Customer Reviews

Rockhounding the Wiley's Well District of California: The GPS User's Guide

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

 

 

Book is well written and GPS data is accurate. My husband and I had fun searching for rocks last April, weather was good, remember to fill your gas tank and bring water. This book was so well written that it was easy to follow the dirt track roads to find the target areas.

We were very pleased with this book. It provides very good information on locations. We used it in conjunction with National Geographic Topo software maps, and that was very useful, however the book would still have been very helpful without the topo maps. Without this book, we would not have found the quantity and quality of geodes and other rocks that we found.

This seems to be a very good book.
We went to Wiley Welds back in the 70's and it is almost imposible to find the areas we went to without GPS.
This is a large area of BLM land and a rockhounds haven for many wonderful rocks.
We found a geode with Amethyst in it back in the 70's, the area has been visited by many since that time but there are still gem's there if you want to work for them.

This was one of several books I purchased for rockhounding the area this past January 2010 vacation. Reading the history on some of the sites I visited in the book gave me the feeling of a guided tour and gave me a better indication into where and what to look for. GPS locations, I found to be right on the money, and although my GPS is not portable outside the vehicle, the directions and instructions provided were sufficient along with my compass to find the collecting areas away from where I had to park and walk. I found directions, driving conditions, warnings, and notes very accurate, and could see that Mr. Ross has put a lot of forethought into attaining, compiling, and presenting information to make those of us who use his book, "Happy Rockhounds." I can't wait until next year's vacation to visit more of the sites in the book.

If possible, I would RATE THIS ITEM 3.25 STARS

What a disappointment. This book, "Rockhounding the Wiley's Well District of California" though laden with valuable GPS coordinates and some good practices to exercise when in the dessert is without a single map and has a person navigating in an unnatural manner. I'm not at all interested in the author's limited justification on page 1 for taking such direction, no pun intended, but as far as I see it, the author's motivation is little more than a half baked excuse for being incomplete and lazy.

To even vaguely rest all of one's laurels on satellite navigation technology is foolish. I guess the author feels it's a bad thing to incorporate a little extra visual aid to assist the reader. A sort of backup to the GPS coordinates and to provide some sort of visual context for the reader. That way the reader can better picture in one's mind, where they are heading and the lay of the road in route. Better yet, the author could take a cue from James Mitchell and his series of books called "Gem Tails of ...". A question to the author, what do you do on days of high solar activity and the birds over head cease to function properly for several hours or days? What do you do when the batteries in the GPS fail?

None the less, after page 1, the author on pages 9, 91, 103, 134, 192 and 208, waste up to half a page each to show the reader photos of highly limited value. On page 9 we are treated with a photo of the author looking down at the old Wiley well nearly 20 years ago, on 91 a photo of a camp ground sign, on 103 a dessert parking lot, a wild donkey on 134, on 192 a rusting van and on 208 a hwy and dirt road intersection along with two vehicles in the background. Personally, I think the spaces could have been better served in some other way. Perhaps a color photo of a rock or map would have been more useful.

The heading of the text is "Rockhounding the Wiley's Well..." and yet there are only 47 photos of rocks in the book and of them 11 are of geodes, all of them black and white. Since the color of a rock is an important physical property of the rock, I would have expected there to have been at least a few sample photos in color. Throughout the text, the author list various types of rocks (i.e. page 98) and minerals one might expect to find in a given area, but not a single list in the book is accompanied with a photo of collected samples. A sort of group photo per say that conveys to the reader the types, general quality and collection sizes for the area. After all, this is supposed to be a book on rock hounding and not just how to get to a destination in the dessert, or this book should be grouped with orienteering.

Over all, I get the impression that this book, "Rockhounding the Wiley's Well District of California" is little more than a collection of self serving notes and dusty old photos collected on the desk from over the years. That's also my guess as to why the book is void of much material that other readers might find helpful and useful. But like I shared at the beginning of the review, this book is incomplete unless you are of course the author. In general, the quality of the paper used is poor. The pages are very yellow from day one. The book new is not worth a penny more than the $15.39 I paid.

Minus 1.00 for not having any supplemental visual aids to accompany the GPS coordinates.
Minus 0.50 for using low quality black and white photos.
Minus 0.25 for using poor quality paper.