Andrea Lankford’s account of the search for three hikers missing from the Pacific Crest Trail fascinated me. I learned that hikers often take on that trail not only for the physical challenge but also as a personal quest to find new meaning in life or a new way of living.
With this mindset, missing PCT hikers may have not only suffered accidents or attacks but may have also gone off the trail with new friends or even joined a cult-like organization that runs inviting rest stops along the southern part of the trail. The searchers gave an astounding amount of their time, money, and even their health in the quest to find the missing.
This book was especially fascinating as I am an avid hiker, and I frequently see notifications of missing hikers on trails. I am also a retired private investigator who has searched for missing people, and I’m…
** AN AMAZON "BEST BOOKS OF THE MONTH" FOR AUGUST 2023 (Biographies & Memoirs) **
From an award-winning former law enforcement park ranger and investigator, this female-driven true crime adventure follows the author’s quest to find missing hikers along the Pacific Crest Trail by pairing up with an eclectic group of unlikely allies.
As a park ranger with the National Park Service's law enforcement team, Andrea Lankford led search and rescue missions in some of the most beautiful (and dangerous) landscapes across America, from Yosemite to the Grand Canyon. But though she…
I worked for 25 years as a wilderness guide and outdoor educator on the Colorado Plateau and in Alaska, and the Grand Canyon is my favorite national park and one of my two favorite places on earth (the other being Alaska’s Brooks Range). My background in cultural anthropology has given me a deeper appreciation of what it took for indigenous peoples to make a living inside the canyon. And it’s a humbling perspective indeed. When I lived in Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon was my “backyard” weekend wilderness. I’m still drawn there and visit at least once a year, even while living up north.
Even the most perfect pictures simply cannot do the canyon justice—none of mine ever have. But the photographic montages of Klett and Wolfe come close; fusing historical shots with contemporary ones they took at the same location, from the same angle, they manage to show what impresses me most in the grand gorge: its timelessness, how little the geology and even the vegetation changes over decades.
This really puts human life into perspective. The images in this coffee table book for the discerning are daring, whimsical, playful, and experimental, all of which are qualities that the best guides and canyoneers display.
Using landscape photography to reflect on broader notions of culture, the passage of time, and the construction of perception, photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe spent five years exploring the Grand Canyon for their most recent project, "Reconstructing the View". The team's landscape photographs are based on the practice of rephotography, in which they identify sites of historic photographs and make new photographs of those precise locations. Klett and Wolfe referenced a wealth of images of the canyon, ranging from historical photographs and drawings by William Bell and William Henry Holmes, to well-known artworks by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams,…
I didn’t really take up hiking until I was in my 30s, but outdoor adventures have become a way of life. I love walking along a trail, marveling at my surroundings and wondering what new delight I’ll discover around the next bend or over the next hill. Upon turning 70, I tackled my most challenging walk yet – trekking over 250 miles along the spectacular South West Coast Path in Cornwall, England. I found the immersion in focusing solely on walking each day to be both meditative and uplifting. The books on this list reflect my love for the outdoors, with some inspiring me to try something new, while others I prefer to experience vicariously.
I guarantee this amazing history of Butchart will leave you in awe, especially if you have explored a bit of the Grand Canyon as I have or have dreamed of doing so.
Butchart tackled an astonishing number of remote and extreme formations in this remarkable place. Very well-written and meticulously researched.
Winner of a 2008 National Outdoor Book Award, a 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY), and named a Book of the Year by the Pima County Library, "Grand Obsession" continues to gather recognition for its striking portrayal of a man who felt compelled to do what no one had dared attempt in modern times: explore the deepest, most inhospitable reaches of the Grand Canyon, crown jewel of America's national parks - something which took decades to achieve and exacted a great personal cost.
Writers Elias Butler and Thomas M. Myers (co-author of the book "Over the Edge: Death in Grand…
I worked for 25 years as a wilderness guide and outdoor educator on the Colorado Plateau and in Alaska, and the Grand Canyon is my favorite national park and one of my two favorite places on earth (the other being Alaska’s Brooks Range). My background in cultural anthropology has given me a deeper appreciation of what it took for indigenous peoples to make a living inside the canyon. And it’s a humbling perspective indeed. When I lived in Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon was my “backyard” weekend wilderness. I’m still drawn there and visit at least once a year, even while living up north.
I love a writer who is willing to put his life at risk to solve a mystery. And I love history and biography. The mystery? What happened to Glen and Bessie Hyde, a young couple who vanished on their honeymoon while trying to run the length of the canyon in 1928 in a scow—a boat that looked like a water trough.
Dimock, a Grand Canyon guide and builder of wooden dories, researched this type of craft and, together with his wife, braved the rapids because he thought this would provide clues about the disappearance. Having rowed unwieldy baggage boats in the canyon myself, I emphasized with their plight, and the story of the honeymooners is one guides often tell the clients sitting in camp chairs in the after-dinner circle.
I grew up in Colorado and visited national parks all over the country on summer vacations with my family. Now I write about U.S. Western history while living outside Boston, Massachusetts. My most recent book, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020) was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History. I have written about the Civil War and the U.S. West for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, and Civil War Monitor. Scribner will publish my next book, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, on March 1, 2022.
Indigenous communities and land dispossession are the subjects of Crimes Against Nature, although Jacoby also brings white transgressors of federal policy into his book about the dark history of the American conservation movement. The rural communities he describes engaged in survival practices that quickly became defined and punished as crimes: hunting, fishing, tree-cutting, and foraging. Jacoby includes eastern parks in his assessment, writing about the Adirondacks before turning to Yellowstone and Grand Canyon. At the heart of this beautifully written book is the tension between what constitutes private and public space in American history, and how rural white and Indigenous Americans have often lived in the borderlands between them.
Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on conservation's impact on local inhabitants, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting, fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in the newly created parks. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these "crimes" and provides a rich portrait of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
As a child growing up in the Pacific Northwest, my pockets were often full of rocks. Rocks are beautiful and soothing to hold. They are ubiquitous treasures, available to all. But even more than this, rocks are portals to the past—to a time before humans, before animals, before plants, before microbes. I am endlessly fascinated by the stories rocks tell and by the secrets they share with us through their form and structure. I still collect rocks, and now I also write picture books about science and nature for children. The books on this list are all wonder-filled. I hope you enjoy them!
I’m obsessed with time—how to define it, the way it reshapes all things, the sheer immensity of it. Rocks are our only link to Earth’s deep past, and we rely on the stories rocks tell to understand our planet’s history.
This nonfiction picture book offers a detailed introduction to the geology and ecology of one of Earth’s great natural wonders, showcasing the Grand Canyon’s distinct ecological communities and explaining its formation.
As a parent and child hike the canyon, we explore it alongside them, and through momentary leaps back in time, we see how the landscape and its inhabitants have changed over the course of more than 1 billion years.
Rivers wind through earth, cutting down and eroding the soil for millions of years, creating a cavity in the ground 277 miles long, 18 miles wide and more an a mile deep known as the Grand Canyon.
Home to an astonishing variety of plants and animals that have lived and evolved within its walls for millennia, the Grand Canyon is much more than just a hole in the ground. Follow a father and daughter as they make their way through the cavernous wonder, discovering life both present and past.
Weave in and out of time as perfectly placed die cuts…
I’ve read several books about the Powell expedition down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon, and this is my favorite. Dolnick brings in the journal writings (mercifully without the poor spelling that they must contain) of other members of the expedition, and this gives a more nuanced account of the events than just reading Powell’s after-the-fact narrative from his own sparse notes. Lots of grumbling going on. A lot of these journal quotes sound like vintage Mark Twain, e.g., “We broke many oars and most of the Ten Commandments.” Dolnick’s discussions of the geology are good, and he doesn’t pad the book with extensive repetition of material from other sources.
Drawing on rarely examined diaries and journals, Down the Great Unknown is the first book to tell the full, dramatic story of the Powell expedition.
On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. The Grand Canyon, not explored before, was as mysterious as Atlantis—and as perilous. The ten men set out from Green River Station, Wyoming Territory down the Colorado in four wooden rowboats. Ninety-nine days later, six half-starved wretches came ashore near Callville, Arizona.
I am an international bestselling author of Strays and a London-based journalist for The Guardian, The Observer, The Sunday Times, and other publications. I've written about animals, conservation, and volunteered at sanctuaries around the world, from tending big cats and baboons in Namibia to wild mustangs in Nevada—a labour of love that has inspired features for The Guardian, The Independent, and Condé Nast Traveller. I've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for many charities through my investigative animal-cruelty stories; as an activist, I helped shut down controversial breeders of laboratory animals in the UK. I also created Catfestlondon, a sell-out boutique festival that rescues and rehomes Moroccan street kittens in the UK.
Amory wrote this wildly entertaining read of his rescue of a stray he found sick and starving in a NYC alley on a snowy Christmas Eve in 1977. He named the white cat Polar Bear, a moody curmudgeon with one blue and one gold eye, who became his lifelong companion. The book spent 12 weeks at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list and sold over 10 million copies. Amory was a fierce and famous activist who helped Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society buy a boat to use in his fight against whaling and seal-hunting. In 1980 Amory founded the Black Beauty Ranch in Texas, a refuge for discarded and neglected animals, from cats, dogs, deer, horses to elephants, monkeys, and big cats. That same year, he spent over $500,000 to trap 582 burros and helicopter them out of the Grand Canyon to save these…
A cat charms its way into a curmudgeon's heart one hilarious holiday season in this "extraordinary" bestselling Christmas classic (Parade), the perfect gift for the animal lover in your life. 'Twas the night before Christmas when a bedraggled white feline entered the heart -- and home -- of Cleveland Amory. To say it is a friendly takeover is an understatement. For the cat who came for Christmas is clearly of the Independent Type, and Cleveland Amory, cranky or not, is a pushover where animals are concerned. Toe to toe they stand -- Amory at six feet three, the cat at…
In 1997, I was hired by the Northwest Youth Corps as a trail crew leader. That season, and across five more seasons, I built trails across the Pacific Northwest and Desert Southwest, including in many national parks. Since then, I have been in love with backpacking trails (including hiking the Long Trail and Colorado Trail), building trails, and writing about trails (Crosscut: Poems). I now live in Vermont with my wife and daughter. We have a trail we built that weaves through our woods.
Nathaniel Farrell Brodie’sSteel on Stone takes readers into Grand Canyon National Park. Here, Brodie worked on trails for eight seasons during brutal summer heat and cold winters. Brodie explores not just the national park in its beauty and danger but also the park’s history, tales from the park, and other adventures. In the end, Steel on Stone beautifully ruminates on home and on Brodie’s love of this landscape.
The Grand Canyon National Park has been called many things, but home isn't often one of them. Yet after years of traveling the globe, Nathaniel Brodie found his home there.
Steel on Stone is Brodie's account of living in the canyon during the eight years he worked on a National Park Service trail crew, navigating a vast and unforgiving land. Embedded alongside Brodie and his crew, readers experience precipitous climbs to build trails, dangerous search-and-rescue missions, rockslides, spelunking expeditions, and rafting trips through the canyon on the Colorado River. From Brodie's chronicles of tracking cougars and dodging rampaging pack mules…
This topic is very close to my heart, as a lot of my readers know me as “the landscape guy.” My two award-winning mystery thrillers (and the serial killer thriller I'm currently writing) feature chillingly explosive landscapes (the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Gates of the Arctic, and the Rocky Mountains). Readers and reviewers have mentioned time and again how I utilize landscape as a character in its own right, and I have very much been influenced by other authors who do the same. There is so much opportunity in these remote and high-altitude landscapes to propel the dread and isolation for these types of stories.
This one’s a little bit of a cheat because the Grand Canyon isn’t technically a mountainous landscape—unless you’re looking at it from the bottom. But as far as landscapes go, you can’t do much better. The Anomaly follows an I’ll-do-it-myself archaeologist who discovers an ancient cave that seems to have a mind of its own. More than anything, this book is just downright freakin’ fun. It’s evident that Rutger knows this landscape better than most, and he utilizes both history and conspiracy theories to his advantage. This one’s a true mystery where the setting is a character in itself.
An utterly gripping thriller perfect for fans of Dan Brown, Michael Crichton and Stephen King. The Anomaly will leave you breathless until the final page has been turned . . .
THEY SOUGHT THE TRUTH. THEY FOUND A NIGHTMARE
A team of explorers seek ancient treasures, hidden in a secret cave.
At first it seems they will return empty handed. Then their luck turns.
But the team's elation is short-lived as they become trapped there in the dark, with little possibility of escape.
