California
by Art Wolfe (Photographer), Peter Jensen
 

Amazon.com California Book Section

California Books
 

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Book Description 

This is a California that is familiar—Yosemite, Marin, the Owens Valley—and yet remarkably new. Internationally acclaimed nature and landscape photographer Art Wolfe has taken pictures on every continent, often traveling to the most remote locations in search of perfect light on unique landforms. The exquisite range of California’s landscape has long inspired Wolfe, and this book brings together his best pictures in a celebration of the golden coast, rich forests, elemental mountains, lush valleys, and colorful desert. Wolfe offers a personal landscape in his images of place, and the result is California as it has not been seen before. 

From the Inside Flap 
Internationally acclaimed nature and wildlife photographer Art Wolfe has long had a love affair with California. Along its wild coastline, he finds iconic vistas and light playing upon water in ways that crystallize the very idea of the West Coast. 

Heading inland, he is drawn to the dense lushness of ancient forests, the bracing environs of an alpine lake in the Sierra Nevada, and the particular abundance of plant and animal life found only in the desert. Seeking the natural world in the great Central Valley, Art Wolfe captures stands of ancient oaks, wildflower carpets, and migratory bird populations. 

The natural bounty of California is a gift of diverse treasures. Mountain landscapes of ice and rock give way to cloistered old-growth forests. A commanding scene of cliff and sand and breaking waves is also, upon closer inspection, the location of highly intricate stone carvings. And the light on sand forms in Death Valley exposes nature's most sensual shapes. Art Wolfe brings a painter's eye to photography, and so his eye is as apt to focus on light and pattern as it does on grand scenery and wildlife. 

This is a California that is familiar -- Yosemite, Marin, the Owens Valley -- and yet remarkably new. Art Wolfe offers a personal landscape in his images of place. The result is California as it has not been seen before. 

About the Author 
Art Wolfe is one of the most celebrated wildlife and nature photographers in the world today. Based in Seattle, he travels the globe year-round collecting images for book projects and shooting assignments. He has spent many years hiking, exploring, and photographing California. He is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which are COLORADO, ALASKA, PACIFIC NORTHWEST, and THE LIVING WILD. 

Peter Jensen is a journalist and editor who has covered travel and nature topics in California and throughout the West for over 30 years. He is based in Del Mar, California. 

Excerpted from California by Art Wolfe, Peter Jensen. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 
I can remember to this day the first time I ever traveled to California. During winter break in 1969, some friends and I racked up many road miles doing the "Grand Tour" of the state. Having never been there, I had the stereotypical preconceptions of what California would be like, gleaned from television and magazines, which were the only sources of knowledge I had of the state. So of course, I knew all about Disneyland and its faux Matterhorn; I knew that Hollywood was there, and that the Golden Gate Bridge was in San Francisco, and that San Francisco was a beautiful city situated on hills very similar to my hometown of Seattle. And of course, the sun shone all the time. 

We took fabled Highway 1 down the Washington and Oregon coasts and into California through the Klamath Mountains. My first impressions came from driving through Crescent City and coming to the groves of redwoods in Redwood National Park. It was there that I experienced my first true taste of what natural California had to offer. I had never seen any living thing of that magnitude in my life. The redwoods were so tall that their 350-foot-high crowns were lost in a midwinter mantle of fog, and their massive trunks dwarfed everything in their midst. 

The farther we ventured into the state, the more my naive perceptions were changed. Where was the immense population and choking smog? I found instead a stunning coastline intersected by ridges and valleys, and a pastoral beauty that was largely untrammeled and thankfully undiscovered by the casual tourist. We made our way to San Francisco where we stayed a few days enjoying the sights and scenes of that great city. Then we continued on to Big Sur and once again the raw beauty of the coastline profoundly affected me. I remember to this day sitting on a small deck outside a cabin on the Central Coast, smelling the honeysuckle vines a-buzz with hummingbirds and hearing news reports that Seattle was experiencing a snow storm. Later in the day, at an al fresco cafe, we looked several hundred feet down a cliff and watch sea otters frolicking in the kelp beds. 

We made it as far south as San Diego, turned east, and set off into the desert. What an experience the arid and elemental landscape of Death Valley was for someone fresh out of the mossy Pacific Northwest. The December nights were unexpectedly cold, but during the day it warmed up to a pleasant seventy-five degrees. Following the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada through Owens Valley and past monumental, yet ecologically devastated, Mono Lake -- deprived of water by the Los Angeles Aqueduct -- we skirted Lake Tahoe and dropped over to the west side once again. We ended up in Yosemite, with its great granite walls etched in snow and the smell of juniper smoke wafting through the valley. The scene is still fresh in my mind thirty years later. 

Since my first Grand Tour of Calfornia, I have returned countless times. It is a landscape photographer's dream, full of amazing geological diversity, and I cannot think of any state in the entire country that offers so many different experiences. If California were a state on the East Coast, it would stretch from Maine to Georgia. Truly unique is Death Valley, with its blistering heat and sub-sea level elevation -- at -282 feet, and lowest in the United States. There is the tilted granite block of the High Sierra, with its alpine tarns and meadows, and home to Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the Lower 48. The snow-capped volcanoes of Shasta and Lassen, located in the southern reaches of the Cascade Range, clearly rival the beauty and power of Washington's icon, Mount Rainier. A sea in primordial times and now productive farmland, the great Central Valley has field of flowers near Lancaster and Bakersfield that are unparalleled in sheer size and color. The rugged coastline, made up of five mountain ranges, is every bit as wild and untamed as you would find elsewhere in the United States, and the North Coast redwood forests simply tower over the cedar and spruce forests of the Pacific Northwest. 

With nearly 35 million residents and the fifth or sixth most powerful economy in the world, California must confront the major challenge of how to protect its environment from encroachment and overuse. The conflict between economic prosperity and environmental health has been an issue since the days of the Gold Rush in 1849. In the face of overnight development and environmental exploitation, the Sierra Club was founded in 1892, with John Muir as its first president. In the century since, it has evolved into one of the most effective environmental lobbies in the United States. In the last century, various commissions have been set up to protect California's 1,264-mile coast and to save San Francisco Bay from the leeching poisons of landfills. How to protect its multiplicity of delicate environments and ecosystems as well as its multiplicity of human cultures is indeed a huge challenge for California in the twenty-first century. Because of its status as a bellwether state, California's policies, successes, and failures will affect us all. 
-- Art Wolfe, from the Introduction to CALIFORNIA 
 
 
 

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