"This book details a remarkable example of the lived human history of a place and its intersection with the natural."
Environment, Space, Place
"This book serves both as a deep dive into how the Sierra Nevada range was formed (Jones is a geology professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder) and the montains' importance in American history (the Gold Rush, the perservation of Yellowstone and Yosemite, and more)."
Landscape Architecture Magazine
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Introduction
1 • An Asymmetric Barrier
2 • A Golden Trinity
3 • A Placer for Everyone
4 • Fossil Rivers, Modern Water
5 • Lode Gold
6 • “A Property of No Value”
7 • Granite, Guardian of Wilderness
8 • Big Trees, Big Battles
9 • Mountains Adrift
10 • What Lies Beneath
11 • Paradoxes and Proxy Wars
Notes
References
Illustration Sources
Index
“We look up to the Sierra mountains because they are big and they are magnificent. But, as this book makes entirely clear, we also look up to them because they are important—far more important than we might otherwise realize.”—William Deverell, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
“Rocks don’t lie, but we Homo sapiens haven’t quite grasped the full stories that mountains are silently telling us. The Mountains That Remade America redresses this, masterfully revealing human history in the Sierra as it intersects with geological history to show how these mountains create the world we live in now. Focusing on the Sierra Nevada Range, Craig Jones finds startling new ways to consider events like the Gold Rush and the protection of Yosemite. The book offers one revelation after another: compelling, deeply informative, new. This is essential reading that will change the way you look up at a peak and down at a valley.”—Mary Ellen Hannibal, author of Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction