The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave--its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs--becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert

For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time--and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations--Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you.

Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is The Voice of the Desert a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night.

From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.

A magnificent illustrated journey into California's famed deserts and the astonishingly abundant life they contain.

2023 Glenn Goldman Award Winner for California Lifestyle, Chosen by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance

A San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller!

From Obi Kaufmann, author-illustrator of the best-selling California Field Atlas, comes a grand adventure through time, geography, and ecology in California's deserts. Of a piece with his richly illustrated books The Forests of California and The Coasts of California, this volume features hundreds of vivid watercolor maps and illustrations, blending art and science to breathtaking effect. Journeying through the Great Basin, Mojave, Colorado, and Sonoran Deserts, Kaufmann pays special attention to national and state parks and monuments, and to the dozens of wilderness areas that reveal the underappreciated natural abundance of California's arid lands.

From Joshua Tree to Death Valley, these deserts full of life, as Kaufmann evokes them, are perfect places for meditating on our future, and for imagining a California that might thrive beyond the age of climate breakdown. The Deserts of California is a canonical entry into the literature of the American deserts, uniquely colorful and celebratory, and abounding in hope and wonder.

A richly illustrated atlas of the world's deserts and drylands, their ecosystems, and their environments

Deserts and drylands account for more than 40 percent of land on our planet. Characterized by a lack of water and extreme temperatures, they are the result of atmospheric stability, large landmass characteristics, rain shadows, and cold ocean currents. They appear harsh and hostile, but deserts and drylands are also exceptionally beautiful environments. Desert ecosystems often teem with diverse forms of life that exhibit astonishing ingenuity in the face of such forbidding conditions. The World Atlas of Deserts and Drylands takes readers on a guided tour of some of the most awe-inspiring desert environments on Earth, explaining their environmental and ecological dynamics and describing the techniques used to categorize and map them. From the ever-expanding Gobi of Mongolia and China to the ancient Namib of coastal Africa, this is the ultimate reference book for deserts.

• Features a wealth of color photos, maps, and infographics
• Describes the resilient and complex biodiversity of the world's desert and dryland terrains
• Covers subtropical deserts, continental deserts, rain shadow deserts, and ocean margin deserts
• Addresses the challenges posed by global warming and human activity, and discusses solutions and opportunities
• Written by a team of leading experts

Deserts cover about one third of the earth's surface and are the largest terrestrial ecosystem in the world. They are the only biome that is actually expanding, largely due to human activities and climate change. In the United States, six unique desert ecosystems stretch across the country: the Great Basin, Mojave, Chihuahuan, Sonoran, Peninsular, and the Painted Desert.

Both a travelogue and science writing, North American Deserts: Ecology of Our Arid Lands is a celebration of these ruthlessly beautiful landscapes. Readers will be transported from the enchanting saguaro forests of Arizona and the precipitous red walls of the Grand Canyon to the monotonous, yet impressive landscapes of Nevada's Great Basin and Texas' Chihuahuan Desert. More than 190 vivid, color photographs accompany the lively writing.

Biologist Sean P. Graham has extensive field experience in the deserts of the Southwest and Mexico, and in North American Deserts, he takes readers on a journey through both sides of the border. The first half of the book focuses on global climate patterns giving rise to desert regions, and it then delves into how plants and animals survive the physical and biological characteristics of these ecosystems. The second half, which is split into cold and warm regions, features portraits of each desert that explore the unique flora and fauna. Although the work is focused on deserts in the United States, it also surveys the semiarid landscapes that extend into Canada and Mexico.

Outdoor enthusiasts, national park visitors, and self-proclaimed desert rats will enjoy this reflective yet informative account of our North American deserts.

2020 Foreword INDIES Editor's Choice Winner

Burrillo makes a commanding debut in a consistently fascinating distillation of the unrivaled mosaic nature of the land's history.
--THE UTAH REVIEW

For more than 12,000 years, the wondrous landscape of southeastern Utah has defined the histories, cultures, and lives of everyone who calls it home. Archaeologist and conservationist R. E. Burrillo takes readers on a journey of discovery through the stories and controversies that make this place so unique, from traces of its earliest inhabitants through its role in shaping the study of Southwest archaeology itself--and into the modern battle over its protection.

Few writers can better express the strange vitality of desert landscapes than Childs.

--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Originally published over twenty-five years ago, Stone Desert brings the wonder and wildness of one of our nation's most geologically and culturally unique national parks to readers everywhere. With a new introduction by the author, this edition includes Craig Childs's original journal--written over a winter in Canyonlands National Park and complete with pen-and-ink sketches--from which Stone Desert originated. Join Childs as he hikes the high mesas, navigates the winding canyons, and witnesses the ancient rock art of Utah's most inscrutable and remote slickrock desert.

Have you ever stood on the bank of a creek or river and considered what lies upstream? Have you gazed into the flow, contemplated its journey, and grown curious about what secrets the drainage might hold?

Searching Salmon Falls tells the story about a series of treks that enables the author to witness a slice of the watershed-from the creek's finish in Idaho to its source in a remote Nevada wilderness. The excursions pass through a variety of terrain shaped by events that range from ancient volcanoes, flood waters, and a recent landslide or two. The narrative is also a tale of humanity that includes the area's first inhabitants, early explorers and settlers, and a few current residents.

Traveling mostly alone but sometimes in the company of his wife, the outings consist of more than an inventory of the region's unique resources. They are a celebration of wild landscapes offering few trails, the chance to embrace solitude, and the means to build a connection with the natural world.

Winner of a 2019 Southwest Book Award (BRLA)

An homage to the useful and idiosyncratic mesquite tree

In his latest book, Mesquite, Gary Paul Nabhan employs humor and contemplative reflection to convince readers that they have never really glimpsed the essence of what he calls arboreality.

As a Franciscan brother and ethnobotanist who has often mixed mirth with earth, laughter with landscape, food with frolic, Nabhan now takes on a large, many-branched question: What does it means to be a tree, or, accordingly, to be in a deep and intimate relationship with one?

To answer this question, Nabhan does not disappear into a forest but exposes himself to some of the most austere hyper-arid terrain on the planet--the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts along the US/Mexico border--where even the most ancient perennial plants are not tall and thin, but stunted and squat.

There, in desert regions that cover more than a third of our continent, mesquite trees have become the staff of life, not just for indigenous cultures, but for myriad creatures, many of which respond to these nurse plants in wildly intelligent and symbiotic ways.

In this landscape, where Nabhan claims that nearly every surviving being either sticks, stinks, stings, or sings, he finds more lives thriving than you could ever shake a stick at. As he weaves his arid yarns, we suddenly realize that our normal view of the world has been turned on its head: where we once saw scarcity, there is abundance; where we once perceived severity, there is whimsy. Desert cultures that we once assumed lived in food deserts are secretly savoring a most delicious world.

Drawing on his half-century of immersion in desert ethnobotany, ecology, linguistics, agroforestry, and eco-gastronomy, Nabhan opens up for us a hidden world that we had never glimpsed before. Along the way, he explores the sensuous reality surrounding this most useful and generous tree.

Mesquite is a book that will delight mystics and foresters, naturalists and foodies. It combines cutting-edge science with a generous sprinkling of humor and folk wisdom, even including traditional recipes for cooking with mesquite.

Writer and naturalist Ellen Meloy and photographer Stephen Strom met in the fall of 2004 and began work on a book of images and prose expressing their shared love of the desert. Two months later, Meloy died suddenly at her home in southern Utah. Over the years to follow, Strom called on Meloy's writing to put his new photographs to words. The collaboration seemed to deepen over time, and it comes to fruition in This Desert Hides Nothing, edited by poet Ann Walka, a friend of Ellen Meloy.

In this masterful tour de force of nature writing, Kenneth Brown explores one of the most awe-inspiring regions on earth -- the Four Corners of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Weaving together its geological, ecological and human histories, he presents a unique portrait of this ruggedly beautiful landscape that goes beyond mere description to give readers a true sense of the land in all its richness. Here are rock croppings that are 2 billion years old and broad desert valleys where rivers of lava cooled to form floors of solid rock. Here ancient hunter-gatherers stalked the woolly mammoth, four-story pueblos were carved by the Anasazi from sheer stone cliffs and an ancient midnight Holy Week ceremony is still practiced in a modern Spanish village.

Providing a fresh perspective on a region currently enjoying an upwelling of interest, Four Corners is a fascinating study of one of the world's great wonders -- compelling reading for all science, nature, anthropology and travel aficionados.

Sifting through the scraps of the the American Dream and discovering those who still hope...Stories of driving the open road, bird counts, rat research, close calls with fires and skunks, mixing it up with the local color, the eternal search for shade...and a grand finale at a frenetic ecological conference in Portland.

33rd Annual Reading the West Book Award Winner for Memoir, 2023 Foreword INDIES Award Silver Winner, LGBTQ+, and New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards Finalist for Memoir and LGBTQ

Readers will find hope and peace on these beautifully written pages.--LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)

A young person's story of growing up gay in a rural Mormon town and the wild places where he found refuge.

This intimate record lays bare one person's experience growing up in a rural Mormon community and struggling to reconcile his sexual orientation with the religious doctrine of his childhood. Weaving together prose, poetry, and stories scrawled on the margins of high school notebooks, Jonathan T. Bailey encounters truth-seeing owls, anachronistic gourds, and the hard-edged realities of family and church. In When I Was Red Clay, he navigates desert landscapes, mental health, and the loss of faith with unflinching honesty and biting humor.

The Land of Little Rain (1903) is a collection of essays and short stories by Mary Hunter Austin. Originally published with photographs taken by acclaimed American photographer Ansel Adams, The Land of Little Rain is a classic work of nature writing. Austin is now recognized as an early feminist and conservationist who understood the intricacy and fragility of ecosystems as well as the extent to which human civilization threatens their continued existence.

In a series of stories and essays on the animals, landscapes, and peoples that make up the American Southwest, Mary Hunter Austin proves that the foremost responsibility of a writer is to look. With an attentive and deeply respectful eye, Austin describes the heat and violence of desert weather, the tracks made by disparate animal species as they travel in search of water, and the scavengers that depend on death for life. Within this collection are brief stories about the people and communities scattered throughout the harsh Mojave desert: a miner who longs for wealth and civilization but returns to the wild and unpredictable life of speculation; a Shoshone medicine man captured by the Paiute tribe who misses his people and home; a town where people live simply, depending on nothing but the land and its bounty for their daily existence and abundant happiness. The Land of Little Rain is both informative and moving, an intricate tapestry that celebrates the diversity of life while making an incontrovertible case for its continued preservation.

Mary Hunter Austin was a gifted writer and an environmentalist ahead of her time. In a world faced with the catastrophic effects of a global climate crisis, we need writers such as Austin for not only the wisdom and knowledge they offer, but the monumental change their words can inspire.

With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Mary Hunter Austin's The Land of Little Rain is a classic of American literature and nature writing reimagined for modern readers.

The Mojave Desert has a rich natural history. Despite being sandwiched between the larger Great Basin and Sonoran Deserts, it has enough mountains, valleys, canyons, and playas for any eager explorer. Ancient and current waterways carve the bajadas and valley bottoms. This diverse topography gives rise to a multitude of habitats for plants and animals, many of which are found nowhere else in the world.

A Natural History of the Mojave Desert explores how a combination of complex geology, varied geography, and changing climate has given rise to intriguing flora and fauna--including almost 3,000 plant species and about 380 terrestrial vertebrate animal species. Of these, one quarter of the plants and one sixth of the animals are endemic.

The authors, who, combined, have spent more than six decades living in and observing the Mojave Desert, offer a scientifically insightful and personally observed understanding of the desert. They invite readers to understand how the Mojave Desert looks, sounds, feels, tastes, and smells. They prompt us to understand how humans have lived in this desert where scant vegetation and water have challenged humans, past and present.

A Natural History of the Mojave Desert provides a lively and informed guide to understanding how life has adapted to the hidden riverbeds, huge salt flats, tiny wetlands, and windswept hills that characterize this iconic desert.

Along a tiny spring in a narrow canyon near Death Valley, seemingly against all odds, an Inyo Mountain slender salamander makes its home. The desert, writes conservation biologist Christopher Norment, is defined by the absence of water, and yet in the desert there is water enough, if you live properly. Relicts of a Beautiful Sea explores the existence of rare, unexpected, and sublime desert creatures such as the black toad and four pupfishes unique to the desert West. All are anomalies: amphibians and fish, dependent upon aquatic habitats, yet living in one of the driest places on earth, where precipitation averages less than four inches per year. In this climate of extremes, beset by conflicts over water rights, each species illustrates the work of natural selection and the importance of conservation. This is also a story of persistence -- for as much as ten million years -- amid the changing landscape of western North America. By telling the story of these creatures, Norment illustrates the beauty of evolution and explores ethical and practical issues of conservation: what is a four-inch-long salamander worth, hidden away in the heat-blasted canyons of the Inyo Mountains, and what would the cost of its extinction be? What is any lonely and besieged species worth, and why should we care?

This book, in both English and Spanish, will introduce readers to a unique region that has been hidden in plain sight for far too long. Of the four deserts found in North America, the Chihuahuan Desert is the largest. Located in both the United States and Mexico, it is not the desolate place most people think of when they hear desert. Eight ecosystems, resulting from basin and range landforms, have created an area teeming with extremely diverse plant and animal life. It is a place that deserves our attention and respect. Update: This book won first place in the New Mexico Press Women's Communications Contest 2015 for children's non-fiction. Update: This book won first place in the New Mexico-Arizona 2015 Book Awards for Spanish Language.

Everyday Creatures is a collection of thirteen simply and elegantly told nature essays, set in time over the course of a naturalist's lifetime-from field-trip experiences as a freshman and sophomore in college, through the challenges of producing a dissertation in ecology, and on through the author's career at a major university. Yet these stories are not the scientific reports of a research professor, nor are they an attempt at popular science writing. These are personal essays that spring forth from observation and discovery of what nature has to show anyone who is willing to pay attention. The author begins with his early experiences in deserts and continues into forests, mountains, and the seashore.

Kenagy shares with the reader his own direct observations and transparent personal responses to meeting a wide variety of animals in their natural habitats, and he uses language that is understandable to anyone. He follows his discoveries with reflections on the values of natural history and the conservation of wildlife and habitats. This all adds up to inspire a passion for the greater care for our planet Earth and its future.

The stories and comfortable style of Everyday Creatures have attracted the acclaim of other writers:

Biologists often begin as nature-infatuated kids, turning over rocks, chasing critters through the brush. As they pursue scientific training, many quit venturing outdoors; instead of looking at animals, they hole up in labs to study molecules. Not so George James Kenagy, who has maintained his fascination with whole organisms, the communities they form, and the landscapes they inhabit. In his lively company, you can observe geckos, beavers, pandas, ants, kangaroo rats, desert iguanas, snowy egrets, deer mice, surf smelt, spiny lobsters, ground squirrels, darkling beetles, western rattlesnakes, hoary marmots, and other marvels of the living world. One of the most interesting animals you'll meet in these pages is the author himself.

-SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS, author of Earth Works: Selected Essays.

Everyday Creatures is a story of discovery, told with precision, intimacy, and wonder. Kenagy's prose is clean and entirely accessible, informative to the scientist and non-scientist alike, a testament to a lifetime of attentiveness to the natural world.

-GREGORY MARTIN, author of Mountain City and Stories for Boys.

Kenagy is a rare specimen among modern biologists: a true naturalist, with deep knowledge of an astonishing variety of plants and animals. This book takes you from China to New England, from eastern Washington State to western Sonora, Mexico, with rewarding stops in between, all steeped in the decades of field work that have allowed him to contribute so much to our knowledge of the natural world. To read this is to be taken to all these places, and to learn about such diverse things as the temperatures that make beetles happy, ground squirrels that prey on chipmunks, the surprising adaptations of kangaroo rats, and even the relationship between campus committees and Canada geese. I read it from beginning to end without putting it down, and suspect you will too.

-DONALD K. GRAYSON, author of The Great Basin: A Natural Prehistory.

A collection of photos of flowering plants and wild animals in the Mojave Desert of the southwestern US, taken by the author. Accompanying text includes common & scientific names of plants and animals, ecological & ethnobotanical information, gee-whiz facts and engaging personal stories.

An anthology of the first five years of submissions from winners and finalists of the Waterston Desert Writing Prize. The book includes project descriptions submitted by each included writer, a writing sample and author biographies.

The wild beauty of deserts has always been a source of fascination the world over. Mankind and Deserts 2 - the second of three volumes - focuses on water, its absence or indeed its extreme scarcity, as well as on the ways in which salts come to be formed in areas such as these.

Aridity of the climate does not exclude rainfall, after which deserts flourish; wet mists, dew, exceptional events separated by years of total drought. Water flows into temporary and disorganized networks but, occasionally, large rivers cross the deserts, giving rise to vibrant civilizations: the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, Niger, to name a few. Temporary or permanent lakes collect water in basins without outlet to the ocean, referred to as endorrheic basins, such as Lake Chad. This results in salt accumulation and evaporitic formations. A large variety of salts crystallize, in addition to halite, among which is potash. Halite - common salt - is an essential resource and its trade leads to the creation of salt caravans, used to exchange it with gold, even on a 1-1 weight basis, generating subsequent wealth.

From ancient, almost mythical, exploration to modern scientific studies, deserts have come to be better known yet still hold great appeal. This book traces the history of their knowledge while providing a basis for understanding their features and the tools needed for their protection, in an ever-changing world.