This most complete guide to Northern California features sites from the Oregon border south to San Luis Obispo. Beautiful color photographs showcase the specimens that can be found at the sites described. Detailed text and maps make locating collecting areas easy.

Focusing on California rocks and minerals, this tabbed booklet features detailed photographs, organized by rocks/minerals and then by general appearance, to help readers quickly and easily identify the rocks and minerals they find.

Focusing on rocks and minerals of California, Oregon, and Washington's Pacific Coast, this tabbed booklet features detailed photographs, organized by rocks/minerals and then by general appearance, to help readers quickly and easily identify the rocks and minerals they find.

At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.

A complete guide and source-book brimming with advice on collecting and preparing gems and minerals .