McPhee’s first geology book, 1981, and the one that started the whole run. He rides I-80 across Nevada with Ken Deffeyes, a Princeton geologist with a beard and a scheme to make money pulling silver out of hundred-year-old mine tailings. What they’re looking at is the Basin and Range, four hundred miles of the West where the crust is pulling apart, cracking into blocks, some tipping up into mountains and some dropping into valleys, over and over from Salt Lake to the Sierra. The book alternates between the road and the history of geology itself — Hutton figuring out the earth was ancient, Lyell, then plate tectonics blowing the field open in the sixties. And it’s where McPhee planted the phrase deep time in everybody’s head.
Basin and Range