Famed naturalist John Muir (1838-1914) came to Wisconsin as a boy and studied at the University of Wisconsin. He first came to California in 1868 and devoted six years to the study of the Yosemite Valley. After work in Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, he returned to California in 1880 and made the state his home. One of the heroes of America’s conservation movement, Muir deserves much of the credit for making the Yosemite Valley a protected national park and for alerting Americans to the need to protect this and other natural wonders. The mountains of California (1894) is his book length tribute to the beauties of the Sierras. He recounts not only his own journeys by foot through the mountains, glaciers, forests, and valleys, but also the geological and natural history of the region, ranging from the history of glaciers, the patterns of tree growth, and the daily life of animals and insects. While Yosemite naturally receives great attention, Muir also expounds on less well known beauty spots.

The Santa Cruz Mountains, an area covering almost 1,400 square miles from San Francisco southward to the Monterey County line, are a part of the Coast Range of Central California. The Mountains and the adjacent lowlands have a rich vascular flora, and about 1,800 species, subspecies, varieties, forms, and hybrids of ferns, conifers, and flowering plants, distributed among 168 families, have been reported from the region. This comprehensive flora, the first of the area, is designed for use by both the serious beginner and the trained botanist. The flora is illustrated by 250 line drawing and ten photographs. In addition, there is a map of the Santa Cruz Mountains area and a stratigraphic profile of the rock formations. The stratigraphic profile and a section on geology have been contributed by Dr. Earl E. Brabb of the United States Geological Survey. Distributional notes, keys to families, genera, and species, pertinent synonymy, a glossary of technical terms, an index of place names, and common0name and scientific-name indexes form the body of the text. The Introduction contains a description of the geography of the Santa Cruz Mountains and adjacent lowlands, seconds on the geology and climate, a brief discussion and analysis of the vegetation and floristic affinities of the area, and a history of past botanical collecting. A selected list of references has been appended to allow the interested individual to pursue his studies further.

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.

While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.