Now completely revised and updated, this authoritative guide provides a comprehensive introduction to New England's more than 350 federal, state, and local parks, forests, wildlife preserves, and lands in the public domain, comprising more than one million acres. An essential planning tool and an invaluable travel companion for quick weekend getaways as well as extended vacations. 7 maps.
Based on the authors' interviews with hundreds of federal, state, and local officials, here are 200 alphabetically arranged entries which identify Florida's quiet places, subtropical natural wonders, plants, animals, salt marshes, forests, beaches, islands, coral reefs, and more in a one-volume, comprehensive, and solidly researched guide. 5 maps.
Now completely updated and expanded, this invaluable sourcebook makes little-known wilderness sites of California accessible to the outdoor enthusiast. It provides detailed information about more than 200 natural areas. Sites are listed alphabetically within nine zones. Each entry includes location and directions, physical descriptions, wildlife, flora, recreation, and resources. Index. Bibliography. 10 maps.
This is a story that few know, but those who do are its disciples. The story, of the highest and driest of all American deserts, the Great Basin, has no finer voice than that of William Fox. Fox’s book is divided into the three sections of the title. In “The Void,” he leads us through the Great Basin landscape, investigating our visual response to it—a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale of such magnitude and emptiness and undifferentiated by shape, form, and color that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired. “The Grid” leads us on a journey through the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Frémont to the net of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history. “The Sign” wends us through the metaphors and language we continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a palimpsest where, for example, the neon boulevards of Las Vegas interplay with ancient petroglyphs. In this one-of-a-kind travel book that allows us to travel within our own neurophysiological processes as well as out into the arresting void of the Great Basin, Fox has created a dazzling new standard at the frontier of writing about the American West. His stunning and broad insight draws from the fields of natural history, cognitive psychology, art history, western history, archaeology, and anthropology, and will be of value to scholars and readers in all these subjects.