Customer Reviews (3)

Great bunch of maps in one simple book
I keep this in my car at all times. It encompasses a state-wide map, along with city & street maps for every major city (and not so major cities) in California. I was always forgetting to bring my fold-out maps when I would travel, and now I don't have to. So, instead of needing 50 fold out maps, everything is in one simple book.

This is a must-have for anybody who enjoys a quick road trip or a real vacation.

All of CA is right here for you to find and experience....
I too, bought my 1st copy of this map book at Costco, now I am purchasing more as gifts. To anyone who loves and/or lives in California, this is a must have. Want to get out and have no idea where to go? Know where you need to go, but don't quite know how to get there? It is all in here and then some....Gather up your California road map/atlas, get in your car and let your inner child out to play. It lists campgrounds, State Parks and little known places just begging for you to enjoy. California is a place for all types to recharge their batteries and this is the perfect book to help you find the places that can do just that! You just can't get this detailed of info. in any fold out map.....

Format is too small
I bought this atlas at Costco and ended up returning it. Since the page size is only 8 1/2 by 11, it is next to impossible to see enough detail to be useful. You would be better collecting a half dozen fold-out regional California maps. The city maps are somewhat better, but still small. ... Read more

Product Description
The fascinating process by which the Great Basin evolved from terra incognita to recognized region through art as well as science. The Great Basin was the last region of continental North America to be explored and mapped, and it remained largely a mystery to European-Americans until well into the nineteenth century. In Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin, geographer-historian Richard Francaviglia shows how the Great Basin’s gradual emergence from its "large cartographic silence" both paralleled the development of the sciences of surveying, geology, hydrology, and cartography, and reflected the changing geopolitical aspirations of the European colonial powers and the United States.

Francaviglia’s compelling, wide-ranging discussion combines an explanation of the physical realities of the Great Basin with a cogent examination of the ways humans, from early Native Americans to nineteenth-century surveyors to twentieth-century highway and air travelers, have understood, defined, and organized this space, psychologically and through the medium of maps. This book explores the relationship between mapmakers from various cultures and nations—Spain, Mexico, France, England and the Americas—and shows how their maps of the Great Basin reflected attitudes and beliefs about what lay in the interior American West. These maps run the gamut, from the manuscript maps of early explorers to printed maps used to promote rail and air travel across the Great Basin, as well as satellite and computer-derived maps of the very recent past.

This rich interdisciplinary account of the mapping of the Great Basin combines a chronicle of the exploration of the region with a history of the art and science of cartography and of the political, economic, and social contexts in which maps are created. The result is an impressive contribution to the canon of American Western history and of the evolution and multifarious functions of maps, ancient and modern. Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin will be irresistible to historians, geographers, lovers of maps, and anyone who thrills to the exploits of early Western explorers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Spirit and Legend Dispelled by Mapping and Explorations
This is not just a recounting of the exploration of the Great Basin, the vast territory between the Sierras and the Colorado and Arizona Rockies but a major review of the major periods of time when the Basin and Range province, as geologists term it, was one of the most deadly barriers to westward migration from the states. And the popular attitude toward it and how it changed from a land of drought and death to the tourist lands of today.
The Old Spanish Trail wended its way to California through the Sonoran Desert to the south, but Spanish settlement never got further north than the Tucson area. Far to the north both the Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe trail started in Missouri and crossed the formidable Great Plains; the latter in the days after the Louisiana Purchase passed into Nuevo Mexico from Colorado.
Except for the raiding Comanches of the Grat Plains and further west, the mighty Navajo nation, there was little Indian settlement to bar western travel; the tribes along the Gila and in southern California were not a horse culture and were known as digger Indians for the primitive sticks they used to plant corn.
After the railroads met at Ogden, Utah, safe cross travel across the Great Basin was finally possible, and the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific went through to the south.
Except for the Mormons and their far flung State of Deseret, there was litle traffic except catty-corner to San Diego.
The major emphasis was not on setllement until the fabulously rich mining cities, such as Virginia City, led to development from the Sierra Nevada side. Entry from the SE was blocked by the Rio Grande box, the Grand Canyon, and the scenic canyon lands. And Death Valley is still as isolated as it ever was away fro the railway.
After the mining settled down, the Santa Fe built a branch line to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and a hotel; the Union Pacific through Ogden began to run tourist trains and built resorts.
In the mid 19th century there were several major scientific mapping expeditions covering portions of the area at 1;250,000 scale (approximately 1/4 inch to a mile). The responsibility for mapping the Trans Pecos was regularized by the establishment of the United States Geological Survey in the 1870s. As mechanized mining has developed, the vast hordes of hard rock miners have long since moved on and the population of the California-Nevada area has depleted in favor of resorts like Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas.
The Four Corners area has the huge coal burning Navajo power plant supplying Arizona and southrn Calfornia. So as long as the power holds out and air conditioning is availabl parts of the Basin will thrive. And tourist will come to view the deserts.
Sixty years plus ago John ford filmed many epics in Monument Valley. Arizona and new Mexico have active film commissions so the public perception is changing once more.
One modern problem is the fractured land management; the transcontinental railroads were paid with every alternate section of land north and south of their route. The US Forest Service, the National Park Service,combined with the Bureau of Land Management holdings, put most of Nevada and Utah under federal control, so there is little private land left.
The entire Great Basin includes most of western Utah, most of Nevada, NW Arizona and southern Idaho and chunks of the surrounding states so that there are few maps of any useful scale showing the whole province.
The various geologic maps are good examples of the "State Line Faults" so notorious among earth scientists. This occurs, when mapping geology, the surveys began in the interior and spread out to the state lines, where the stratigraphy seldom matches. Today USGS is producing uniform coverage of the whole US.
Nowadays one flies transcontinentally either through Albuquerque or Denver, and the Great Basin is known as "redeye" or "flyover country".
... Read more