57 books
Lawrence R. Walker and Frederick H. Landau
The scientific baseline for the Mojave in one accessible volume. Geology and how the basins and ranges got there, climate and why so little rain arrives, soils and desert pavement and cryptobiotic crust, the plants from creosote clones thousands of…
David B. Williams
David Williams spent nine years in Moab, working as a ranger at Arches and teaching for the Canyonlands Field Institute, and this is the field guide that came out of it, illustrated in line drawings by Gloria Brown. It covers…
Kevin Fedarko
The Grand Canyon runs 277 river miles and has no trail from one end to the other, so walking it means about 750 miles of route-finding along ledges between the rim and the river, in country where water can be…
Cormac McCarthy
John Grady Cole is sixteen when his grandfather dies and the ranch he expected to inherit gets sold out from under him. It’s 1949, and the cowboy life he wants has already ended in Texas, so he and a friend…
David E. Stuart
Everybody wants the ruins of Chaco Canyon to be a mystery. Stuart, an anthropologist at New Mexico who’s spent his career there, knows it isn’t. Chaco was a boom town. There were great houses five stories high, dead-straight roads running…
Linda S. Cordell and Maxine McBrinn
If you get serious about Southwest archaeology, this is the book that ends up on your shelf, and the third edition from 2012 is the current one. Linda Cordell taught at New Mexico and Colorado and was about as central…
David Darlington
Darlington went out to Rachel, Nevada, in the mid-nineties and hung around long enough to write the book about the people, not the saucers. The base is real and the history is straight: The CIA built it in the fifties…
R.E. Burrillo
Burrillo came to this the long way — upstate New York, then New Orleans tending bar for five years trying to be a writer, then seasonal work in Glacier and two summers on the North Rim, which is where the…
Hampton Sides
Kit Carson was a small, illiterate, soft-spoken trapper who couldn’t read the dime novels that made him a legend while he was still alive. Sides uses him as the thread through the whole conquest of the Southwest — the Mexican…
Cormac McCarthy
A runaway kid out of Tennessee, fourteen years old, drifts down into Texas in 1849 and falls in with the Glanton gang — real men, scalp hunters the Mexican states paid by the head to kill Apaches, who figured out…
J. Smeaton Chase
J. Smeaton Chase was an Englishman who landed in Southern California in 1890, wandered it on horseback for thirty years, and wrote it down. This one came out in 1919, after he’d settled in Palm Springs when it was still…
David Rains Wallace
Here’s the riddle: Nobody can say how old the California desert actually is, or where its plants and animals came from. Creosote, ocotillo, cactus, the chuckwalla itself — did they evolve out there over tens of millions of years, or…
Gabriel Tallent
Gabriel Tallent’s second novel, Crux, feels as if it’s trying to squeeze every possible metaphor out of every possible climbing term, and, like his hyper-loquacious protagonist Tamma, it’s a lot to take—at first. But you settle in, or maybe buckle…
Melissa Broder
A woman drives out of Los Angeles to a Best Western in the high desert, supposedly to work on her novel, actually to get away from her father, who’s been in the ICU for months and died and been brought…
Edwin Corle
Erskine Caldwell got the idea for a series of books about American regions after coming home from covering the German invasion of Russia, and this was the first one out, in 1941. Edwin Corle got the desert — Nevada, Arizona,…
Raymond B. Cowles
Raymond Cowles grew up in South Africa, ended up at UCLA, and more or less invented the study of how cold-blooded animals manage their own body heat — the reason we know a lizard is running a schedule all day,…
Edward Abbey
Abbey spent two seasons as a ranger at Arches in the late fifties, alone in a trailer at the end of a dirt road, before the pavement came. This is what he made of it, and it isn’t a nature…
Gary Nabhan
Terroir is the wine world’s word for the way a place ends up in the glass — soil, sun, wind, water. Nabhan takes it out of Burgundy and drops it on the Arizona-Sonora border, where he’s spent his life. Mexican…
Edmund C. Jaeger
In 1946, Edmund Jaeger was poking around a canyon in the Chuckwalla Mountains when he found a poorwill wedged in a rock crevice, cold and unresponsive, and it stayed that way for weeks. Nobody thought birds could hibernate. He went…
Ann Zwinger
Zwinger went down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon over and over, in every season and just about every kind of boat, usually tagging along with scientists doing river studies. She calls herself an observer at the river’s brim, and…
Ekkehart Malotki
Almost everybody looking at rock art goes hunting for the pictures — the sheep, the hunters, the spirals with a story attached. Malotki and Dissanayake point out that the oldest marks aren’t pictures at all. They’re dots, lines, grids, circles,…
Ellen Meloy
Meloy lived on the San Juan River in Southeast Utah and spent four seasons watching a band of about eighty desert bighorn on the cliffs near her house — sheep she called the Blue Door Band. They’d been written off…
John McPhee
McPhee’s trick here is simple and mean. He takes David Brower, the head of the Sierra Club and the most effective conservationist alive, and drops him in the field with three men who want to use the land, one at…
Philip L. Fradkin
In November 1934 a twenty-year-old kid from Los Angeles rode two burros into Davis Gulch on the Escalante and never came out. The burros were found penned in the canyon. He wasn’t. He’d been wandering the Southwest since he was…
Alex Patterson
Alex Patterson flew P-51s in the war, spent a career at IBM, retired, then went back to school and made himself an anthropologist. This came out of that second life, in 1992, and it’s still the standard — 17 printings,…
David Roberts
Roberts came at Ruess for thirty years, and this book is him finally inside the story instead of writing about it. First half is the life: the letters, the woodblock prints, the burros, five years of a kid in his…
Claire Vaye Watkins
The Southwest has dried out and been evacuated, and a dune sea called the Amargosa is moving east across California, burying towns. Luz, a former poster child for the drought-relief effort, and Ray, an ex-soldier, are squatting in an abandoned…
Frank Decourten
Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996 and Utah went to war over it, and this was the first book to actually walk you through what got protected. It’s 1.9 million acres, bigger than Utah’s five national parks put together, bigger…
Craig Childs
The standard story is that the Ancestral Puebloans vanished. Childs walks the actual ground to show they moved. He starts at Chaco and follows the trail out — the great houses at Aztec and Mesa Verde, the roads, the pottery…
David Roberts
This book changed my life. Roberts was a mountaineer who fell hard for the Ancestral Puebloans and spent years walking to their sites in the canyons of southeast Utah and northeast Arizona — cliff dwellings on ledges you need a…
Bill Broyles
El Camino del Diablo runs across the driest corner of the Sonoran Desert, and for centuries the only reliable water on it was Tinajas Altas — a stack of natural rock basins in a granite ravine, filled by the rare…
Lena Valencia
Ten stories, most of them set in the desert Southwest, most of them about women in situations that tilt just past ordinary. A wellness retreat that goes wrong. Influencers in a canyon. A boarding school. A woman on the road…
Alvaro Enrigue
A Mexican woman flees into the desert after an Apache raid on her dead husband’s ranch. A lieutenant colonel chasing cattle rustlers realizes he’s tracking an abduction instead. Decades on, the American and Mexican armies maneuver Geronimo toward a surrender…
Terry Tempest Williams
Two things happen at once. The Great Salt Lake rises to record levels through the mid-eighties and drowns the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, where Williams has watched birds her whole life. And her mother is dying of ovarian cancer,…
Tom Zoellner
Zoellner walked eight hundred miles across Arizona, roughly the diagonal, and used the walk to work through the state he grew up in. Chapters alternate between the trail — heat, water, private land, dogs, the people who pick up a…
David Roberts
Comb Ridge is an eighty-mile monocline running from Utah into Arizona, dense with Ancestral Puebloan sites, and nobody had ever traversed the whole thing on foot. Roberts did it with Greg Child and Vaughn Hadenfeldt — three men in their…
Peter Reyner Banham
Banham was the British architecture critic who took Los Angeles seriously when nobody else would, and this is what happened when he pointed the same eye at the Mojave. He drives it, camps it, and picks at his own reaction…
James Lacatski, Colm Kelleher, and George Knapp
Lacatski was the Defense Intelligence Agency scientist who got the AAWSAP program funded — the predecessor to the better-known Pentagon UFO office — and this is the insider account of it. The program studied Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, and the…
David Roberts
His last book on the country he spent thirty years in. Half is the archaeology and his own walking — the Cedar Mesa sites, Grand Gulch, the panels, the places he keeps returning to. The other half is the history…
Edmund C. Jaeger
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.…
Stephen Lekson
Lekson noticed that Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins, and Paquimé in Chihuahua sit within a few minutes of longitude of one another, hundreds of miles apart, over four centuries. His argument is that this was deliberate — that the political center…
Cormac McCarthy
The second McCarthy border novel — a young man crosses into Mexico to return a wolf to the wild. The wolf doesn’t survive. Neither does the old world McCarthy is eulogizing. If McCarthy’s your jam, the prose is as good…
Philip J. Corso
Corso was a retired Army colonel who had run a Pentagon foreign technology desk, and in 1997 he published this: A claim that he was handed a filing cabinet of debris recovered at Roswell in 1947 and quietly fed the…
Kevin Fedarko
In June 1983 the snowpack came off the Rockies faster than anyone predicted and Glen Canyon Dam started to come apart, spillways cavitating, plywood bolted onto the top to hold the reservoir back. With the Grand Canyon closed to boats…
Mary Austin
Austin published this in 1903, out of years living in the Owens Valley between the Sierra and Death Valley, and it’s the book that taught American writers how to look at the desert. Short chapters: A buzzard, a scavenger’s territory,…
David Roberts
The sequel to In Search of the Old Ones, twenty years on. He revisits sites and finds some wrecked by visitation and others still untouched, and pushes into new country — Range Creek in Utah, kept private by one family…
David Darlington
Darlington spent years driving and walking the Mojave in the years around the fight over the California Desert Protection Act, and the book is built out of the people who live there and can’t agree on anything. Miners who see…
Edward Abbey
Four people meet on a river trip and decide to start wrecking things. A Vietnam surgeon with three ex-wives, a Mormon river guide with three current ones, a Bronx kid turned desert fanatic, and a woman from the Bronx who…
David Yetman
Everything known about one plant. Yetman and his coauthors cover the saguaro’s biology and its absurd arithmetic — decades to reach a few inches, a hundred and fifty years to full height, thousands of seeds a year of which almost…
Craig Childs
Two things are true in the desert: There isn’t enough water, and there is way too much of it. Childs spends the book hunting the first and getting caught by the second. He maps water holes in the Arizona desert,…
Frank B. Salisbury
Salisbury was a plant physiologist at Utah State — a serious scientist with NASA contracts — who spent years in the late sixties and early seventies documenting sightings in the Uintah Basin, mostly from the Ute reservation and the ranching…
Joseph Wood Krutch
Krutch was a New York drama critic and Thoreau scholar who moved to Tucson in his fifties and became one of the great desert writers. This is his naturalist’s year: The spadefoot toad that waits underground for the one right…
Paolo Bacigalupi
The Colorado River has been cut down to nothing and the states have gone to war over what’s left, legally and otherwise. Nevada has water knives — Angel Velasquez is one — men who show up with a court order…
Ann Zwinger
Five canyons on Cedar Mesa in southeast Utah — Grand Gulch, Slickhorn, Johns, Fish, and Owl — walked and camped and described by a naturalist who was also a fine draftswoman. Zwinger works the geology and the plants and the…
Keith H. Basso
Basso spent decades at Cibecue, and it started when an elder asked him to make a map with the real names on it. Apache place names turn out to be whole sentences — water flows down over a succession of…
Taylor Brown
Trace Temple’s family lost their New Mexico ranch after somebody shot an endangered wolf, and he’s living out of his truck, broke and furious at the government. A secretive militia offers him money to kill One-Eleven, the she-wolf leading the…
Claire Vaye Watkins
Watkins’s fourth book. Rose of Sharon — named for the Grapes of Wrath character — is a Sierra Club fundraiser living in a cinder block cabin in the Mojave, her daughter with an ex on the East Coast for the…
