The Place Names of New Mexico is an invaluable guide to the state's geography and history. It explains more than 7,000 names of features large and small throughout the state--towns, mountains, rivers, canyons, counties, post offices, and even abandoned settlements--as well as providing relevant information about location, history, and current status. The revised edition contains more than fifty expanded and updated entries. The accounts are also journeys into New Mexico's past, offering glimpses of the lives and values of the people who named the place. Humor, tragedy, mystery, and daily life--they can all be found in this book.

Many non-New Mexicans envision New Mexico as one large desert, yet New Mexico is very much a mountain state, with more than one hundred named mountain groups. New Mexico's highest point is 13,161-foot Wheeler Peak, and Sierra Blanca, 11,973 feet high, is snow capped for most of the year.

What's more, the mountains here display a diversity rarely seen elsewhere: glacier-carved alpine summits (Sangre de Cristos), shield volcanoes (Mount Taylor and Sierra Grande), cinder cones (Capulin Mountain), fossil limestone reefs (Guadalupes), laccolith intrusions (Capitan and Zuni Mountains), erosional formations (Tucumcari Mountain), and tilted fault-blocks (Sandias and Caballos.) New Mexico's mountain animals range from elk to desert bighorn sheep, from marmots to coatimundis. The arctic lynx and semitropical jaguars have also been spotted.

In this guide to New Mexico's mountains, Robert Julyan provides essential information such as location, physiographic province, elevation and relief, ecosystems, and ownership, as well as the historical and natural details that make each range unique: archaeology, Native American presence, mining history, ghost towns, recreation, and much more, as well as geology, ecology, and plants and animals.

The fictional High Plains village of Sweeney, New Mexico, population 856 and falling, is like so many small towns in rural America--once vibrant and alive but now a dry husk of obsolescence, decay, and despair. Only its few remaining citizens care that it not die like so many other towns, but when a handful of them concoct a plot to draw attention to their hometown, the result is a hilarious romp through the oddities and opportunities of small town life. Aliens, nudists, naked bull riders, Druids, phony Indians, and real Indians--all play a role in Sweeney's quixotic journey of survival and self-discovery.