I just finished reading Miller's 2nd edition yesterday and am very pleased with it. I live in Oregon, am not a geologist or scientist, and have taken the 1st edition on many trips, and I expect to take the new edition on many more. It is superior in many ways to the 1978 1st edition (with no disrespect intended to Alt's and Hydmann's first venture into the roadside geology business). I also think it is one of the best written of the 15 or so Roadside Geology books I own.
She has used more modern names for the state regions and has slightly rearranged the order of presentation for the better. She has paid close attention to details, thousands of them. (I wonder what her notebooks look like.) Evidently, she has personally driven most if not all of the roads described in the book, and she seems to have taken most of the photographs herself. (She likes polarizers and deep blue skies!)
What does Miller do that makes her book so good? She seems to have tried to reach a broad range of readers, both those who already are familiar with geological concepts, explanations, and vocabulary, and those who are approaching a geology book for the first time. For example, geologists think of rock formations and accreted terranes the way that novelists and biographers think of people as characters: you've got to give them names and ages and a certain "personality". Then the writer has to refer to dozens of them, but not lose the reader, who may be picking up the book months after reading it the last time. In the 1st edition Alt & Hyndman solved the problem by avoiding formation names and just using descriptions of the rock types in them. Miller bravely uses the actual names of formations and adds succinct reminders most of the time of what the formation contains. It worked for me, and now terms like Siletzia, Columbia River Basalt Group, Tyee, and Clarno all make music for me. Her other science writing skills are very good.
She succeeds in making it much easier to actually locate a site while being a passenger and reading aloud the relevant passage to the driver. She often gives the mileage marker, a great benefit from the Oregon Dept. of Transportation. She often thinks to tell you where the point happens where you pass from one terrane and/or formation to another. She posts actual color photos of interesting sites and points out what to look for in the picture. The books are printed on heavy-weight glossy paper that reproduces color photos very richly and with a lot of detail.
The famous strip maps of the Roadside Geology series are enhanced in her hands. The glossy paper, use of color, and modern printing techniques permit her and the publisher to put much detail into the maps. They are very rich. The material is referenced both by the labels and pointers as well as text descriptions of what is on the roads. As other authors have done, she sometimes refers to a small town that is not on the map, but not too often.
She has included coverage of some minor roads that were not described in the first edition. Two examples are Oregon Rte. 205 branching from US 26 near Portland to Tillamook and OR 205 in the southeast Oregon basin and range region near Steens Mountain.
She includes the big geological stories of Oregon: examples are subduction earthquakes, the clockwise rotation of the coast mountains around a center in southern Washington, the effect of the Missoula ice-age floods on the Columbia River region, and the Basin and Range faulting. Little tidbits are included, too: the folding of the Oregon coast with low center (near Newport, if I recall correctly) and the making of the weird Oxbow on the Snake River and many more.
I think even readers from other states and countries may find this book well worth reading because Oregon has such complexity and Miller has described it so well.
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