Great Places: Montana: A Recreational Guide to Montana's Public Lands and Historical Places for Birding, Hiking, Photography, Fishing, Huntin (Great Places) Review

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The high country of Montana, the "Big Sky" country, calls to the wilderness-oriented with a force that is irresistible. It is Montana that flows through dreams, dominates cheerful planning sessions, and determines budgets. With good reason: Montana's wild vastness; its mountains, lakes and rivers; its light and openness, its clean air and the lift you feel inside when you pass a truck or car on a lonely road and get a friendly wave; its amazing animal and bird life abundance.There is no place on the planet like Montana, except Alaska, and Montana is a lot easier to get around in than Alaska. Once you've locked into Montana's pull, you know you have to go.
The best way to go to Montana is with Chuck Robbins as your guide. He's already been where you want to go.
Chuck Robbins has floated the rivers and walked the trails. He has sat on the overlooks where you can watch herds of buffalo, just as the mountain men saw them. He has trained his binoculars and cameras on more birds and wild animals than most of us could ever see in a lifetime. He has stayed in the wrong campgrounds and eaten in the wrong restaurants. He has fished the over-rated, over-crowded rivers and hunted where game was sparse. BUT . . . he has also done all these things in the right places, Great Places: Montana is his third book on the Rocky Mountain outdoors and is your personal guide to Montana's finest.
With Chuck Robbins and Great Places: Montana as your guides, you're going to make every dollar and every minute of your precious time count as you explore the wonders of Montana for your own personal outdoor adventure--whether bird-watching, trail-walking, wilderness backpacking, photography, fishing, hunting, float-tripping, or sight-seeing. Wildlife preserves, historical sites, detailed maps, internet resources, guides and outfitters--they're all in this book. You can trust Chuck Robbins to show you where and how to enjoy the outdoor life in Montana.


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Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada Review

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(More customer reviews)This classic work by one of the great yarn-spinners of all time includes some wonderful descriptive information about California places and people in the early 1860s and some gripping, heartstopping tales about King's own mountaineering exploits. Even in his early 20s, Clarence King was recognized for leaderhip and intellectual ability. He served with the Army Topographic Engineers on the survey of the Western United States along the 40th parallel and was an intimate of Henry Adams and his wife in their small social/intellectual circle in Washington D.C. (See Patricia O'Toole's "The Five of Hearts"). He established his national reputation for being a shrewd, practical man of science when he discovered and exposed a stock swindle based on salted ore and fraudulent assay samples when asked to evaluate a mining promotion in Colorado. "Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada" is a non-chronological, semi-autobiographical reconstruction of some of King's time (circa 1862-63) with Josiah Whitney's Survey, commissioned by the State legislature to catalogue and evaluate California geologic and mineral resources. It is an entertaining and engrossing narration of one foolhardy, death-defying exploit after another. Like those of John Muir (another classic, albeit overrated talesman of the Range of Light), Clarence King's numerous renditions of his own hairsbreadth escapes from impossibly precarious positions by the power of luck, pluck and sheer physical prowess, while entertaining and enthralling, were made possible only by his own chronic rash foolhardiness, if not by tremendous powers of exaggeration. A better man was his fellow draft-dodger (the Civil War was going on back East all the while they were dancing around in the mountains of California, after all), William Brewer. Brewer served longer, harder and more responsibly than King in the Whitney Survey. Brewer also wrote a factually more thorough and reliable description of conditions in the young state of California in a series of letters home to his family in New England (collected as "Up and Down California"), with none of King's histrionics but just as entertaining in its own way. King's book does include some unique insights. One is his near-comic description of the "Piker" rubes (from Pike County, Missouri), rural folk residing in the foothills of the Southern San Joaquin Valley, which can be read as a precourser of all hilarious mountain folk descriptions, from Li'l Abner through the Beverley Hillbillies to Deliverance. But truth be told (rarely enough, one suspects), this book is mostly about the indefatigable King and his own personal exploits in the Southern Sierra. While King's literary talent was substantial, his writing (and indeed his entire public life and historic reputation) were seemingly unilluminated in any way by his own domestic arrangements. These included a life-long love relationship and common law marriage to a black woman, Ada, with whom he maintained a household including their several children. Not only did he keep the marriage secret from all of his prominent social contacts, but he kept his own notorious identity and true name a secret from his wife and children until just before he died. Still, under the constant strain of maintaining a double identity, he continued to support his family and maintained an exhausting schedule of international travel, geological consulting and writing until he died prematurely from consumption at the age of 59. (See Thurman Wilkins' "Clarence King"). You won't find any mention of King's real family anything King wrote for public consumption, or even for the consumption of his well-placed friends. Altogether, this book makes for a slightly less than satisfying cud to chew over, but it tastes pretty good the first time on the way down.

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This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.

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The Naturalist in Nicaragua Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is one of the best natural history books ever writen. Thomas Belt lived in Nicargua for 4 years during the last century and his travel with in the country descrived the way the tropics used to be 100 years ago. Since he wrote the book, 98% of the low land tropical dry forest have been deforested.

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With an Introduction by ANTHONY BELT, F.L.S.

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The Encyclopedia of Deer Review

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(More customer reviews)There are nice pictures and nice tidbits of info about deer but generally there are no good, unbiased deer books that exist. Most books are loaded with jargon about hunting and "management" practices. Sadly, I have yet to find a good deer book with unbiased educated information about deer. I wish the book had more pictures for each type of deer and more specific info about the animals. Many deer books just talk about deer and people, something I don`t care about. If I wanted to read a hunting magazine I`d buy one for my bathroom reading.

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Exploring Colorado's Wild Areas: A Guide for Hikers, Backpackers, Climbers, X-C Skiers & Paddlers Review

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(More customer reviews)Though I have not read this yet, I am looking forward to it. I have similar books on my Colorado reference shelf. I use these for my yearly hikes out in Colorado. I would do business with this seller again. I had no problems what so ever.

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The Jump-Off Creek Review

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(More customer reviews)A woman homesteads by herself in eastern Oregon. There are the standard dangers, problems, terrors and tragedies. This is saved from being trite by the stoic and undaunted character of the woman. Gloss also avoids the usual romantic happily-ever-after with the man next door.
Gloss has used journals and diaries of women in the West in hopes to draw out some of the nontraditional women's roles in the West, "I hope their strong, honest voices can be heard in this book." Showing that gender roles weren't fixed as many choose to believe, we see Lydia doing hard, manual labor, and Tim cooking and doing the wash. Lydia, the heroine of the book, abandons typical women's roles in the very beginning when she picks up and moves West alone to start a new life. "I'd rather have my own house, sorry as it is, than the wedding ring of a man who couldn't be roused from sleeping when his own child was slipping out of me unborn."
Gloss attempts to break down the Western stereotypes for men. Tim and Blue are like real men we could meet if we were on the frontier, not larger than life heroes that commonly dominate Western myths. Unlike heroes admired for their independence, Tim and Blue are dependant on others and each other on the frontier . They become almost like children in their dependence on others, "He turned and looked at her, ducking his chin." Things don't come easily for them and they struggle like any human being would have, "Tim put the gun down in the mud and went, shaking, across the bloody wallow on his knees." Even being a cowboy is rejected in this book, "He said he'd seen years when a good cowboy couldn't by himself a job, but a good cook could pretty much always find work."
Besides narrations from characters, Gloss utilizes Lydia's journal entries to make the story more real, personal, and familiar. This helps us recognize and remember Lydia's real identity, while the central narration builds the events of her daily life in a flowing form. Dreams of easy success are shot down in The Jump Off Creek. Giving a truer picture of the West, The Jump Off Creek is not a romanticized myth of adventure and easy success. Gloss establishes a view that shows the desperation of lives in a West where there is nothing new and glorious to see and experience every day. We see the miserable and wretched hard lives that one might have encountered. Fantasies of ease and comfort in the West are gone in this novel. It isn't a fairy tale like the traditional Western, where the good guy always wins, and the hero can handle any problem successfully. This book doesn't contain a lot of action, but instead it brings out the monotonous daily life of establishing a new home in the West and centers on the domestic side of the West. Gloss tells us of the every day grind and challenges of lives where sometimes people fail and hours of hard work are only the beginning of more hours of hard work.

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Foxfire 4 Review

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(More customer reviews)Being a native of rural Appalachia, we owe so much to Mr. Wiggington for the preservation of our culture. No other, in my knowledge has done so much. The entire seires of Foxfire books is a tribute to the plain, industrious, pragmatic, proud mountain ways that I so fondly recall from my childhood. Whether you are doing research, or simply trying to remember how granddaddy did it, these books are an excellent source of knowledge.

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Fiddle making, spring houses, horse trading, sassafras tea, berry buckets, gardening, and other affairs of plain living are the topics covered in this volume.

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Mule Deer: A Handbook for Utah Hunters and Landowners Review

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(More customer reviews)I really doubt that there is a person who understands mule deer and mule deer management in Utah as well as retired wildlife biologist Dennis Austin. There may be some who understand portions of the mule deer story in greater detail, or with more sophistication, but Austin can speak for the entire mule deer package: evolution, history, biology, management, use, abuse, hunters and hunting, agriculturalists and crop damage, and the future of mule deer.
That makes this book, Mule Deer: A Handbook for Utah Hunters and Landowners, an important contribution to mule deer management.
What are the impacts of predators? Is all winter habitat equal in importance? Will the "good old days" of abundant deer harvests ever return? Should deer ever be fed in the winter? Do deer really damage apples, alfalfa, and winter wheat?
If you are a wildlife biologist new to Utah, this is required reading. If you are an experienced wildlife biologist, you should match your wits, and your interpretation of the various studies (many authored by Austin), with this book. If you are a landowner or ranch/farm manager, this book is full of tips for increasing the deer population and the quality of the harvest. And if you are one of those who plan your fall vacations around the mule deer hunt, quit complaining about the "woulda-shoulda-coulda" aspects of deer management, and learn something. Austin speaks with experience as a deer hunter, a resident who has experienced the destruction and modification of winter range, and as a wildlife biologist paid to manage mule deer for multiple uses (but primarily sustained yield).
The ability of a biologist to be able to devote a lifetime to studying mule deer probably will never happen again, so this book really is unique. All mule deer enthusiasts will learn from it.

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The Backyard Birdsong Guide: Western North America (Backyard Birdsong Guides) Review

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(More customer reviews)Sitting on my porch I can now tell what bird is singing it's song. The audio is excellant. The book also has clear photographs and great details so that you can easily identify each bird. The one downside is if you live in the Central US, you need to purchase both the Western and Eastern North America books in order to find all the birds in this region.

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