Fish Springs and Black Rock, two long-forgotten settlements in Owens Valley, California, were thriving communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1864 to 1922, more than nine hundred people lived there, earning precarious livings as farmers, ranchers, miners, millwrights, merchants, and lumbermen. This is their story, and it is also the story of how the City of Los Angeles, by purchasing water rights throughout Owens Valley, gradually turned Fish Springs and Black Rock into ghost towns.

Fish Springs and Black Rock: Forgotten Towns of Owens Valley

History

Bowers, Janice Emily

Americas

Three Gardens Press

Pulitzer Prize-winning landscape photographer Jack Dykinga, photographer of Abrams' The Sonoran Desert and Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau, turns his attention to another of the American southwest's spectacular scenic wonders, Death Valley and the vast area of the Mojave Desert surrounding it in California, Arizona, and Nevada.
Dykinga and botanist Janice Emily Bowers, who provides a personal text, were aided in the creation of this book by El Ni$o, whose rains in 1997-98 produced perhaps the most spectacular wildflower blossoming of the desert ever seen. Here too are the mysterious moving rocks of Racetrack Playa, the singing sand dunes at Kelso, and many other remarkable views of the Mojave Desert, including the remarkable Joshua Tree National Park.

Desert: The Mojave and Death Valley

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Harry N. Abrams

Pulitzer Prize-winning landscape photographer Jack Dykinga turns his lens to the American Southwest's spectacular scenic wonders: Death Valley and the vast Mojave Desert that surrounds it. Botanist Janice Emily Bowers provides a personal text, complementing stunning views of this remarkably alive landscape.

Dykinga, Jack

Forrest Shreve (1878-1950) was an internationally known plant ecologist who spent most of his career at the Carnegie Institution's Desert Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona. Shreve's contributions to the study of plant ecology laid the groundwork for modern studies and several of his works came to be regarded as classics by ecologists worldwide. This first full-length study of Shreve's life and work demonstrates that he was more than a desert ecologist. His early work in Maryland and Jamaica gave him a breadth of expertise matched by few of his ecological contemporaries, and his studies of desert plant demography, the physiological ecology of rain-forest plants, and vegetational gradients on southwestern mountain ranges anticipated by decades recent trends in ecology. Tracing Shreve's development from student to scientist, Bowers evokes the rigors and delights of fieldwork in the first half of this century and shows how Shreve's sense of place informed his scientific thought—making him, in his own words, "not an exile from some better place, but a man at home in an environment to which his life can be adjusted without physical or intellectual loss."

A Sense of Place: The Life and Work of Forrest Shreve

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

University of Arizona Press

The Rincon Mountains east of Tucson are a small and seemingly undistinguished range; rounded and arid, they are more a site for foothill walks than serious exploring. Yet these unassuming mountains disclose many wonders and curiosities upon close inspection, as Janice Emily Bowers discovered while conducting a botanical study there. Over the course of two years she made 38 excursions into the Rincons—some for two or three days at a time—and garnered not only plant specimens but thoughts along the way. The Mountains Next Door is the first book to describe and celebrate the natural history of these mountains that even longtime Arizonans may often take for granted. "I watched the seasons march through the canyons," writes Bowers, "followed the wildflower parade from February through November, and throughout it all realized that I could travel in the Rincon Mountains forever and never learn all they contained." It is also a book of meditations, as Bowers reflects upon the meaning of nature, the similarities between the scientific and creative processes, the value of wilderness in the face of urban encroachment, and other ideas. Participating in the long tradition of reflective natural history writing, she has produced a memorable book that depicts the delights and dilemmas of field botany as it explores the perennial struggle between science and mysticism that tugs at every naturalist's heart.

The Mountains Next Door

A Full Life in a Small Place: And Other Essays from a Desert Garden

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

The frustrations and pleasures of gardening are evident; its implications for life are more subtle, lurking under a leaf or buried in a compost pile. Janice Emily Bowers senses these implications, and communicates them as only a fine writer can. In A Full Life in a Small Place, she shows how backyard gardening opens up a broader appreciation of both life and living. Her observations on organic gardening inspire further meditations on nature and wildlife, and demonstrate how gardens both complicate and enrich our lives. In their entirety, these sixteen essays ask how we shall live, and recognize that "before we can determine how, we need to find out why."

A Full Life in a Small Place and Other Essays from a Desert Garden

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Gardening & Landscape Design

The Sonoran Desert, a fragile ecosystem, is under ever-increasing pressure from a burgeoning human population. This ecological atlas of the region's plants, a greatly enlarged and full revised version of the original 1972 atlas, will be an invaluable resource for plant ecologists, botanists, geographers, and other scientists, and for all with a serious interest in living with and protecting a unique natural southwestern heritage.An encyclopedia as well as an atlas, this monumental work describes the taxonomy, geographic distribution, and ecology of 339 plants, most of them common and characteristic trees, shrubs, or succulants. Also included is valuable information on natural history and ethnobotanical, commercial, and horticultural uses of these plants. The entry for each species includes a range map, an elevational profile, and a narrative account. The authors also include an extensive bibliography, referring the reader to the latest research and numerous references of historical importance, with a glossary to aid the general reader.Sonoran Desert Plants is a monumental work, unlikely to be superseded in the next generation. As the region continues to attract more people, there will be an increasingly urgent need for basic knowledge of plant species as a guide for creative and sustainable habitation of the area. This book will stand as a landmark resource for many years to come.

Sonoran Desert Plants: An Ecological Atlas

Turner, Raymond M.

Burgess, Tony L.

Biological Sciences

Jan Bowers lives in the right place. A lover of nature and the outdoors, an avid hiker and backpacker, she is surrounded by mountain ridges, peaks, and canyons of almost every description. In this book, she invites us to come along and find out why some of these places are special, why some of them stay in her mind long after she has returned to the workaday world of the city. Readers have come to expect the best from this writer, termed "a rare talent. . . uncommonly good at the craft" by Wilderness magazine. Her new book is filled with creeks and meadows, tiny ferns and towering oaks, bears and butterflies and Red-tailed Hawks. We see gray clouds clogging the sky in a canyon, "wildly, almost tastelessly romantic, as full of clouds as a tea kettle with steam," and we startle a female grouse and her half-dozen fuzzy chicks "exploding from underfoot like billiard balls scattered with a cue stick."Faced with the prospect of moving to another place, Bowers finds herself thinking about the familiar world in new and unfamiliar ways. Through her eyes, too, we see how an interest in nature and the outdoors developed from early childhood and how simple curiosity has led her to the most surprising discoveries. At odd and unexpected moments, her work also seems to bring new insights into herself and her life as a writer, a wife, and a mother.These pages promise a new adventure at every turn in the trail. For sheer terror, there's a climb up the face of Baboquivari, for laughs, there's the great bagworm caper, and for some quiet truths, there are themes of gain and loss, of connection and reconcilliation. Crunching through winter snow or sweating under summer sun, we know we're in the hands of an experienced guide. And we know we couldn't ask for a better companion.

Fear Falls Away and other Essays from Hard and Rocky Places

Jan Bowers lives in the right place. A lover of nature and the outdoors, an avid hiker and backpacker, she is surrounded by mountain ridges, peaks, and canyons of almost every description. In this book, she invites us to come along and find out why some of these places are special, why some of them stay in her mind long after she has returned to the workaday world of the city. Readers have come to expect the best from this writer, termed "a rare talent. . . uncommonly good at the craft" by Wilderness magazine. Her new book is filled with creeks and meadows, tiny ferns and towering oaks, bears and butterflies and Red-tailed Hawks. We see gray clouds clogging the sky in a canyon, "wildly, almost tastelessly romantic, as full of clouds as a tea kettle with steam," and we startle a female grouse and her half-dozen fuzzy chicks "exploding from underfoot like billiard balls scattered with a cue stick." Faced with the prospect of moving to another place, Bowers finds herself thinking about the familiar world in new and unfamiliar ways. Through her eyes, too, we see how an interest in nature and the outdoors developed from early childhood and how simple curiosity has led her to the most surprising discoveries. At odd and unexpected moments, her work also seems to bring new insights into herself and her life as a writer, a wife, and a mother. These pages promise a new adventure at every turn in the trail. For sheer terror, there's a climb up the face of Baboquivari, for laughs, there's the great bagworm caper, and for some quiet truths, there are themes of gain and loss, of connection and reconcilliation. Crunching through winter snow or sweating under summer sun, we know we're in the hands of an experienced guide. And we know we couldn't ask for a better companion.

Fear Falls Away: And Other Essays from Hard and Rocky Places

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bowers, Janice Emily. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bowers, Janice Emily

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bowers, Janice Emily. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Fish Springs and Black Rock: Forgotten Towns of Owens Valley

Desert: The Mojave and Death Valley

Desert: The Mojave and Death Valley

A Sense of Place: The Life and Work of Forrest Shreve

The Mountains Next Door

A Full Life in a Small Place: And Other Essays from a Desert Garden

A Full Life in a Small Place and Other Essays from a Desert Garden

Sonoran Desert Plants: An Ecological Atlas

Fear Falls Away and other Essays from Hard and Rocky Places

Fear Falls Away: And Other Essays from Hard and Rocky Places