California Coast Trails: A Horseback Ride From Mexico to Oregon

Item Details

Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin, 1913

8vo. xix, 326 pp. Illustrated with 16 photographs taken by the author; index. Gilt decorated front cover and lettered spine; uncommon publisher's illustrated dust jacket. Minor wear to extremities; smudging to front cover; slight fading to spine; previous owner name; short moisture line inside rear cover; shelf wear; a very good copy in near fine dustjacket (minor wear to extremities; "$2.25 stamped over the printed price of $2.00 on spine).

The second title in the author's "trilogy of trails" books celebrating the state's wild landscapes through his horseback journeys. J. Smeaton Chase was an Englishman, a scholarly amateur naturalist and adventurer who, in 1911, embarked on a journey that anyone who loves the wildlands of California would envy: A paseo, on horseback, along the California coast from Mexico to Oregon. Here is the record of his travels, liberally sprinkled with poetic evocations of the beauty of the land, wry affectionate accounts of encounters with people along the way, and apposite quotations from Keats. The high point of the book - as it was the high point of his paseo for Chase himself - is the Santa Lucia Mountains and the Big Sur Country. Even though Chase saw it as we never can, before the highway, when the land was still dotted with isolated ranches accessible only by trail, before tourism, exclusive resorts and the advent of the weekend backpacker had made their numerous marks on the land and on the spirit of the place - even with all these changes, those who travel the backcountry can still see this truly magical place much as Chase saw it. (The Double-cone Quarterly)