23 books
Kevin Fedarko
The Grand Canyon runs 277 river miles and has no trail from one end to the other, so walking it means about 750 miles of route-finding along ledges between the rim and the river, in country where water can be…
R.E. Burrillo
Burrillo came to this the long way — upstate New York, then New Orleans tending bar for five years trying to be a writer, then seasonal work in Glacier and two summers on the North Rim, which is where the…
John McPhee
McPhee went north in the mid-seventies, right as the Land Claims Act carved the state up and everybody was fighting over what would be park, what would be Native, what would stay open. The book comes in three parts. First,…
Edward Abbey
Abbey spent two seasons as a ranger at Arches in the late fifties, alone in a trailer at the end of a dirt road, before the pavement came. This is what he made of it, and it isn’t a nature…
John McPhee
McPhee’s trick here is simple and mean. He takes David Brower, the head of the Sierra Club and the most effective conservationist alive, and drops him in the field with three men who want to use the land, one at…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
David Roberts
His last book on the country he spent thirty years in. Half is the archaeology and his own walking — the Cedar Mesa sites, Grand Gulch, the panels, the places he keeps returning to. The other half is the history…
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…
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…
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…
Edward Abbey
Four people meet on a river trip and decide to start wrecking things. A Vietnam surgeon with three ex-wives, a Mormon river guide with three current ones, a Bronx kid turned desert fanatic, and a woman from the Bronx who…
Ken Ilgunas
Ilgunas walked the Keystone XL route across the Plains, most of it on other people’s land, and came out with a question: When did Americans lose the run of their own country? His answer is that they had it and…
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,…
Nick Hayes
The follow-up to The Book of Trespass, and it moves from manifesto to action plan. Hayes and a dozen contributors argue that the English are locked out of ninety-odd percent of their own country, and that the answer isn’t just…
Roderick Nash
The book that founded environmental history as a field. Nash traces what Americans have meant by wilderness — first a wasteland to be conquered, a place of moral danger, then, once it started running out, a national treasure and a…
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.
