The desert

morning approach--Air illusions--Sand forms--The winds--Sun-shafts--Sunlight--Desert life--Antelope--The Lost Mountains--The ascent--Deer trails--Footprints--The stone path--Def...

ranges on desert--Plains, valleys, and mesas--Effect of drouth--The rains--Harshness of desert--A gaunt land--Conditions of life--Incessant strife--Elemental warfare--Desert veg...

former Gulf--Sea-beaches on desert--Harbors and reefs--Indian remains--The Cocopas--The Colorado River--The delta dam--The inland lake--The first fall--Springs and wells in the...

canyon--On the desert--The lower river--Sluggish movement--Stillness of the river--The river’s name--Its red color--Compared with the Nile--The blood hue--River changes--Red san...

desert--Glare and heat--Pure sunlight--Atmospheric envelope--Vapor particles in air--Clear air--Dust particles--Hazes--Seeing the desert air--Sea-breezes on desert--Colored air-...

Nature--The blue sky--Changes in the blue--Dawns on the desert--Blue as a color--Sky from mountain heights--Blackness of space--Bright sky-colors--Horizon skies--Spectrum colors...

impressions--Deception by sunlight--Distorted forms and colors--Changed appearance of mountains--Changes in line and light--False perspective--Abnormal foreshortening--Contradic...

and decay--Nature’s plan--The law of change--Nature foiling her own plans--Attack and drouth--Preservation of species--Means of preservation--Maintaining the _status quo_--The p...

desert character--Desert Indians--Life without water--Endurance of the jack-rabbit--Prairie dogs and water--Water famine--Coyotes and wild-cats living without water--Lean, gaunt...

sand--Scarcity of birds--Dangers of bird-life--No cover for protection--Food problem--Heat and drouth again--A bird’s temperature--Innocent-looking birds--The road-runner--Wrens...

Southern Arizona--Rising from the desert--The great mesas--“Grease wood plains”--Upland vegetation--Grass plains--Spring and summer on the plains--Home of the antelope--Beds of...

and passes--View from mountain top--Looking toward the peaks--Lost streams--Avalanches and bowlder-beds--Ascent by the arroyo--Growth of the stream--Rising banks--Waterfalls--Go...

It is the last considerable group of mountains between the divide and the low basin of the Colorado desert. For days I have been watching them change color at sunset--watching t...

The first going-down into the desert is always something of a surprise. The fancy has pictured one thing; the reality shows quite another thing. Where and how did we gain the id...

In the ancient days when the shore of the Pacific was young, when the white sierras had only recently been heaved upward and the desert itself was in a formative stage, the ocea...

The career of the Colorado, from its rise in the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming to its final disappearance in the Gulf of California, seems almost tragic in its swift transitio...

These deserts, cut through from north to south by a silent river and from east to west by two noisy railways, seem remarkable for only a few commonplace things, according to the...

How silently, even swiftly, the days glide by out in the desert, in the waste, in the wilderness! How “the morning and the evening make up the day” and the purple shadow slips i...

In our studies of landscape we are very frequently made the victims of either illusion or delusion. The eye or the mind deceives us, and sometimes the two may join forces to our...

Nature seems a benevolent or a malevolent goddess just as our own inadequate vision happens to see her. If we have eyes only for her creative beauties we think her all goodness;...

The life of the desert lives only by virtue of adapting itself to the conditions of the desert. Nature does not bend the elements to favor the plants and the animals; she makes...

The desert’s secrets of life and growth and death are not to be read at a glance. The first day’s walk is usually a disappointment. You see little more than a desolate waste. Th...

The word mesa (table), by local usage in Mexico and in the western United States, is applied to any flat tract of ground that lies above an arroyo or valley, as well as to the f...

The character of the land lying along the western boundaries of the deserts is very different from that of the Arizona canyon country. Moving toward the Pacific you meet with no...