Point Reyes Visions

''The most beautiful volume ever done [on Marin] is Point Reyes Visions.''

Photographer Richard Blair and writer Kathleen Goodwin share their passion for Point Reyes with photos and essays that capture the peninsula's landmarks, wildlife, people, and rugged spirit. With 237 color photographs and 21 duotones.

Only 30 miles from San Francisco, Point Reyes National Seashore attracts admirers year-round to its forests, wetlands, and beaches. Visitors come to this tranquil place to hike, camp, backpack, bike, kayak, horseback ride, picnic, fish, and nature-watch. This invaluable resource gives detailed information on the trails, roads, camps, and and beaches within the Seashore, plus surrounding parks and preserves. Point Reyes: The Complete Guide to the National Seashore & Surrounding Area has much more than coverage of all the popular recreational activities and hiking trails.

Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. Religion & Spirituality. Originally published in recurring dispatches for a small town newspaper, this collection of essays by noted California naturalist Richard Vacha reads like a delighted field journal, full of insights into the mystic, sensory, and nearly-forgotten world of animal tracking. Through a series of outings, Vacha traverses the prismatic experience of tracking and brings it to our level. Practical investigations of signs and tracks draw close to the lives of all the animals in his landscape, including bobcats, badgers, skunks, coyotes, and one particular vulture. With spontaneous energy, Vacha's essays reveal the practice of asking sacred questions, and the process of stripping down to your senses in order to enter this primal awareness.

Visions of Nature revives the work of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums, projected in theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both the American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate “nature” with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a new comparative frame.