First Edition

Reading for calm relaxing moments, a beautiful and poetic set of reflections on life in the eastern Sierra Nevada and Owens Valley more than a hundred years ago. ( )

En este clásico venerado sobre el desierto, Austin medita sobre las maravillas de estas tierras y captura tanto el paisaje, como la enorme variedad de vida animal y vegetal, o los pocos seres humanos que las habitan. ( )

Enjoyable read on the natural and cultural history or desert California. Writing style is definitely indicative of the time, and a bit stilted in parts. But easily overlooked for me due to the fascinating subject matter. ( )

If you can, choose to read the 1950 edition of The Land of Little Rain. It has 48 photographs taken by Ansel Adams.

California’s sparsely populated Owens Valley is the geographic heart of this volume, a place familiar to seekers of high-altitude trips in the eastern Sierra Nevada or access to the state’s northernmost desert lands. Mary Hunter Austin lived there during the late 19th and early 20th centuries but the valley she wrote about in 1903 isn’t the same as ours. After diversion of much of its water supply to Los Angeles it couldn’t be. This gives her book even more interest, and there’s plenty to enjoy and consider, in the valley or elsewhere, as she writes of Indians, long-time Mexican residents, miners, wildlife, and natural wonders all about.

Austin’s prose has a disposition:
“Somehow the rawness of the land favors the sense of personal relations to the supernatural…All this begets…a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an explanation that passes belief…it represents the courage to sheer off what is not worth while. Beyond that it endures without sniveling, renounces without self-pity, fears no death, rates itself not too great in the scheme of things; so do beasts, so did St. Jerome in the desert, so also in the elder day did gods. Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to gape and wonder at.”

And while she doesn’t strain after poetic effects, sometimes it can’t be helped: “If the fine vibrations which are the golden-violet glow of spring twilights were to tremble into sound, it would be just that mellow double note [of the burrowing owl] breaking along the blossom tops.” She must enjoy her thoughts too, to write this: “Very likely if he knew how hawk and crow dog him for dinners, he would resent it. But the badger is not very well contrived for looking up or far to either side.”

Each short chapter is an individual undertaking, aware of the others but its own self entire. One or more will be a favorite, and if you’re like me each will seem to have said something new, even if just in a passing observation. ( )