44 books
John McPhee
McPhee spent twenty years riding shotgun with geologists up and down Interstate 80, pulling over at roadcuts, and this is his four books on the subject plus a fifth chunk stacked into one. It won the Pulitzer in 1999. He…
John McPhee
McPhee’s California book, and the fourth of the Annals volumes. He drove I-80 across the state with Eldridge Moores, a Davis geologist who read ancient seafloor for a living, and the story they told is that California isn’t one place.…
John McPhee
McPhee’s first geology book, 1981, and the one that started the whole run. He rides I-80 across Nevada with Ken Deffeyes, a Princeton geologist with a beard and a scheme to make money pulling silver out of hundred-year-old mine tailings.…
Callan Wink
In this second novel from author and fly-fishing guide Callan Wink, twenty-something brothers Thad and Hazen are hanging on, barely, in their rustic log house on the banks of the Yellowstone River, just outside the national park. They’re saddled with…
Jack Kerouac
Kerouac wrote On the Road, and it made him famous, and the fame ate him alive. By 1960, he was 38, drinking himself apart, with strangers showing up at his mother’s house wanting the King of the Beats. Ferlinghetti offered…
Peter Heller
Celine is 68, blue-blooded, Sarah Lawrence grad, an apartment under the Brooklyn Bridge, a cigarette habit that gave her emphysema, and a better record finding missing people than the FBI. She takes cases about lost families because of a hole…
Dan Flores
Wolves got wiped out of the Lower 48. Coyotes got the same treatment — bounties, poison, a federal agency that killed millions of them for the better part of a century — and instead of dying off they spread into…
Jack Kerouac
Kerouac wrote this right after On the Road, and it’s the calmer and better book. Ray Smith is Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder is Gary Snyder, who was then a young poet in Berkeley translating Han Shan and heading for a…
Jeremy Collins
Jer Collins is a climber and an illustrator, and somebody asked him to bring his sketchbook down the Amazon and draw the people living along it. That trip opened the door to mixed-media storytelling, and he kept going — the…
Emily St. John Mandel
Los Angeles, 2031, the first spring after the United States comes apart. Peacekeepers are pulling out, the curfew just lifted, the jacarandas are blooming, and everybody in the city is going to a party. Ari Waker walks across Silver Lake…
Craig Childs
Childs walks canyons and leaves what he finds where it lies. That’s his position going in, and this book is him spending four years having it argued out of him. He sits with private collectors who’ve got Mimbres bowls on…
Omer Stewart
Omer Stewart wrote this in the 1950s and nobody would publish it. His claim was that the pristine wilderness the pioneers walked into wasn’t pristine at all — Native people had been burning it on purpose for thousands of years,…
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. A camera instead, and years of sitting still in the timber watching bears…
Halley Sutton
Salma Lowe gives celebrity death tours in Los Angeles — a van, a script, the houses where famous people died — and one of the stops is her own sister’s, a movie star found dead in 1975 at twenty-two. Then…
Bonnie Garmus
Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist in early sixties Southern California who is very good and gets nothing for it — no doctorate, no credit on her own work, and a lab full of men who treat her as furniture.…
Joseph L. Sax
Sax was a law professor, and this is the clearest short statement of what national parks are for. His argument is that the parks aren’t a commodity to be delivered to consumers efficiently, and that the fight over what to…
Steve Hawk
A small nuclear device goes off beside a highway in West Virginia — low yield, few dead, and the first act of nuclear terrorism in history. Months later, on a rough stretch of Northern California coast, a surfer and lifeguard…
Ian Frazier
Frazier spent years going out to Pine Ridge with his friend Le War Lance, an Oglala Lakota man he met in New York, and the book is what that friendship showed him. Some of it is history — Crazy Horse,…
Jack Kerouac
Sal Paradise meets Dean Moriarty and spends the next few years crossing and recrossing the country — New York to Denver to San Francisco, down to Mexico City, back again, in borrowed cars and on buses, with no money, chasing…
Brian Kelley
Author and photographer Brian Kelley has a huge collection of U.S. national park maps and ephemera—at least twelve hundred items. He notes, “If you just have one map, it doesn’t feel as significant. But then when you start getting this…
Richard A. Rogers
Rogers is a communication scholar, and his subject isn’t what rock art meant but what we keep doing with it. Visitor centers, guidebooks, New Age tours, corporate logos, and the shaman theory all get examined as acts of appropriation, each…
Andrea Lankford
Twelve years as a National Park Service ranger — Yosemite, Zion, Grand Canyon, Denali — and this is the version they don’t print in the brochure. Body recoveries below the rim, drug busts, car wrecks, search and rescue for people…
Ann Zwinger
Ann Zwinger ran the Green River from its source in the Wind River Range down to its confluence with the Colorado — by kayak, raft, and on foot — and wrote the whole river as a naturalist. Geology of the…
Jess Walter
Rhys Kinnick blew up his life seven years ago and has been living off the grid in the woods of eastern Washington, no phone, no news, growing his own food and stewing. Then his granddaughter and grandson turn up at…
M. Kat Anderson
The California the Spanish and then the Americans walked into looked like untouched abundance, and Anderson’s book shows it was a garden. Indigenous Californians burned meadows on schedule, coppiced hazel and redbud so the shoots would come back straight enough…
Jack Turner
Turner spent decades guiding in the Tetons and this strident book stems directly from it. His argument is that we’ve replaced actual wild experience with representations of it — nature documentaries, photographs, managed parks, permits, interpretive signs — and that…
Stephen Graham Jones
In 1912, a Lutheran pastor in Montana takes the confession of a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, who has been coming to the church weekly and telling a story in pieces. Good Stab is a vampire, made by a white…
Kenneth Arnold
On June 24, 1947, a private pilot flying near Mount Rainier saw nine objects moving in formation and later described their motion as like a saucer skipping across water. A reporter turned that into flying saucer and the phrase went…
Peter Heller
We’ve all imagined what it would be like to survive an apocalypse, but Peter Heller imagined it better. It’s nine years after a pandemic, our location a small airport at the base of the Colorado Rockies. Hig (Big Hig to…
Josh Jackson
Los Angeles-based furniture maker Josh Jackson had never heard of the Bureau of Land Management and wasn’t all that clear on “public lands”—he just wanted a last-minute place to camp. Then a friend mentioned “BLM lands” and he fell down…
Peter Heller
Peter Heller’s novel The River,moved as swiftly and eventfully as class V whitewater, but not all readers were pleased with its denouement (one AJ editor and Heller fan threw his copy against the wall in protest). The Guide, though, will…
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson has been walking the Sierra Nevada since 1973 and has done something like a hundred trips, and this is everything he knows about it in one enormous, wandering book. Route descriptions and gear lists sit next to the geology…
Peter Heller
Ren Hopper is a park ranger in Yellowstone, still carrying the death of his wife, and his job is mostly managing tourists who get too close to the animals. His friend Hilly is a wolf biologist whom the anti-wolf faction…
Eric Blehm
Randy Morgenson spent twenty-eight summers as a backcountry ranger in Sequoia and Kings Canyon, walking a district most people never see, and in July 1996 he didn’t answer the radio. What followed was one of the largest searches in Park…
James Galvin
A hundred years of one meadow on the Wyoming-Colorado line, at ten thousand feet, told out of order. Galvin owned part of it and knew the people who worked it, chiefly Lyle Van Waning, a man who built his own…
Joshua M. Powell
Not a guidebook. Powell hiked the PCT and made a visual compendium of it — hand-drawn maps, charts, and diagrams covering the whole 2,650 miles from Campo to Manning Park. Elevation profiles, snowpack, water sources, the mileage between resupply towns,…
Peter Heller
Jim Stegner is a painter with a real market, two dead marriages, a daughter who was murdered, and a prison term for shooting a man in a bar. He’s living in Colorado trying to fish and paint and stay level.…
Carrot Quinn
This book stopped me in my, ahem, tracks, and I was obsessed with the idea of excerpting it in Adventure Journal (we did—thanks, Carrot!). Quinn grew up in Anchorage with a mother deep in untreated schizophrenia — no heat, no…
Richard Preston
A handful of amateurs discovered in the 1980s that nobody had ever been to the top of a redwood, and that the canopy three hundred feet up is a whole ecosystem — soil, huckleberry bushes, ferns, salamanders that live their…
Christopher Ketcham
Ketcham spent years reporting on the 450 million acres the federal government holds in the West and came back angry. The core of it is livestock grazing on public land — how few operators there are, how little they pay,…
Carrot Quinn
The Pacific Crest Trail, 2,660 miles, told as the daily blog she actually kept — which is why it reads nothing like a reflective memoir. It’s feet, water carries, hunger, weather, town stops, and the trail family that forms and…
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…
Caro Claire Burke
Natalie Heller Mills sells the pioneer life to millions of followers — raw milk, farm eggs, five kids, a husband, a ranch in Idaho, all of it shot beautifully and none of it done by her, since there are nannies…
Daniel Duane
My favorite Daniel Duane book, and that’s saying something from the man who wrote Caught Inside. A Sierra boyhood braided with the harder history behind the postcard, and he never stops loving the place even as he reckons with it.
