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…
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…
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…
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…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Before cameras, if you wanted to bring back what you saw, you drew it. 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 in the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Anna Brones
Fika started as slang — Swedes flipped the syllables of kaffe and got fika. It’s a coffee break, but calling it that undersells it. It happens once or twice a day, everywhere, at every workplace, and it’s a verb: You…
Tristan Gooley
Water carries signs and almost nobody reads them. Gooley works through puddles, ponds, rivers, and open sea: How ripple patterns reveal wind direction and depth, how eddies mark what’s under the surface, how the color of a wave says something…
Tristan Gooley
The short, gentle one in Gooley’s run — an introduction rather than a manual, aimed at getting the senses back open. Fifteen short exercises, most taking a few minutes: Listen for the shape of a landscape in its sounds, notice…
Brendan Leonard
Leonard got sober at twenty-three after an arrest and a night in a cell, and then had to work out what a life looks like without the thing that had organized it. What he found was climbing. The book runs…
Richard Henry Dana
Dana was a Harvard student whose eyes gave out, so in 1834 he shipped out of Boston as a common sailor rather than a passenger, rounded the Horn, and spent two years working the hide trade on the California coast…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Polar explorer, historian, professor, and writer Huw Lewis-Jones is so prolific you will be forgiven for thinking there are two of him. In 2010, he published this book, an admiring sweep of ocean pioneers, along with a similar, companion book…
Yvon Chouinard
The 1968 journey to Patagonia by Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins is the stuff of legend, and from it epic tales and giant companies were sparked. Four decades later, Jeff Johnson retraced their travels for Chris Malloy’s 2010 film, 180°…
Audrey Sutherland
Audrey Sutherland paddled a nine-foot inflatable kayak up the Inside Passage from Ketchikan, alone, in her sixties, in summer after summer until she’d done the whole eight hundred and fifty miles. No support, no motor, food she’d dehydrated herself, camping…
