Customer Reviews

Discovering the Geology of Baja California: Six Hikes on the Southern Gulf Coast

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is like a nice walk with a good friend who has a talent for telling great stories. You go along for the pleasantness of the walk, and find yourself transported right into the middle of the story. Here you are, some forty feet above the current level of the sea, standing on a shelf of land that contains the perfectly preserved remains of a coral reef. In another area, some 260 feet above sea level you come across a fossilized seabed jammed with the shells of thousands of oysters. Ancient shark teeth litter the ground on top of a 130-foot high mesa. Your friend walks on a few yards and, with infectious enthusiasm, reads the next chapter of the story to you.

Six hikes around the Punta Chivato area on Baja's Gulf coast introduce you to the fascinating story of Baja's geologic history. If you love Baja, love geology, or just love a nice hike, you'll LOVE this book!

We had great expectations for this book. After all, we were living on a cruising sailboat in the Sea of Cortez and we kept seeing all these great rock formations along the coast and wanted to learn more about them and how they had been formed. Unfortunately, this book didn't give us much insight. However, we couldn't find any other books that did any better, so I'm giving it 3 stars.

The book does NOT cover all Baja, but rather just the Punta Chivato area, between Santa Rosalia and Mulege on the east side of the peninsula. The hikes are virtually impossible to do, as a result of housing and other development right on the land described -- most of the landmarks have been obliterated and many of the geologic features have been destroyed (NOTE: we found this true when we were there in the summer of 2007, and there has been more development since then). However, it still is semi-interesting reading.

Interesting, informative, .............a delight. Yes, "Discovering the Geology of Baja California" is a pleasure and the guided tours that Markes takes one through, will in the end leave the reader with a renewed sense of wonder and appreciation for our planet. In my own case, even before I had gotten to making the actual pilgrimage to Punta Chivato, my eyes had been newly sensitized enough through the reading alone, that I was able to offer up a discovery of my own, which I more or less stumbled upon well south of Professor Johnson's "Living Museum"of Punta Chivato. I can't tell you what a thrill it has been for a novice like myself to help shed even a tiny bit more light on the solution of the geological puzzle of this fascinating penninsula! Since then, between pondering "my site" and actually walking through time at the awesomely beautiful Chivato, I realize that my life has, through exposure to this book, been fundamentally changed for the better. I wasn't looking for a new hobby but it will indeed be hard to shake this one. I therefore highly recommend this book to anyone who might be interested in the geology of Baja California and the associated birth of the Gulf of California. May it broaden your horizons as well.