Jay Gardiner is seventeen and diving alone off the California coast to recover his father’s remains — the father was a legendary diver who walked into the ocean to die of cancer, and the two of them had said unforgivable…
Seth Kantner
Kantner’s collected dispatches — columns, essays, and reportage from northwest Alaska written over a couple of decades. Wolves and caribou and the biologists counting them, the economics of a village where a gallon of gas costs what it does, snow…
Jeremy Collins
Collins was shivering in a cave under Fitz Roy in Patagonia when he got the idea: Go out from home in each of the four directions, climb something new, and fill sketchbooks doing it. He told his friend and mentor…
Art Davidson
In February 1967, eight men attempted Denali in winter, which nobody had done. Three of them reached the summit late in the day, then got pinned at Denali Pass by a storm that lasted six days — no tent, in…
Andy Kirkpatrick
Kirkpatrick spent twelve days alone on the Reticent Wall on El Capitan, one of the hardest aid routes in the world, hauling everything himself, sleeping in a portaledge, terrified most of the time. The climb runs through the book pitch…
Thomas Hornbein
Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld were on the 1963 American expedition, the one that put the first Americans on top by the regular route. The two of them wanted the West Ridge instead, which nobody had climbed and nobody knew if…
David Roberts
Comb Ridge is an eighty-mile monocline running from Utah into Arizona, dense with Ancestral Puebloan sites, and nobody had ever traversed the whole thing on foot. Roberts did it with Greg Child and Vaughn Hadenfeldt — three men in their…
Claire Vaye Watkins
The Southwest has dried out and been evacuated, and a dune sea called the Amargosa is moving east across California, burying towns. Luz, a former poster child for the drought-relief effort, and Ray, an ex-soldier, are squatting in an abandoned…
William Finnegan
Finnegan covered wars for The New Yorker and spent his whole life not telling people he was a surfer, because it sounded ridiculous coming from a serious reporter. Then he wrote this and won the Pulitzer. It starts with a…
Seth Kantner
Kantner was born in a sod igloo on the Kobuk River to homesteading parents and grew up hunting and trapping among Iñupiaq neighbors in northwest Alaska. This is memoir in photographs and short essays — his father’s pictures and his…
Robin Wall Kimmerer
You’ve read it, right? Or seen it on the shelf? Or the bestseller list? How it got there is part of the story. Milkweed, a small nonprofit press in Minneapolis, published it in 2013 with no marketing budget, and for…
David B. Williams
David Williams spent nine years in Moab, working as a ranger at Arches and teaching for the Canyonlands Field Institute, and this is the field guide that came out of it, illustrated in line drawings by Gloria Brown. It covers…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Facsimile pages from the private logbooks and sketchbooks of people at sea across four centuries. Naval officers, whalers, a ship’s surgeon, naturalists, a young woman on an emigrant voyage, modern sailors and marine biologists. Watercolors of coastlines drawn as navigational…
Huw Lewis-Jones; Kari Herbert
Before cameras, if you wanted to bring back what you saw, you drew it. Married couple Lewis-Jones and Herbert — he’s a polar guide and historian, she’s the daughter of the explorer Wally Herbert — pulled together seventy sketchbooks kept…
Kevin Fedarko
In June 1983, the snowpack came off the Rockies faster than anyone predicted and Glen Canyon Dam started to come apart, spillways cavitating, plywood bolted onto the top to hold the reservoir back. With the Grand Canyon closed to boats…
David Grann
In 1925, Percy Fawcett, the most experienced explorer in the Amazon, walked into the Mato Grosso with his son and his son’s friend looking for a city he called Z, and none of them came out. Something like a hundred…
Charles C. Mann
I think we know now that what they taught us in school was…hmm…not always accurate. 1491 is the first book that opened my eyes to just how not accurate. Reporting from archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and ecology, Charles C. Mann upends…
Ellen Meloy
Meloy lived on the San Juan River in Southeast Utah and spent four seasons watching a band of about eighty desert bighorn on the cliffs near her house — sheep she called the Blue Door Band. They’d been written off…
Nan Shepherd
British author Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the introduction to the 2011 edition of this classic, is no slouch for words, but he struggled to label The Living Mountain, calling it a “formidably difficult book to describe.” He comes close when…
David E. Stuart
Everybody wants the ruins of Chaco Canyon to be a mystery. Stuart, an anthropologist at New Mexico who’s spent his career there, knows it isn’t. Chaco was a boom town. There were great houses five stories high, dead-straight roads running…
Matt Warshaw
If sports could wish, every sport wishes it could be treated with the depth, breadth, love, and wit that Matt Warshaw has given surfing. The former editor of Surfer magazine, Warshaw is the preeminent chronicler of surfing history, and no…
Doug Peacock
Peacock came home from Vietnam a Green Beret medic who couldn’t be around people, drove into the Montana and Wyoming backcountry, and started following grizzlies. No gun, just a camera and years of sitting still watching bears he came to…
Helen Macdonald
A goshawk is the falconer’s hard case — bigger, faster, and less forgiving than a falcon, with a reputation for being impossible to keep steady. Macdonald had been a falconer since childhood and she bought one in Scotland for £800,…
Candice Millard
Despite his well-document track record of pushing beyond his physical limits and emerging from life-threatening situations mostly unscathed, Theodore Roosevelt’s journey through uncharted regions of the Amazon almost broke him. What started as a comically arrogant march through the jungle…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Portraits of the great mountaineers — Mallory, Shipton, Tilman, Hillary and Tenzing, Bonington, Messner, Boardman and Tasker, Lynn Hill, Steve House, and others — each with photographs, a short bio, and a passage in their own words. Lewis-Jones is a…
