Jaeger’s 1933 guide, and for decades it was the only real one: geology, water, weather, plants, animals, and the routes across the Mojave and the Colorado, written by a man who walked it for sixty years and taught at Riverside. There are chapters on how to travel that are dated in specifics and dead-on in substance, and a list of desert place names and what they meant. He’s good on the thing a lot of people miss — that the two California deserts are different countries, one high and cold, one low and brutal, with a different roster of things living side by each.
The California Deserts