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Hiking in the Sierra has been equal parts recreation and profession since I’ve been an adult. I’ve worked for the concessionaire in Yosemite Valley, surveyed lakes for rare amphibians, completed a PhD on alpine plants, and, over the past 15 years, written nine books on the Sierra Nevada. I continue to spend every summer obsessively exploring its trails, peaks, and remote lake basins, always excited to see a new view, find a rare flower, or simply see a favorite place in a new light. The rest of the year is spent writing—and reading what others have written, broadening my knowledge about my favorite place on Earth before I set out on the next summer’s adventures.
Every step in the Sierra leads you across landscapes shaped by a succession of geologic events—overwhelming to comprehend at times. I’ve read and reread this book because it describes not just what you see, but explains, in approachable language, the processes that led to the rocks you see. The book is comprised of as series of vignettes, each focused on a different rock outcrop, formed through a unique process at a particular moment in the Sierra’s geologic history.
Few places in the nation rival Yosemite National Park for vertigo-inducing cliffs, plunging waterfalls, and stunning panoramic views of granite peaks. Many of the features that visitors find most tantalizing about Yosemite have unique and compelling geologic stories�tales that continue to unfold today in vivid, often destructive ways. While visiting more than twenty-seven amazing sites, you�ll discover why many of Yosemite�s domes shed rock shells like onion layers, what happens when a volcano erupts under a glacial lake, and why rocks seem to be almost continually tumbling from the region�s cliffs. With a multitude of colorful photos and illustrations, and…
Hiking in the Sierra has been equal parts recreation and profession since I’ve been an adult. I’ve worked for the concessionaire in Yosemite Valley, surveyed lakes for rare amphibians, completed a PhD on alpine plants, and, over the past 15 years, written nine books on the Sierra Nevada. I continue to spend every summer obsessively exploring its trails, peaks, and remote lake basins, always excited to see a new view, find a rare flower, or simply see a favorite place in a new light. The rest of the year is spent writing—and reading what others have written, broadening my knowledge about my favorite place on Earth before I set out on the next summer’s adventures.
Daniel Arnold’s book describes his journey to climb 15 of the Sierra’s most prominent peaks by their first-ascent routes—and mostly using similar gear to the first-ascent party. As a Sierra mountaineer and backpacker, his writing immediately captivated me because he wove his adventure together with that of the first ascent party. His careful historical research drew me back in time, providing context for why each climber was pursuing the summit, their personalities and passions, and, importantly, how well (or poorly…) documented the Sierra’s topography was at the time of their explorations. My mind kept wandering into the past, imagining a time when I didn’t have ready access to detailed maps and thinking how different Sierra exploring once was.
“A splendid chronicle of early climbing in the Sierra Nevada.” —Royal Robbins
It’s 1873. Gore–Tex shells and aluminum climbing gear are a century away, but the high mountains still call to those with a spirit of adventure. Imagine the stone in your hands and thousands of feet of open air below you, with only a wool jacket to weather a storm and no rope to catch a fall.
Daniel Arnold did more than imagine—he spent three years retracing the steps of his climbing forefathers, and in Early Days in the Range of Light, he tells their riveting stories. From 1864…
Hiking in the Sierra has been equal parts recreation and profession since I’ve been an adult. I’ve worked for the concessionaire in Yosemite Valley, surveyed lakes for rare amphibians, completed a PhD on alpine plants, and, over the past 15 years, written nine books on the Sierra Nevada. I continue to spend every summer obsessively exploring its trails, peaks, and remote lake basins, always excited to see a new view, find a rare flower, or simply see a favorite place in a new light. The rest of the year is spent writing—and reading what others have written, broadening my knowledge about my favorite place on Earth before I set out on the next summer’s adventures.
Rachel Mazur was a wildlife biologist in Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks for many years. A core component of her job was “solving the bear problem”—generation upon generation of bears dependent on human food and ever more aggressive and crafty as they endeavored to satisfy this desire. Her story artfully weaves together the history of bear-human interactions in the Sierra, scientific research on bear habits and diets, and importantly sociology, especially people’s changing perception of acceptable wildlife management and visitors changing expectations of the attractions on offer in a national park. The book is skillfully written and thought-provoking, but also heartening as it ends with evidence that changing wildlife management and visitor actions mean bears are slowly becoming wilder again.
As majestic as they are powerful, and as timeless as they are current, bears continue to captivate. Speaking of Bears is not your average collection of stories. Rather, it is the history, compiled from interviews with more than 100 individuals, of how Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks, all in California's Sierra Nevada, created a human-bear problem so bad that there were eventually over 2,000 incidents in a single year. It then describes the pivotal moments during which park employees used trial and error, conducted research, invented devices, collaborated with other parks, and found funding to get the crisis…
Hiking in the Sierra has been equal parts recreation and profession since I’ve been an adult. I’ve worked for the concessionaire in Yosemite Valley, surveyed lakes for rare amphibians, completed a PhD on alpine plants, and, over the past 15 years, written nine books on the Sierra Nevada. I continue to spend every summer obsessively exploring its trails, peaks, and remote lake basins, always excited to see a new view, find a rare flower, or simply see a favorite place in a new light. The rest of the year is spent writing—and reading what others have written, broadening my knowledge about my favorite place on Earth before I set out on the next summer’s adventures.
The folklore of any region is defined by big personalities—people whose impact far outlasts their lifetime and whose name is almost always mentioned with reverence. As the decades pass and their accomplishments and life stories become more distant, it is essential to have books that remind us why they are worth memorializing. This book tells the story of two such Sierran giants, Pete Starr and Norman Clyde. Pete Starr, was a young, accomplished mountaineer when he vanished on a climbing trip in the Minarets, west of Mammoth Lakes. He already had a completed draft of the first comprehensive hiking guide to the Sierra. Norman Clyde probably claims the most first Sierran ascents to his name. When search parties failed to find Starr, only Clyde persisted, showing the true character of a man often remembered for refusing to abide by society's norms.
This riveting narrative details the mysterious disappearance of Peter Starr, a San Francisco attorney from a prominent family, who set off to climb alone in the rugged Minaret region of the Sierra Nevada in July 1933. Rigorous and thorough searches by some of the best climbers in the history of the range failed to locate him despite a number of promising clues. When all hope seemed gone and the last search party had left the Minarets, mountaineering legend Norman Clyde refused to give up. Climbing alone, he persevered in the face of failure, resolved that he would learn the fate…
I married my high school sweetheart and travel partner, and followed my own advice to do graduate work, and started my career working for the French National Railroad in New York City, mapping itineraries for travelers to Europe. Travel means the world to me, and if I don’t have a trip on the horizon, I feel aimless and untethered. I worked in book publishing for 30 years and dropped out of the corporate rat race to take a gap year abroad. I wrote about our “Senior year abroad” in my first book Gap Year Girl. I returned to the US to teach middle school French and organize student trips to France.
I read Almost Somewhere in just two sittings because I couldn’t wait to return to the trail.
I am a life-long hiker in her sixties and I couldn’t believe how much I identified with the self-doubt and misgivings of the twenty-something author on her journey. Roberts writes beautifully, and shares honest, raw reflections on almost every page and I felt every sore muscle, frustration, and joy.
The stunning descriptions of the trail give readers the sense that they’re there beside the author kicking up pebbles with her, but there is so much more to the story. The ups and downs and the surprises remind us that it’s not completing the trek that counts, it’s all that happens and changes us along the way.
Winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award in Outdoor Literature
Day One, and already she was lying in her journal. It was 1993, Suzanne Roberts had just finished college, and when her friend suggested they hike California's John Muir Trail, the adventure sounded like the perfect distraction from a difficult home life and thoughts about the future. But she never imagined that the twenty-eight-day hike would change her life. Part memoir, part nature writing, part travelogue, Almost Somewhere is Roberts's account of that hike.
John Muir had written of the Sierra Nevada as a "vast range of light," and…
I’m a travel writer, photographer, and lover of wilderness. I am the co-author of three travel guides about swimming: Places We Swim Australia, Places We Swim Sydney, and my new book, listed below. Together with my wife, we write about the connection between water, wilderness, and culture. I am fascinated with how people and nature interact and change one another. All of these books and authors on my list reveal how their experiences in nature have fuelled, anchored them, and inspired their craft.
I heard an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson on an Ezra Klein podcast while we were traveling in California, and I immediately bought this book.
I devoured it while we were exploring and writing about the Sierra Nevada. As the title suggests, Kim has had a lifelong love affair with the Sierras, and this book is filled with his deep knowledge of geology, geography, and personal adventures.
The joy, respect, and wonder are contagious. I love how he talks about the Sierras as a place that has anchored his life through many phases.
Kim Stanley Robinson first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains during the summer of 1973. He returned from that encounter a changed man, awed by a landscape that made him feel as if he were simultaneously strolling through an art museum and scrambling on a jungle gym like an energized child. He has returned to the mountains throughout his life-more than a hundred trips-and has gathered a vast store of knowledge about them. The High Sierra is his lavish celebration of this exceptional place and an exploration of what makes this span of mountains one of the most compelling places…
At some point I decided that if I was going to teach US history, I better have a good sense of what the place looked like. So I drove across the country—and then back again—and then again, and then once more, each time at a different latitude. I drove through North Dakota and South Dakota, Montana and Idaho, Nebraska and Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas, up and down California, Oregon and Washington, and on and on. I got addicted to seeing the landscape in all its amazing variety and vastness, and seeing the landscape made the histories come alive.
Surely the Gold Rush is one of the first things we learn about the West, but who were these people? Where did they come from? Susan Johnson is a great storyteller, and this story is peopled with men and women from across the globe, radicals and racists, Chinese, Mexicans, Germans, Irish, and everyone else, how they worked, loved, and made a life.
The world of the California Gold Rush that comes down to us through fiction and film is one of half-truths. In this brilliant work of social history, Susan Lee Johnson enters the well-worked diggings of Gold Rush history and strikes a rich lode.
Johnson explores the dynamic social world created by the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of Stockton, charting the surprising ways in which the conventions of identity-ethnic, national, and sexual-were reshaped. With a keen eye for character and story, she shows us how this peculiar world evolved over time, and how our cultural memory of…
Kim Heacox has written 15 books, five of them published by National Geographic. He has twice won the National Outdoor Book Award (for his memoir, The Only Kayak, and his novel, Jimmy Bluefeather), and twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for excellence in travel journalism. He’s featured on Ken Burns’ film, The National Parks, America's Best Idea, and he’s spoken about John Muir on Public Radio International’s Living on Earth. He lives in Gustavus, Alaska (next to Glacier Bay Nat’l Park), a small town of 500 people reachable only by boat or plane.
When Muir made his second great canoe trip in Alaska, in 1880, one of his canoe-mates, a Presbyterian missionary, brought along a little terrier named Stickeen. At first, Muir didn’t like the dog. But later, the two spent a cold, wet day exploring a massive glacier, and barely survived. Muir called it the greatest of his many adventure stories. The illustrations in this book are exaggerated, but stunning. You can almost feel the cold, and the elation man and dog feel at the end as they become fast friends.
First published as "An Adventure with a Dog and a Glacier" in 1897 in "The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine" and then expanded into a book and published in 1909, "Stickeen" by American naturalist John Muir is one of literature's most enduring dog stories. Based on a trip he took to Alaska in 1880 with a dog Stickeen and their trek out on a glacier, this short memoir is one of Muir's best-known publications whose enduring appeal has resulted in numerous adaptations and retellings. This thrilling and heart-warming tale follows Muir as he sets out to explore a glacier with the…
Kim Heacox has written 15 books, five of them published by National Geographic. He has twice won the National Outdoor Book Award (for his memoir, The Only Kayak, and his novel, Jimmy Bluefeather), and twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for excellence in travel journalism. He’s featured on Ken Burns’ film, The National Parks, America's Best Idea, and he’s spoken about John Muir on Public Radio International’s Living on Earth. He lives in Gustavus, Alaska (next to Glacier Bay Nat’l Park), a small town of 500 people reachable only by boat or plane.
It won the Pulitzer Prize in biography. Wolfe interviewed many people who knew Muir, and rendered an account that can never be repeated. This was the first book about Muir to explore not only his life as a naturalist and activist, but also his role as a son, father and husband, as well as an inventor, farmer and lobbyist. The text is buoyant and breezy.
Working closely with Muir's family and with his papers, Linnie Marsh Wolfe was able to create a full portrait of her subject, not only as America's firebrand conservationist and founder of the national park system, but also as husband, father, and friend. All readers who have admired Muir's ruggedly individualistic lifestyle, and those who wish a greater appreciation for the history of environmental preservation in America, will be enthralled and enlightened by this splendid biography.
Kim Heacox has written 15 books, five of them published by National Geographic. He has twice won the National Outdoor Book Award (for his memoir, The Only Kayak, and his novel, Jimmy Bluefeather), and twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for excellence in travel journalism. He’s featured on Ken Burns’ film, The National Parks, America's Best Idea, and he’s spoken about John Muir on Public Radio International’s Living on Earth. He lives in Gustavus, Alaska (next to Glacier Bay Nat’l Park), a small town of 500 people reachable only by boat or plane.
Born in Scotland and raised in Wisconsin, Muir had many profound childhood experiences that shaped his radicalism, including his ability to see America through a different lens that gave him impartiality but also compassion. In short, Muir’s ability to question everything, even our modern notions of progress and what makes us happy, stems from his childhood and early manhood, which this book explores in perfect detail.
As a founder of the Sierra Club and a promoter of the national parks, as a passionate nature writer and as a principle figure of the environmental movement, John Muir stands as a powerful symbol of connection with the natural world. But how did Muir's relationships with nature begin? In this book, Steven J. Holmes offers an interpretation of Muir's formative years, one that reveals the agony as well as the of his earliest experiences of nature. From his childhood in Scotland and Wisconsin through young adulthood in the Midwest and Canada, Muir struggled - often without success - to…
