Spanish Peaks Library District

The men on board HMS Terror have every expectation of triumph. As part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage, they are as scientifically supported an enterprise as has ever set forth. As they enter a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, though, they are stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, with diminishing rations,...

Have you experienced repeated droughts, and either bans on, or stringent scheduling of, landscape watering? Have your water bills gone through the roof during summertime watering? Are you battling a constantly browning lawn? Do you want to have a beautiful, quality landscape? If any of this rings true, then Xeriscape Gardening will be your gardening bible. Endorsed by the National Xeriscape Council, this comprehensive primer thoroughly explains the...

"America's northern border is the world's longest international boundary, yet it remains obscure even to Americans. The northern border was America's primary border for centuries--much of the early history of the United States took place there--and to the tens of millions who live and work near the line, the region even has its own name: the northland. Travel writer Porter Fox spent three years exploring 4,000 miles of the border between Maine and...

"Kayla Shaw is a private banker in Arizona - smart and capable but underpaid and underappreciated. Rand McCree is a haunted man who paints landscapes in the Pacific Northwest, burning with a need for answers about the terrible event that shattered his world. They are two strangers with nothing in common ... until their lives entwine - and explode." "On what at first appears to be an ordinary day, everything changes for Kayla, as she barely escapes...

"Alaska looms as a mythical, savage place, part nature preserve, part theme park, too vast to understand fully. Which is why C.B. Bernard lashed his canoe to his truck and traded the comforts of the Lower 48 for a remote island and a career as a reporter. It turned out that a distant relation had made the same trek northwest a century earlier. Captain Joe Bernard spent decades in Alaska, amassing the largest single collection of Native artifacts...

Following a family tragedy, a battle for survival, and a test of faith Marie Dorion begins again in the rugged northwest landscape known as the Okanogan settlement. By 1814, the Astor expedition she had joined to cross the Rocky Mountains has disintegtrated.

In this penetrating study, Alston Chase invites us to examine our basic assumptions about the environment - about the way we manage and protect resources, about the rights of animals and their habitat and the rights of human beings. What is the "balance of nature"? Is ecology a science or a philosophy? What is an ecosystem? Though the saga of the old-growth forests includes plenty of outright bad behavior, the reader will find surprisingly few villains:...

Effects of roads in forested ecosystems span direct physical and ecological ones (such as geomorphic and hydrologic effects), indirect and landscape level ones (such as effects on aquatic habitat, terrestrial vertebrates, and biodiversity conservation), and socioeconomic ones (such as passive-use value, economic effects on development and range management). Road effects take place in the contexts of environmental settings, their history, and the state...

On a late August day in the foothills of the Cascades, five bicyclists climb into the hot, dry air, the breeze of their movement cooling their overheated bodies, the stress of a workweek slipstreaming behind them. But another group has entered the park, too. They're in cars, for pleasure and for vengeance. In Emerson's gripping new novel, a grudge turns an idyllic setting into a terrifying landscape of men and nature at their most dangerous.

The majestic beauty of Grand Teton National Park has moved people throughout time. Native Americans believed in the spiritual power of the towering mountain peaks and journeyed there to gain special powers. Early fur traders, who had just crossed less ominous mountain ranges, viewed with trepidation the massive obstacle that loomed before them on their passage to the Pacific Northwest. In others, the Tetons ignited vision and passion -- a vision to...