Geology of Nevada: Electronic Books

The Great Basin, centering on Nevada and including substantial parts of California, Oregon, and Utah, gets its name from the fact that none of its rivers or streams flow to the sea. This book synthesizes the past 25,000 years of the natural history of this vast region. It explores the extinct animals that lived in the Great Basin during the Ice Age and recounts the rise and fall of the massive Ice Age lakes that existed here. It explains why trees once grew 13' beneath what is now the surface of Lake Tahoe, explores the nearly two dozen Great Basin mountain ranges that once held substantial glaciers, and tells the remarkable story of how pinyon pine came to cover some 17,000,000 acres of the Great Basin in the relatively recent past.These discussions culminate with the impressive history of the prehistoric people of the Great Basin, a history that shows how human societies dealt with nearly 13,000 years of climate change on this often-challenging landscape.

Writing with verve and clarity, Mary Hill tells the story of the magnificent Sierra Nevada—the longest, highest, and most spectacular mountain range in the contiguous United States. Hill takes us from the time before the land which would be California even existed, through the days of roaring volcanoes, violent earthquakes, and chilling ice sheets, to the more recent history of the Sierra's early explorers and the generations of adventuresome souls who followed.

The author introduces the rocks of the Sierra Nevada, which tell the mountains' tale, and explains how nature's forces, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, faulting, erosion, and glaciation formed the range's world-renowned scenery and mineral wealth, including gold.

The Roar and the Silence chronicles the area's history from its earliest days through the early twentieth century, when the lode finally gave out ant the Comstock sank into silent decay, and up to the present, when Virginia City and its environs found new life, first as a community of bohemians and artists, and more recently as a tourist attraction offering a taste of the frontier experience to visitors from around the world. James's text brings the Comstock to life again in all its complexity and boom-and-bust excitement. This book offers a wealth of new information and insight into the history of one of the Old West's most storied areas.