Alumni Travel Reading: California National Parks

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, situated in California's Sierra Nevada, boast some of the most spectacular landscapes on the continent with giant sequoia trees, clear trout rivers, impressive peaks and alpine meadows, including Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the continental United States. This volume presents more than 80 hikes available in these parks, from day hikes to challenging backpacking trips; colorful photos and trail maps.

From his efforts to protect California's wild lands, including the state's majestic redwoods and its dynamic coastline, to his novel ideas about the educational and inspirational value of wilderness that continue to provoke debates to this day, this first biography of John C. Merriam (1869-1945) tells the story of the prominent paleontologist who became a visionary in the American conservation movement. From the Publisher.

AAnsel Adams first visited Yosemite in 1916, at the age of fourteen, and returned every year throughout his life. It was in Yosemite that he fell in love with Western wilderness and became a photographer. Roughly 150 images are reproduced in this large-format book.

Hetch Hetchy: Undoing a Great American Mistake examines the dam both as a feat of engineering and as a disastrous project that compromised the national park idea shortly after its inception. The book memorializes a the valley and the men and women who fought for its preservation.

From Yellowstone to the Great Smoky Mountains, America's national parks were created from public land for recreation and preservation near the turn of the last century. America has changed dramatically since then, and so has its conceptions of what parkland ought to be.

When Stanford Demars arrived at the Arch Rock entrance to Yosemite National Park in June 1968, he found something reminiscent of an urban amusement park rather than a pristine wilderness. Shocked at what seemed to be a misuse of a protected area, Demars considers the human role in preserving and creating wilderness areas.

Writer and former park ranger William Tweed goes to California's High Sierra to rethink the United States' national parks as they approach their 100th anniversary.