, dogs, the people who pick up a…
Ann Zwinger
Ann Zwinger ran the Green River from its source in the Wind River Range down to its confluence with the Colorado — by kayak, raft, and on foot — and wrote the whole river as a naturalist. Geology of the…
Jack Turner
Turner spent decades guiding in the Tetons and this strident book stems directly from it. His argument is that we’ve replaced actual wild experience with representations of it — nature documentaries, photographs, managed parks, permits, interpretive signs — and that…
David Yetman
Everything known about one plant. Yetman and his coauthors cover the saguaro’s biology and its absurd arithmetic — decades to reach a few inches, a hundred and fifty years to full height, thousands of seeds a year of which almost…
Ann Zwinger
Five canyons on Cedar Mesa in southeast Utah — Grand Gulch, Slickhorn, Johns, Fish, and Owl — walked and camped and described by a naturalist who was also a fine draftswoman. Zwinger works the geology and the plants and the…
