25 books
Rebecca Solnit
Solnit built this out of nine essays circling a single idea, which she takes from a line she found in Plato’s Meno dialogue: How do you go looking for something when you don’t know what it is? Four of the…
Kevin Fedarko
The Grand Canyon runs two hundred seventy-seven river miles and has no trail from one end to the other, so walking it means about seven hundred fifty miles of route-finding along ledges between the rim and the river, in country…
Wilfred Thesiger
Thesiger crossed the Empty Quarter twice in the late 1940s, on camels, with a few Bedu who’d have gotten there a lot faster without him. His nominal job was scouting locust breeding grounds for the British, locusts being the scourge…
J. Smeaton Chase
J. Smeaton Chase was an Englishman who landed in Southern California in 1890, wandered it on horseback for thirty years, and wrote it down. This one came out in 1919, after he’d settled in Palm Springs when it was still…
Philip L. Fradkin
In November 1934, a twenty-year-old kid from Los Angeles rode two burros into Davis Gulch on the Escalante and never came out. The burros were found penned in the canyon. He wasn’t. He’d been wandering the Southwest since he was…
David Roberts
Roberts came at Ruess for thirty years, and this book is him inside the story instead of outside it. The first half is the life: the letters, the woodblock prints, the burros, five years of a kid in his teens…
Amity Gaige
How easy is it to get lost when you wander off the Appalachian Trail? Very. This extremely page-turning novel by Amity Gaige veers between the disappearance in Maine’s North Woods of thru-hiker Valerie Gillis, who is just two hundred miles…
Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Chatwin’s book about Patagonia is one of the great travel narratives — though what exactly it is up for debate. It’s part travelogue, part history, part fiction, part hallucination, part what the actual. Chatwin walked through Patagonia collecting stories…
Graham Greene
In 1935, Greene, thirty and with no relevant experience whatsoever, walked across the interior of Liberia with his twenty-three-year-old cousin Barbara, a cook, and a line of carriers, on a route where the map said nothing but “Cannibals.” They spent…
Jack Hitt
Hitt walked the Camino de Santiago in the early nineties, five hundred miles across northern Spain, back when the trail was still mostly empty and the pilgrim infrastructure was a few nuns with a stamp. He is not a believer…
Robert Moor
Moor thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and spent the next several years asking what a trail actually is. So the book goes from fossil traces of the first creatures to move on a seafloor, to ants laying pheromone lines and correcting…
Tom Zoellner
Zoellner walked eight hundred miles across Arizona, roughly the diagonal, and used the walk to grapple with the state he grew up in. Chapters alternate between the trail — heat, water, private land, dogs, the people who pick up a…
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…
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…
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…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane writes that an old path is a record of everyone who wore it, that walking one puts you in their company whether you want it or not, and that this does something to the inside of your head —…
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,…
W.G. Sebald
A man walks the coast of Suffolk, England, and the walk keeps opening into other things. A skull, a herring fishery, Thomas Browne’s missing remains, the silk trade, Joseph Conrad in the Congo, the Taiping rebellion, a collapsing country house,…
Bruce Chatwin
Chatwin went to central Australia to find out how Aboriginal songlines work — the invisible tracks across the country laid down by ancestral beings, sung into being, where the melody carries the shape of the land so a man can…
Nicholas Triolo
This is a book about walking in circles, and the obvious question is “why would you walk in circles?” The answer, in the deeply considered view of author Nicholas Triolo, is profound: because it will change your relationship with the…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane set out to find what wildness is left in Britain and Ireland, expecting remoteness — islands, summits, moors — and slept out in fifteen of them over a year. Then Roger Deakin, his friend, kept pointing him back toward…
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…
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…
Rebecca Solnit
This is walking as a subject with a history. Solnit runs from bipedalism through the peripatetic philosophers, the invention of the country walk as recreation, Wordsworth and the Romantics, pilgrimage, the labyrinth, mountaineering, the flâneur, protest marches and the Suffragettes,…
Ann Zwinger
Here are five canyons on Cedar Mesa in Southeast Utah — Grand Gulch, Slickhorn, Johns, Fish, and Owl — walked and camped and described by a naturalist who was also a fine draftswoman. Zwinger addresses the geology and the plants…
