desert

One of a series of travel guides written by Perry Mason author Erle Stanley Gardner, this book documents a fun-filled search for the “Lost Dutchman” and “Lost Nummel” mines in Arizona in 1965. The team utilized helicopters, jeeps, desert buggies, and mules in its search, which is captured in many photographs. The book also includes biographies of the search team members. It documents a bygone era of exploration and a form of adventure with wide appeal.

Grazing. Fire. Water. All issues important out West, all issues pertinent to rangeland ecology and management, and all addressed in this comprehensive book. For scientists who study natural processes, such as the research staff at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (where this book resides), there is much to be learned from this text. Deer, insects, and other herbivores graze, and grazing has impacts on plant physiology and morphology, energy flow through ecosystems, and other ecosystem effects. Fire and water also profoundly shape both managed and natural systems.

This book is a collection of chapters, each written by experts in their ecological discipline. It covers the role of both insects and vertebrate animals (those with a backbone) in desert ecosystems, how nutrients move through the system (‘nutrient cycling’ is a hot topic for those who study ecosystems), and how plants adapt to the soils and rainfall in deserts. An important text for anyone who studies these phenomenon in deserts and elsewhere.

This slim book about native plants found in the Phoenix regional area, circa 1933, was written at a time when the population of the city was just under 50,000 people. It’s a self published book with the author providing both text and simple pen and ink illustrations of the plants throughout the book, including the book’s cover.

“Civilization Follows the Improved Highway.” That was and still is the motto of the enduring and always alluring travel magazine Arizona Highways.  It was first published in 1925 as an engineering newsletter by the Arizona Highway Department. By the 1930s, it had segued into a magazine documenting the road construction of the expanding highway system throughout Arizona. In the 1940s, the magazine excelled as one of the first color illustrated travel magazines at the forefront of color printing technology.

Third in a series of natural history publications presented by the Grand Canyon Natural History Association, this little book introduces several tree species to Canyon visitors and readers alike. The book talks about the park's “deer epidemic” which happened when ranchers got permission allowed kill mountain lions. This caused the deer population to dramatically increase and destroy the aspen trees on the Kaibab plateau. In response, officials introduced the practice of deer hunting and allowed some existence of mountain, hoping to curtail the problem.

“Civilization Follows the Improved Highway.” That was and still is the motto of the enduring and always alluring travel magazine Arizona Highways.  It was first published in 1925 as an engineering newsletter by the Arizona Highway Department. By the 1930s, it had segued into a magazine documenting the road construction of the expanding highway system throughout Arizona. In the 1940s, the magazine excelled as one of the first color illustrated travel magazines at the forefront of color printing technology.

Cacti are inextricably linked to our vision of the desert. They are native to the Americas with many species found in Arizona, including the state flower, the Saguaro. This book is written by a Cactaceae (cactus family) botanical specialist, Lyman Benson, and illustrated by Lucretia Breazeale Hamilton, a botanical illustrator well known for her drawings of southwest plants. There are many line drawings with color photographs of cacti. This second edition has information on botanical names and taxonomical classification on the species found in Arizona.

The first of six colorful pop-ups in Creatures of the desert world depicts early morning in Arizona’ s Sonoran Desert as bobcats and birds around a large saguaro cactus dramatically lift off the page when the book is opened. The subsequent pages follow the vibrant and alive desert environment throughout the day into a full moonlit night when the night hunters, including bats and kit foxes, begin their search for food.

Originally produced and published for the students of the Rock Point Community School on the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona, this book became prominent as Volume 11 in the Sun Tracks, a series of contemporary Native American literary works. Between Sacred Mountains portrays Navajo world view based upon the land and how it has sustained the lifeways of the Navajo people. Text and stories are written and told by Navajo traditional knowledge holders, healers, educators, artists, and numerous specialists in the field of Navajo Studies.

Together, the Goodwin and Guenther Collections in the Arizona State Museum form the most significant collection of Apache cultural materials dating from the mid-1800s to 1985. In the early 1930s, Grenville Goodwin came to Arizona to attend prep school, but instead was drawn to the Apaches and spent his time studying their way of life. He gathered items from them, and earned the trust of knowledgeable elders who recreated things no longer made – all which he thoroughly documented, detailing their construction, meaning, and use.

“Writers of mystery stories often have to cast about for the key elements of an intriguing story […] I did not go looking for these critical ingredients of the story of the Tucson Meteorite. They came to me.” states Richard R. Willey in his forward to this short but thorough book. This book explores every aspect of the Meteorites – from their original descent to Earth, their mineral composition, to their use as anvils by American Indians and frontiersmen alike, to their name as a specimen, and the history of how they came to be in the Smithsonian.