Swallowtail butterflies frolic on the wind. Vireos and rock wrens sing their hearts out by the recovering creek. Spiders and other predators chase their next meal. Through it all, John Alcock observes, records, and delights in what he sees. In a once-burnt area, life resurges. Plants whose seeds and roots withstood an intense fire become habitat for the returning creatures of the wild. After the Wildfire describes the remarkable recovery of wildlife in the Mazatzal Mountains in central Arizona.
It is the rare observer who has the dedication to revisit the site of a wildfire, especially over many years and seasons. But naturalist John Alcock returned again and again to the Mazatzals, where the disastrous Willow fire of 2004 burned 187 square miles. Documenting the fire’s aftermath over a decade, Alcock thrills at the renewal of the once-blackened region. Walking the South Fork of Deer Creek in all seasons as the years passed, he was rewarded by the sight of exuberant plant life that in turn fostered an equally satisfying return of animals ranging from small insects to large mammals.
Alcock clearly explains the response of chaparral plants to fire and the creatures that reinhabit these plants as they come back from a ferocious blaze: the great spreadwing damselfly, the western meadowlark, the elk, and birds and bugs of rich and colorful varieties. This book is at once a journey of biological discovery and a celebration of the ability of living things to reoccupy a devastated location. Alcock encourages others to engage the natural world—even one that has burnt to the ground.
Despite its reputation as a "desert" state, Arizona is one of the most mountainous states in the country. Within its borders are nearly 200 named mountain ranges, over a hundred more hill-ranges, many hundreds of volcanic mounds, and many more hundreds of eroded mountain-like formations within the Grand Canyon and other great canyons and at the periphery of the giant plateaus. By one measure, Arizona has over 7,000 distinct mountains. There is virtually nowhere within the state that one could stand and not see a mountain close by or on the distant horizon.
The Arizona Mountains Gazetteer is an encyclopedic compendium of over 1,600 mountains, peaks, hills, mesas, buttes, mounds, cinder cones and eroded formations within Arizona. Not a guidebook in the usual sense, information ranges from thumbnails on hiking or climbing a particular mountain to important and often fascinating aspects of its role in history. Which mountains played roles in the Civil War? Where did the various Native Americans seek refuge during the American presence in the latter 19th century? Where did early American explorers discover mineral wealth that established an economic foothold and would eventually result in the creation of the Territory of Arizona? Which mountain was the site of one of the worst airplane disasters in American history? Which mountains have been in the movies? Which mountains have been in song lyrics? Which mountain is named for a wandering mule? Which famous Hollywood actor climbed a vertical spire on the Navajo Nation? Which mountain appears on the state's license plates? Which mountain is less than a thousand years old? Which mountain has interesting mathematical qualities to it? Which mountain has a boat on top of it? Somewhere in the pages of this book are the answers!
These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside The Call of the Canyon:
And when the last quarter hour of that eventful and tragic year began slowly to pass with the low swell of whistles and bells, Carleys friends had discreetly left her alone with her lover, at the open window, to watch and hear the old year out, the new year in.
...But to come home an incomprehensibly changed man-and to see my old life as strange as if it were the new life of another planet-to try to slip into the old groove-well, no words of mine can tell you how utterly impossible it was.
...What from far above had appeared only a green timber-choked cleft proved from close relation to be a wide winding valley, tip and down, densely forested for the most part, yet having open glades and bisected from wall to wall by the creek.
...From this point the driver turned back along the creek, passed between orchards and fields, and drove along the base of the red wall to come suddenly upon a large rustic house that had been hidden from Carleys sight.
...Glenn led her away up a trail that climbed between bowlders, and meandered on over piny mats of needles under great, silent, spreading pines; and closer to the impondering mountain wall, where at the base of the red rock the creek murmured strangely with hollow gurgle, where the sun had no chance to affect the cold damp gloom; and on through sweet-smelling woods, out into the sunlight again, and across a wider breadth of stream; and up a slow slope covered with stately pines, to a little cabin that faced the west.
About the author (2012)
Zane Grey was born Pearl Zane Gray in 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio. He studied dentistry at the University of Pennsylvania, married Lina Elise Roth in 1905, then moved his family west where he began to write novels. The author of 86 books, he is today considered the father of the Western genre, with its heady romances and mysterious outlaws. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) brought Grey his greatest popular acclaim. Other notable titles include The Light of Western Stars (1914) and The Vanishing American (1925). An extremely prolific writer, he often completed three novels a year, while his publisher would issue only one at a time. Twenty-five of his novels were published posthumously. His last, The Reef Girl, was published in 1977. Zane Grey died of heart failure on October 23 in Altadena, California, in 1939.
This is a novel about commitment - or, rather, the consequences of shirking commitment. Earth Firstl Founder Dave Foreman unfolds the story of burned-out and disillusioned Sierra Club lobbyist Jack Hunter, who leaves Washington D.C., for his family's cabin in southwestern New Mexico's Diablo National Forest. Convinced there is nothing he or anyone else can do to stop humankind's war on nature, he returns to his old trade of horseshoeing, determined not to become involved again in conservation issues. Nevertheless, he finds himself falling for the leader of the Diablo Wilderness Committee. Dr MaryAnne McClellan, a biologist who is as pretty as she is tough. She tries to draw him into the campaign to protect the Diablo Wilderness Area from Forest Service logging plans, and she also wants to involve him when a pack of lobos - Mexican wolves - are reintroduced to this wilderness bordering a small ranching community. Hunter refuses to commit to either MaryAnne or the lovos, however, and he is soon caught up in the bloody consequences of his cynicism, discovering the true cost of not taking a stand for what he loves.
One of the bloodiest gunfight's in Arizona history took place the morning of February 10, 1918 outside the Power Cabin in desolate Rattlesnake Canyon in the Galiuro Mountains near Klondyke, Arizona. Four men were killed, three of them Graham County Law officers. The Power Brothers spend 42 years in the Arizona State Prison, convicted of first degree murder. Their story and the story of the gunfight is one of the saddest and bloodiest days in the early days just a little over six years after Arizona became a state on February 14, 1912!
Fighting fierce Apaches, and the heat, four prospectors barely eking out a living on the frontier find a fortune in silver. They discovered a King of a mine and so named it, The Silver King. It soon became one of the most famous mines of Arizona and the West. Its riches provided prosperity for many of the Arizona Territory's early pioneers.
It was the great American dream.
The mine was the catalyst that enabled settlement of the Central Arizona Territory in the 1870s. The Silver King produced between $7 and $17 million dollars between 1875 and 1887. The mining camps of Silver King and Pinal sprange up overnight to handle the flood of miners and speculators. Oh, they thought the silver would last forever....
Ten Years of Recovery from the Willow Fire
The Arizona Mountains Gazetteer
The Call of the Canyon
The Lobo Outback Funeral Home
The Power Affair
Volcanoes of Northern Arizona: Sleeping Giants of the Grand
When Silver Was King: Arizona's Silver King Mining Days, Historical Highlights and Human Interes
Route Editor
Route Scout
