DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK
Splendid Desolation
Stewart Aitchison
64 pages. Oversized 10”x13”
ISBN 1-58071-042-5
$9.95

This stunningly beautiful, oversized book is lavishly illustrated with breathtaking color imagery by America’s leading landscape photographers. In addition to the stunning photography, the book also includes detailed maps of the park and region and insightful, heartfelt narratives detailing the park’s natural and human histories.

In the cool dark, I drive up the road in the Black Mountains first graded back in the 1920s to provide tourists with a startling view of Death Valley. An early advertisement had boasted, “You might enjoy a trip to Death Valley, now! It has all the advantages of hell without the inconveniences.” A common poorwill, not the devil, flushes in the headlights.

...In the harsh midday light, the mountains are brooding masses of burnt iron. Most have no introductory hills, the mountains rising abruptly out of the flat, burning basin. From here, no plant life is discernible on the valley floor, but I know that on this spring morning desert gold, brown-eyed evening primrose, purple mat, and gravel ghost are in their glory.

...Death Valley National Park is a land of sailing rocks, musical dunes, sublime vistas, and tall tales. Let’s look at some of the dry facts: ecologically, Death Valley lies within the very northern part of the Mojave Desert and is also part of the Great Basin, a region covering much of the intermountain West. In the Great Basin rivers and streams do not flow out to an ocean but into valleys or basins where the water sinks, evaporates, and/or becomes a saline lake. Death Valley and its surrounding mountain ranges are also within the geologic province called the Basin and Range where stretching and large-scale faulting of the earth’s crust has produced a series of roughly parallel, north-south–trending valleys and ranges.

—From “Splendid Desolation” by Stewart Aitchison

Splendid Desolation
Stewart Aitchison
64 pages. Oversized 10”x13”
ISBN 1-58071-042-5
$9.95

OTHER TITLES THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST

Death Valley: A Valley of Life by Jeff Nicholas and Jim & Lynn Wilson

Death Valley: A Quest For Life by Lynn Wilson

Death Valley Postcard Book