The Northern California coast--from Monterey County to the Oregon border--is home to some of the richest avian habitats on the North American continent. Field Guide to Birds of the Northern California Coast provides a comprehensive ecological overview of this extensive and diverse region. It features detailed discussions of the area's most common waterbirds, raptors, and landbirds and highlights the most productive birding sites in each Northern California coastal county. Accessibly written and user-friendly, this guide contains nearly 250 species accounts that focus on seasonal rhythms and behavioral characteristics of each species. More than 130 color photographs and hand-drawn sketches depict the birds in context, and maps and occurrence charts indicate when readers might spot each species.

In the shadow of the Vietnam War, a significant part of an entire generation refused their assigned roles in the American century. Some took their revolutionary politics to the streets, others decided simply to turn away, seeking to build another world together, outside the state and the market. West of Eden charts the remarkable flowering of communalism in the 1960s and ’70s, fueled by a radical rejection of the Cold War corporate deal, utopian visions of a peaceful green planet, the new technologies of sound and light, and the ancient arts of ecstatic release. The book focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area and its hinterlands, which have long been creative spaces for social experiment. Haight-Ashbury’s gift economy—its free clinic, concerts, and street theatre—and Berkeley’s liberated zones—Sproul Plaza, Telegraph Avenue, and People’s Park—were embedded in a wider network of producer and consumer co-ops, food conspiracies, and collective schemes. Using memoir and flashbacks, oral history and archival sources, West of Eden explores the deep historical roots and the enduring, though often disavowed, legacies of the extraordinary pulse of radical energies that generated forms of collective life beyond the nuclear family and the world of private consumption, including the contradictions evident in such figures as the guru/predator or the hippie/entrepreneur. There are vivid portraits of life on the rural communes of Mendocino and Sonoma, and essays on the Black Panther communal households in Oakland, the latter-day Diggers of San Francisco, the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, the pioneers of live/work space for artists, and the Bucky dome as the iconic architectural form of the sixties. Due to the prevailing amnesia—partly imposed by official narratives, partly self-imposed in the aftermath of defeat—West of Eden is not only a necessary act of reclamation, helping to record the unwritten stories of the motley generation of communards and antinomians now passing, but is also intended as an offering to the coming generation who will find here, in the rubble of the twentieth century, a past they can use—indeed one they will need—in the passage from the privations of commodity capitalism to an ample life in common.

Weighing in at more than a pound and completely revised and updated, the ninth edition of this guide covers the whole range of weekend trip options in the Bay Area, from urban treks through San Francisco and Sacramento to kayaking in the Russian River and backpacking in Lassen Volcanic Park. Each destination includes information on what to do, where to stay, and where to eat. Helpful extras include the most direct driving route and stops along the way. A chapter is devoted to ski areas, with advice on the difficulty of slopes. An additional chapter covers family camps, houseboats, river and pack trips, and other adventures. Clear, current maps; a detailed index; and an appendix itemizing annual events by month and location are part of what makes this the most useful guide of its kind on the market.

La Gente traces the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento and the role of everyday people in galvanizing a collective to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s. In their efforts to be self-determined, la gente contested multiple forms of oppression at school, at work sites, and in their communities. Though diverse in their cultural and generational backgrounds, la gente were constantly negotiating acts of resistance, especially when their lives, the lives of their children, their livelihoods, or their households were at risk. Historian Lorena V. Márquez documents early community interventions to challenge the prevailing notions of desegregation by barrio residents, providing a look at one of the first cases of outright resistance to desegregation efforts by ethnic Mexicans. She also shares the story of workers in the Sacramento area who initiated and won the first legal victory against canneries for discriminating against brown and black workers and women, and demonstrates how the community crossed ethnic barriers when it established the first accredited Chicana/o and Native American community college in the nation. Márquez shows that the Chicana/o Movement was not solely limited to a handful of organizations or charismatic leaders. Rather, it encouraged those that were the most marginalized—the working poor, immigrants and/or the undocumented, and the undereducated—to fight for their rights on the premise that they too were contributing and deserving members of society.

This national bestseller chronicles one man’s 650–mile trek on foot from San Diego to San Francisco—sure to appeal to readers of naturalist works like Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Paul Thoreau’s On the Plain of Snakes, and Mark Kenyon’s That Wild Country. In 1769, an expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá sketched a route that would become, in part, the famous El Camino Real. It laid the foundation for the Golden State we know today, a place that remains as mythical and captivating as any in the world. Despite having grown up in California, Nick Neely realized how little he knew about its history. So he set off to learn it bodily, with just a backpack and a tent, trekking through stretches of California both lonely and urban. For twelve weeks, following the journal of expedition missionary Father Juan Crespí, Neely kept pace with the ghosts of the Portolá expedition—nearly 250 years later. Weaving natural and human history, Alta California relives Neely’s adventure, while telling a story of Native cultures and the Spanish missions that soon devastated them, and exploring the evolution of California and its landscape. The result is a collage of historical and contemporary California, of lyricism and pedestrian serendipity, and of the biggest issues facing California today—water, agriculture, oil and gas, immigration, and development—all of it one step at a time. “Rich in little–known history . . . Up the Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo county coasts, then inland into the Salinas Valley to Monterey Bay. Somewhere along here, the owl moons and woodpeckers do something you might not have thought possible in 2019: they make you fall, or refall, in love with California, ungrudgingly, wildfires and insane housing prices and all . . . What a journey, you think. What a state." —San Francisco Chronicle