My adopted home state's entry in the popular Roadside Geology series. Now seemed like a good time to read this, as I spent the weekend doing a little New Mexico road tripping (down to the very geologically interesting White Sands National Park).

This book has an extremely difficult balancing act to pull off – or, really, several of them at once. It's trying to be completely accessible to people with no knowledge of geology at all, while still appealing to those with an amateur interest. It's trying to provide a sense of the general geology of the state while mostly limiting itself to features visible from the highways and discernible at highway speeds. And it has to discuss long and sometimes diverse stretches of highway in just a few pages.

Unsurprisingly, it doesn't succeed perfectly at all of this. There was a moment or two when my geologically ignorant self was a little confused by some bit of terminology that no doubt seemed extremely obvious to the author (enough so that it didn't even appear in the glossary). In some places, I found the text a bit boring or repetitive, and in others I found it interesting enough that I was frustrated that there wasn't more on a particular topic or place.

But, overall, it does pretty much what it's aiming to do: pointing out the features of the landscape that you might pass by in your car and telling you a little bit about what they're made of, how old they are, and how they formed. And it was very, very cool for me to have even a few paragraphs telling me about the place where I live and the mountain I can see outside my living room window.

It also enlightened me about some fascinating aspects of New Mexico geography as a whole. I knew there had been volcanism here – there are places where that's extremely obvious – but I had no idea it was so extensive, or that some of it was so recent. I also didn't realize that I was living on top of a rift in the continent, where the Earth's crust is trying to pull itself apart in a way that might one day result in the entire Rio Grande valley becoming an inlet for the sea. Honestly, I think this book would probably be worthwhile for me just for illuminating me about that.

One word of caution, though: this was originally published in 1987, and I've spotted a few places where I know it's out of date, e.g. a massively low underestimate for the age of the universe in the introductory chapter, and a now-resolved uncertainly about what it was that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. No doubt there are more examples that I'm unaware of, both in the science and the details of the human landscape. But at least we can be pretty confident the geology itself has changed very little in the intervening years. ( )

Great book to have on a driving vacation through New Mexico. I think the content was appropriate for a wide audience of people interested in geology, regardless of their technical background. ( )

This is just the book I've wanted. Road by road, the author describes and labels the geology of the state visible from the highways. We purchased it in Albuquerque, and I read it aloud all the way home. I primarily purchased it because I am interested in geology, but I found that naming mountains, pointing out different types of formations and rocks as we drove kept the children occupied. Excellent and helpful diagrams, maps, and glossary.