Awesome Sierra Nevada Field Guide

Last Thursday, I did a book signing at Word After Word books in Truckee. While there, I found a beautiful field guide that I had to immediately buy. I'll explain below in a moment...

But first, we have a sizable bookshelf of field guides, three or four for each of several areas. But it seems that I'm always reaching for certain ones first.

My favorite bird guide is Birds of Northern California by Fix and Bezener. 

My favorite tree guide is Trees of North America by Brockman and Merrilees.

My favorite guide to bugs is the National Audubon Society field guide to North American Insects and Spiders.

The Peterson Guide is great for wildflowers.

Now comes a spectacular guide that, somehow, I hadn't seen before. The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada is a kind of all-in-one guide.

What's cool about this guide? First, it's got nearly everything in one book. Birds, trees, wildflowers, insects, animals, fungi, fish, reptiles, amphibians and other neat stuff like weather and astronomy information. It's well-indexed and has 2700 color illustrations. The author, John Muir Laws, is an accomplished artist, naturalist, journaler, and teacher with a lot of high-level education from places like UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, University of Montana, and the California Academy of Sciences.

The book is small enough to take on any hike. No longer will I go out into the mountains having left all of my book information behind because I can't carry four or five books.

Does it have everything? Of course not. It's just one book. But it has an amazing amount of useful information.

In addition, the Laws Field Guide has the kind of rich images and information that makes one want to spend evenings reading it.

The book has high-quality paper, printing, and binding. Nevertheless, I imagine I'll wear it out in the coming years.