This compelling new volume in the Time-Life Books American Wilderness series takes you on an incredible journey through a wild, unsettled region covering some 69,000 square miles of southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Geographers call it the Sonoran Desert. To ordinary people it is Cactus Country. Your guide is Edward Abbey, a former park ranger and self-proclaimed desert rat. With him you'll travel the length of this lonely, primitive and strangely beautiful land. You'll scale a sacred peak, explore abandoned silver mines, climb sand dunes and volcanic craters. You'll visit the Superstition Mountains, where touchy old prospectors still search for a legendary treasure of gold buried in a giant rockpile. You'll journey to the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument west of Tucson and the Papago Indian Reservation and the Kofa Mountains. You'll travel across the lava beds and volcanic field of the Pinacate region that the Mexicans call El Gran Desierto, the great desert. In your travels you'll see many of the more than 140 species of cactus that grow in the Sonoran Desert and learn the amazing ways they have reshaped themselves to fit their environment. Towering saguaros that grow to be 50 feet tall and live two hundred years. Cluster-branched organ pipes and hardy, homely prickly pears. Beautifully blossoming hedgehogs and columnar cardons. And you'll learn, too, about the other inhabitants of this desert garden. Olive-drab mesquite bushes, graceful paloverde trees, century plants that bloom only once and then die. You'll marvel at their ability to survive in the hostile wold of the Sonoran Desert. You'll be astounded at the richness and variety of the wildlife in Cactus Country. Coral snakes, Gila monsters, scorpions. Golden eagles, hawks, road runners, mountain lions, bighorn sheep and wolves. Jack rabbits and javelinas. In the mystery and solitude of the remote land - you'll discover you are never alone. All this and more awaits you in Cactus Country : 40,000 words of absorbing text accompanied by more than 100 photographs, drawings, maps and diagrams - a total of 95 pages in full color -- Book jacket.