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The definitive guide to more than 300 of the most remote and diverse desert mountains in Anza-Borrego, Death Valley, Red Rock, Spring Mountains, Toiyabe Forest, and more! Complete with tips, directions, descriptions, 18 maps, and over 130 photos.
This guide showcases 130 peak hikes/climbs selected among 41 mountain ranges in California's Mojave Desert.
"Wine was free, but we had to pay for water." Joe Chiriaco and his thirteen siblings heard this from their Italian immigrant father as he recounted his ocean journey to America. In the face of limited water and rudimentary dirt roads, Joe and his Norwegian wife, Ruth Bergseid, founded Chiriaco Summit in the 1930s, a desert travel oasis on today's Interstate 10 between Phoenix and Los Angeles, promising to serve the world on wheels. The twenty-four-seven challenges are lightened with the courtship of two feisty lovers, the frolicking of youngsters in the desert, more loves, and the juxtaposition of some very imposing personalities, including those of Joe Chiriaco and General Patton. After moving through new aqueducts and highways, military camps, societal upheavals, and a welcome new set of hard-working immigrants, the twenty-first century brings provisions for electric cars, modern aircraft, and ATV facilities outside Joshua Tree National Park from whence the first Summit waters flowed.
Backpacking California is a collection of more than 70 of the most intriguing backpacking adventures in Wilderness Press's home territory of California. With contributions from more than a dozen Wilderness Press authors, the book describes routes ranging from one night to one week. Backpacking novices as well as "old hand" California hikers will find expert-crafted trips in the Coast Ranges, the Sierra, the Cascades, and the Warner Mountains. Expanded coverage includes trips in Big Sur, Anza-Borrego, Death Valley, and the White Mountains. Several trips have been described in print nowhere else. Each trip includes a trail map and essential logistical information for trip planning.
Yilmaz Alimoglu's personal website wwww.desertsandmountains.com Follow the character of Ali Dogan as he embarks on a transformative emotional, physical and spiritual journey from east to west in Deserts and Mountains, the new philosophical novel by Yilmaz Alimoglu. Frustrated with his business, career and family, Ali Dogan, an expatriate Turk living in Canada, turns to his spiritual advisor for guidance. The sheikh counsels Ali to embark on a journey in an attempt to understand the war in his heart and to examine ever more deeply the meanings of the separation from his wife and children, and of his journey. Ali is also instructed to keep a journal of his experiences, a map of his heart; out of this journal is born Deserts and Mountains. Ali leaves his adopted home on a trip which will take him to five countries on two continents, with no fixed agenda other than to reflect on his life. He first makes his way back to his family in Turkey, a visit that raises mixed emotions for the protagonist. Having endured physical and emotional abuse at the hands of Turkish state secret agents and his father, he struggles to cope with the effects as an adult. Ali, prompted to examine his life more profoundly, seeks a broader understanding of its significance, while critically analyzing the cultural context from which he has emerged. Ali travels through Turkey, Spain and North Africa, places that bear the traces of ancient civilizations, where he experiences a dichotomy of emotions as he rediscovers love and struggles to make sense of the injustice, corruption and destitution that he witnesses. Through his observation and participation, Ali slowly begins to recognize the inherent similarities in the struggles of all humanity. The narrative shifts to a more philosophical tone as Ali begins to assimilate what he is learning and develops a fresh perspective on his own life, experiencing a spiritual renewal. “There are several themes woven into the text; friendship, loyalty, freedom, choice and its consequences; love and the individuals’ capacity both to love and be loved,” Alimoglu writes. “Aside from the journey Ali has undertaken in the physical world, an overarching theme putting all the others in context is Ali’s journey towards a deeper understanding of the spiritual tradition of Sufism.” Discover more in the pages of this engaging new book that will take you on a journey to create a map of your own heart as you explore with Ali how the difficulties of one’s past can bring a renewed understanding of possibilities for the future. “Deserts and Mountains is a remarkable volume of insight, beauty, poetic expression and spiritual development. I had to read parts of it very, very slowly so I could savor the beauty of the language and the majesty of the metaphors. I encourage you to pick it up, get through the first chapter which is like packing for a vacation, a routine task that gives way to some of the richest memories.”
From the depths of Death Valley, Daniel Arnold set out to reach Mount Whitney in a way no road or trail could take him. Anything manmade or designed to make travel easy was out. With a backpack full of empty two–liter bottles, and the remotest corners of desert before him, he began his toughest test yet of physical and mental endurance. Badwater Basin sits 282 feet below sea level in Death Valley, the lowest and hottest place in the Western Hemisphere. Mount Whitney rises 14,505 feet above sea level, the highest point in the contiguous United States. Arnold spent seventeen days traveling a roundabout route from one to the other, traversing salt flats, scaling dunes, and sinking into slot canyons. Aside from bighorn sheep and a phantom mountain lion, his only companions were ghosts of the dreamers and misfits who first dared into this unknown territory. He walked in the footsteps of William Manly, who rescued the last of the forty–niners from the bottom of Death Valley; tracked John LeMoigne, a prospector who died in the sand with his burros; and relived the tales of Mary Austin, who learned the secret trails of the Shoshone Indians. This is their story too, as much as it is a history of salt and water and of the places they collide and disappear. Guiding the reader up treacherous climbs and through burning sands, Arnold captures the dramatic landscapes as only he can with photographs to bring it all to life. From the salt to the summit, this is an epic journey across America's most legendary desert.
THE THIRD LARGEST DESERT PARK in the country, Mojave National Preserve protects 1.6 million acres of spectacular arid lands at the heart of the Mojave Desert. Part of the celebrated Great Basin province, it is a spellbinding region of mighty mountain ranges rising thousands of feet above vast inland basins. Famous for the majestic Kelso Dunes, the Devils Playground, and the world¹s largest Joshua tree forest, the preserve also holds considerable natural and cultural wealth, including a wild range of landscapes, striking plant communities, and a rich mining past. Above all, it is a land of contrasts, alternatively forlorn and vibrant with life, stark and colorful, blanketed in snow in the winter, awash with wildflowers in the spring, and scorching hot in the summer. Being high-desert country and generally a little cooler than Death Valley, topographically less rugged, and far less visited, it offers a tremendous potential for comparatively easier hiking in complete solitude.
Translated to English, this collection of contemporary Chinese poetry examines humanity’s relationship with nature and the ecological crisis. Influenced by both the “gray, sinister sea” near the village where Yi Lu grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and the beauty of the sea in the books she read as a child, Sea Summit is a collection of paradox and questioning. The sea is an impossible force to the poet: it is both a majestic presence that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go, to be put “by an ancient rattan chair,” so we can watch “its waves toss” from above. Exploring the current ecological crisis and our complicated relationship to the wildness around us, Yi Lu finds something more complex than a traditional nature poet might in the mysterious connection between herself and the forces of nature represented by the boundless ocean. Translated brilliantly by the acclaimed poet Fiona Sze-Lorrain, this collection of poems introduces an important contemporary Chinese poet to English-language readers. Praise for Sea Summit “Yi Lu is a theatre scenographer, and her poems brim with the imagistic tendencies we might expect from a visual artist. More specifically, her poetic style fits that of a theatrical set designer. Within the poetry of Sea Summit, the images are like set pieces. They play supporting roles as they help to tell the speaker’s stories. . . . Sensitive and poignant poetry.” —The Literary Review “A compilation of over twenty years of work. . . . Yi’s poetry shows the world as staggeringly simultaneous, from a crowded conference room in the middle of the city to the titular wave rising under the incredible volume of the ocean. . . . This collection is a great introduction to Yi Lu, already one of the most widely read poets in China.” —The Los Angeles Review “With this selection of more than 80 of her ecologically conscious lyric poems, Yi receives a generous introduction to English readers. The pastoral is Yi’s mode of choice, and the poems here take as their subject matter the natural world as well as the human experience of it. . . . Sze-Lorrain’s steadfast translations, presented en-face, make accessible one of China’s most famous woman poets.” —Publishers Weekly