1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Charles Mann's history of the pre-Columbian Americas dismantles every assumption you learned in school. The hemisphere before 1492 was more populous, more urban, and more ecologically managed than anyone imagined. A book that redraws the map of human civilization.
180º South
The companion book to Jeff Johnson's film about retracing the 1968 journey of Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia. Part surf trip, part climbing expedition, part environmental reckoning. Johnson sails, hitchhikes, and climbs his way to the edge of the world — and finds it being sold off piece by piece.
A Blistered Kind of Love: One Couple’s Trial by Trail
Dustin and Angela Ballard hiked the Pacific Crest Trail as a test of their relationship. The blisters are real. The love is tested. The trail, as always, is the thing that matters most — 2,650 miles of proving that two people can walk through something enormous and come out the other side together.
A Brief History of Surfing
The former editor of Surfer magazine has become the sport's greatest historian. With a wry vision and crackling wit, Matt Warshaw created the Encyclopedia of Surfing online. Nothing like it exists for any sport, anywhere. is just that—a dipping of the toe into his fine and tubular waters.
A Fine Kind of Madness: Mountain Adventures Tall & True
Laura and Guy Waterman's collection of climbing stories from the mountains of the American Northeast. The Watermans were the conscience of New England mountaineering — their writing is as precise and unforgiving as a winter ascent of Mount Washington.
A Fly Rod of Your Own
John Gierach is the best fishing writer alive. This collection of essays about fly fishing in Colorado and beyond is vintage Gierach: dry, wry, and populated with the kind of characters who drive hours for a rumor of trout. Nobody captures the obsession better.
A Golden Age: Surfing’s Revolutionary 1960s and ’70s
Richard Olsen's photographic history of surfing's most creative era — the shortboard revolution, the North Shore, the counterculture years when surfing was both a sport and a philosophy. The images alone justify the book.
A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca
Andrés Reséndez reconstructs the journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who was shipwrecked on the Texas coast in 1528 and spent eight years walking across the continent. A survival story so improbable it reads like fiction — except every detail is documented.
A Life on the Edge: Memoirs of Everest and Beyond
Jim Whittaker was the first American to summit Everest in 1963. His memoir covers that climb and a life spent at the intersection of mountaineering, business, and politics. Whittaker ran REI and organized the first American-Chinese expedition to K2.
A Long Trek Home: 4,000 Miles by Boot, Raft, and Ski
Erin McKittrick and her husband traveled 4,000 miles from Seattle to the Aleutian Islands by human power — hiking, packrafting, and skiing through some of the wildest country in North America. A young couple's journey through a landscape most people will never see.
A Naturalist’s Guide to Canyon Country
David B. Williams's field guide to the ecology and geology of the Colorado Plateau. Readable, thorough, and organized by habitat. The kind of book that transforms a drive through Moab into a geology lesson you actually want to take.
A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold's collection of essays from the 1940s is the foundational text of the American conservation movement. Written from his weekend shack in rural Wisconsin, it builds from close observation of cranes and wildflowers to the land ethic — the idea that humans are not conquerors of the land but citizens of it.
A Thousand Deer: Four Generations of Hunting and the Hill Country
Rick Bass writes about hunting, family, and the Texas Hill Country with the same lyrical intensity he brings to everything. Four generations of deer hunters, one landscape, and the question of what it means to take a life from a place you love.
A View from the Ridge
Ian Mitchell and Dave Brown on Scottish hillwalking — the culture, the characters, the politics of access, and the landscapes that make Scotland's mountains unlike any others. Opinionated and uncompromising.
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: Vox Clamantis in Deserto: Notes from a Secret Journal
Abbey's collection of aphorisms, epigrams, and provocations — distilled from his journals. Some are brilliant. Some are deliberately outrageous. All of them sound like Abbey talking after his third beer, which is exactly the point.
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
Bill Bryson is not a hiker. That's what makes this book work. His attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail with his old friend Stephen Katz is equal parts comedy, natural history, and honest reckoning with the American wilderness. Bryson is funny in a way that never undermines the seriousness of the landscape he's walking through.
A Wilderness Original: The Life of Bob Marshall
James Glover's biography of the man who founded the Wilderness Society and walked more miles in wild country than anyone of his generation. Marshall was a forester, a civil libertarian, and an indefatigable hiker who once walked 70 miles in a single day. The original wilderness advocate.
A Year in Paradise
Floyd Schmoe's account of a year spent at Mount Rainier's Paradise Inn in the 1920s, reissued with an introduction by Gail Storey. A quiet, observational book about living inside a mountain landscape through all four seasons.
Above the Clouds: How I Carved My Own Path to the Top of the World
If you’ve only skimmed headlines about Spanish mountain athlete Kilian Jornet, you probably think he’s obsessed with speed. After all, the two-time National Geographic Adventurer of the Year holds the fastest known time for climbing and descending the Matterhorn, Kilimanjaro, Mont Blanc, Denali, and Everest. He also set a record for skiing nearly eighty thousand feet uphill in twenty-four hours. So, yeah, there’s good reason to think Jornet is single-minded in his pursuits. Yet in his new memoir, Above the Clouds, which revolves around a year on Everest, Jornet says, “I ran fast to live a slow lifestyle.” And, more important than the stoke of setting records, “it is about how a runner or climber sees the mountains.” Endurance athletes will like the book’s insight into training and nutrition, but it’s Jornet’s honest ruminations on the “why” of adventure and the siren song of nature that make this a must-read for any mountain lover.
Above the Clouds: The Diaries of a High-Altitude Mountaineer
Anatoli Boukreev's climbing diaries, published after his death in an avalanche on Annapurna in 1997. Boukreev was the strongest high-altitude climber of his generation and the most controversial figure in the 1996 Everest disaster. The diaries reveal a man more complex than Krakauer's portrait allowed.
Across the Arctic Ocean: Original Photographs from the Last Great Polar Journey
Huw Lewis-Jones presents the photographs from Wally Herbert's 1968-69 crossing of the Arctic Ocean by dog sled — the last great journey of polar exploration. The images of ice, light, and endurance are extraordinary.
Alaska’s Brooks Range: The Ultimate Mountains
John Kauffmann's portrait of the Brooks Range — the most remote mountain chain in North America. Part natural history, part elegy for a wilderness that was, at the time of writing, still essentially untouched.
Aldo Leopold’s Wilderness
A collection of Leopold's wilderness writings, drawn from his essays, letters, and field journals. Complements A Sand County Almanac with deeper cuts — the conservation philosophy in earlier, rougher form.
Alive
Piers Paul Read's account of the Andes plane crash and the survivors' 72-day ordeal is one of the most harrowing survival stories ever told. The survivors' decision to eat the dead to stay alive is presented without judgment, in prose that earns the right to be that restrained.
All Fourteen Eight-Thousanders
Messner's account of climbing all fourteen peaks above 8,000 meters — the first person to do so. Each chapter is a different mountain, a different year, a different lesson in how the Himalaya tries to kill you. The cumulative effect is staggering.
All Our Waves Are Water
Jaimal Yogis's memoir of surfing and Zen practice — from Ocean Beach to Indonesia to the monasteries of Burma. A surfer-monk's search for the connection between riding waves and sitting still.
All the Pretty Horses
The first volume of McCarthy's Border Trilogy follows two young Texans who ride into Mexico in 1949 looking for a way of life that's already vanishing. The horsemanship is real. The landscape is merciless. The prose is some of the finest in the English language.
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West
To fully understand the modern American West, readers must dig deep into the lives, writings, and philosophies of Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner. On the surface, the men couldn’t be more different: Abbey, an irreverent, hard-living wildman, and Stegner, a measured, buttoned-up professor. In this double biography, Gessner compares and contrasts the two icons, revealing unexpected commonalities and hypocrisies, giving the reader a new perspective on these two complex characters and their lasting impacts on the West.
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration
David Roberts tells the story of Douglas Mawson's 1912 Antarctic expedition, in which Mawson lost both his companions, most of his supplies, and the soles of his feet — then walked 100 miles back to base camp alone. It may actually be the greatest survival story in the history of exploration.
Alone on the Wall
Alex Honnold's account of his free solo of El Capitan and other death-defying climbs, co-written with David Roberts. Honnold is the most famous rock climber alive and also one of the most unusual minds — his calm in the face of certain death is either inspiring or terrifying, depending on your relationship with gravity.
American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon
Steven Rinella hunts a single buffalo in Alaska and uses that hunt to unspool the entire natural and cultural history of the species — from ice age migration to near-extinction to the strange politics of modern conservation. Part memoir, part natural history, part elegy for a continent that used to shake.
American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West
Long before her international fame and a New York Times obituary, O-Six was just another fuzzy wolf pup in Yellowstone National Park’s Northern Range, a descendant of the 1995 gray wolf reintroduction. Her story is brought to life in American Wolf, a work of nonfiction with all the hot-blooded howling of a Jim Harrison novel—romantic drama, bloody turf wars, and seething tensions of social hierarchy among mammals of all stripes, from the wolves themselves to ranchers, ecologists, wolf-watching guides, and elk hunters. Drawing upon thousands of written and multimedia field notes, writer Nate Blakeslee tracks the intertwined lives of O-Six, Yellowstone ranger Rick McIntyre (who documented her every move), and local Wyoming resident Steven Turnbull, a hunter rooted in the ideals of fair chase and living off the land. A 2018 Banff Mountain Book Competition winner, Wolf is a riveting must-read for all who believe in the call of a wilder West.
Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya
Best known for fearless novels and essays on colonial legacies and social classes, West Indies-born Jamaica Kincaid was rumored to be a contender for the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Thus, a travel memoir on Himalayan flora might seem an odd fit, but Kincaid has long loved the outdoors, especially gardening, geology, and classic stories of mountaineering. Among Flowers is her account of venturing to Nepal’s Kanchenjunga with a botanist friend on a seed-gathering trek, and her descriptions of night skies and thirty-foot rhododendrons evoke wonder and awe, like all good odyssey tales. Yet she also writes honestly, at times disruptively, about the trials and tribulations of knee pain and rustic latrines, as well as on the serious threats of Maoist rebels. As a narrator, Kincaid is often overwhelmed and oh so real, forgoing the well-trodden path of grandiose expedition writing. Among Flowers is an immersive journey into the essence of travel itself through the eyes of one of America’s finest cultural observers.
Among the Mountains: Travels Through Asia
Wilfred Thesiger traveling through the mountains of Central and South Asia — Kurdistan, the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram. The landscapes are harsh, the companions are local, and Thesiger's preference for difficulty over comfort is absolute.
An Afterclap of Faith
Charles Lind's quiet, personal essays about landscape, belief, and the intersections between them. Small press, small audience, worth finding.
An American Sunrise: Poems
In summer 2019, Oklahoma-born Joy Harjo became the first Native American appointed as the United States Poet Laureate. Outdoor readers are most familiar with Harjo for her memoir, Crazy Brave, but the Muscogee (Creek) Nation member is also an award-winning playwright, musician, and activist. An American Sunrise, her new collection of poems, traverses the kind of committing and uncomfortable terrain Harjo has been exploring her whole life: “Through the immense and terrible echo of injustice a meadow bird sang and sang.” Some argue outdoor recreation should be the one place we can go to get away from politics. Harjo, whose family was violently forced west on the Trail of Tears, reminds that the sacred exists in step with the profane. “That’s how blues emerged, by the way—Our spirits needed a way to dance through the heavy mess.” Stormy, radiant, singing in rhythms ancient and new, Sunrise is a call to a future restored and whole.
An Ice Axe, a Camera, and a Jar of Peanut Butter: A Photographer’s Autobiography
Ira Spring's memoir of a lifetime spent photographing the Pacific Northwest mountains. Spring was the most prolific outdoor photographer in Washington state history, and his images defined what the Cascades looked like in the American imagination.
An Unspoken Hunger
Terry Tempest Williams's essay collection about desire, wildness, and the body's relationship to landscape. The writing is sensual and fierce. Williams doesn't separate the erotic from the ecological — they're the same hunger.
An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean – Antarctic Survivor
Michael Smith's biography of the Irish seaman who served on three Antarctic expeditions — with Scott twice and Shackleton once — and performed some of the most extraordinary feats of endurance in polar history. Crean walked 35 miles alone across the Ross Ice Shelf to save his companions. Almost nobody knows his name.
Anasazi America
David Stuart's archaeological study of the Ancestral Puebloan civilization of the American Southwest. Stuart argues that Chaco Canyon was the center of a complex, interconnected society that collapsed when its resources ran out — a parable with obvious modern parallels.
Angle of Repose
Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel interweaves the story of a disabled historian with the frontier adventures of his grandparents in the nineteenth-century West. It's about marriage, landscape, and the compromises that settlement demands.
Animals Strike Curious Poses
Elena Passarello's essays about famous animals — from the first dog in space to the last passenger pigeon to a celebrity bear. Each essay is a marvel of form and research, and together they ask what it means that we name animals, mourn them, and still can't stop killing them.
Annals of the Former World
John McPhee spent twenty years writing about the geology of North America by crossing the continent at Interstate 80 and stopping to read the rocks. The result is one of the great works of American nonfiction — four books assembled into a single 700-page masterpiece that makes deep time feel personal.
Annapurna
Maurice Herzog's account of the first ascent of an 8,000-meter peak in 1950 is mountaineering literature at its most elemental. The climb nearly killed him — he lost all his fingers and toes to frostbite — but the book endures because of its raw, unprocessed honesty about what it costs to stand on top of something that doesn't want you there.
Annapurna: A Woman’s Place
Arlene Blum led the first American women's expedition to Annapurna in 1978. Two members summited; two others died attempting a second route. Blum's account is both a mountaineering narrative and a document of what it cost women to earn their place in the high mountains.
Antarctica: The Waking Giant
If anyone can transport us into the soul of the White Continent, it’s photographer Sebastian Copeland. A professional polar explorer, Copeland has made several human-powered expeditions in frozen extremes, including the first transcontinental crossing of Antarctica from east to west via two of its poles, traveling on skis with kites for twenty-five hundred miles. Drawing from his on-foot experiences as well as seasons on a scientific research icebreaker, Antarctica: The Waking Giant is more than a decade in the making, and Copeland ground-truthed his pictures the hard way: breaking ribs, losing parts of his toes to frostbite, scuba diving under icebergs. The book holds one hundred fifty staggering photographs, from the vast, otherworldly interior to the wildlife-rich coasts, where whales break the surface and migrating birds and penguins mob the shorelines. In our rapidly changing, melting world, Copeland’s work is both celebration and warning, a potent reminder that no matter the distance, we are all in this together.
Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Future of the Earth
Craig Childs visits the places where the planet's future is already visible — ice sheets, deserts, flooded coastlines — and reports back with the eye of a naturalist and the fatalism of a geologist. The earth has ended before. It will end again. Childs just wants to know what that looks like.
Arabian Sands
Wilfred Thesiger's account of crossing the Empty Quarter of Arabia twice in the late 1940s with Bedouin companions. A farewell to a way of life that was already ending — the oil companies were arriving as Thesiger left. The prose is austere and the landscape is absolute.
Archipelago An Atlas of Imagined Islands
Huw Lewis-Jones's collection of fictional islands from literature, cartography, and mythology. Beautiful maps, wild stories, and a reminder that the impulse to imagine places that don't exist is as old as the impulse to explore places that do.
Arctic Dreams
Barry Lopez spent five years traveling in the Arctic, and the book he wrote about it is one of the great works of American nonfiction. It's about ice and light and musk oxen and Inuit hunters, but it's also about the nature of imagination — how a landscape this extreme remakes the people who enter it.
As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
Dina Gilio-Whitaker reframes environmental justice through an Indigenous lens, arguing that the mainstream environmental movement has consistently failed Native communities. From treaty rights to pipeline protests, a clear-eyed history of who gets to define 'environment.'
Assembling California
McPhee on the plate tectonics that built California — a state assembled from island arcs, ocean floor, and continental fragments smashed together over hundreds of millions of years. Earthquakes are not anomalies; they're the sound of the assembly still in progress.
Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival
Following the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition, President Thomas Jefferson shifted his focus from exploration to the most American of American pursuits—making money. Enter millionaire John Jacob Astor and his wildly ambitious scheme to create a global trade network, using Lewis and Clark’s newly established route as a primary artery of commerce. Astoria is the tale of this often-overlooked chapter in American history, one with no shortage of adventure, egos, and wild uncharted landscapes.
At Glacier’s End
Chris Burkard's photography book documenting glaciers and the landscapes they've shaped — Iceland, Patagonia, the Alps, Alaska. The images are monumental. The subtext is elegiac: this is what's disappearing.
At the Rising of the Moon
Dermott Somers's collection of mountaineering stories from Ireland and the Alps. Somers writes with a literary intensity unusual in climbing literature — the prose is as demanding as the routes.
Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America
Childs again, this time tracing the routes of the first Americans across a continent of glaciers, megafauna, and landscapes that no longer exist. Part archaeology, part adventure, part thought experiment about what it meant to walk into a world no human had ever seen.
BAD KARMA: The True Story of a Mexican Surf Trip from Hell
Paul Wilson's account of a surf trip to Mexico that went catastrophically wrong. Crime, corruption, and the thin line between adventure and disaster. A cautionary tale told at full speed.
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
William Finnegan's memoir is the best book ever written about surfing, and it's not close. Decades of wave-hunting across five continents, from childhood in Honolulu to middle age in New York, rendered in prose that captures the exact texture of water moving over reef. It won the Pulitzer for a reason.
Barkskins
Annie Proulx's epic novel traces two families across 300 years of North American deforestation. It begins in the forests of New France in 1693 and ends in the present, and its argument is both historical and urgent: we have been cutting trees since the day we arrived, and we have not stopped.
Basin and Range
The first volume of McPhee's geology series, in which he drives across Nevada with a geologist and learns to see time in roadcuts. The book that taught a generation of readers to look at landscapes and see the forces that made them.
Before the Wind
Set in the Pacific Northwest, Before the Wind is a deeply funny fictional account of a lovably maddening family that communicates best through sailing. (Wes Anderson, please option the film rights.) There’s a loudmouth dad—Where’s the wind? No! Those waves are old news!—a try-to-fix-everything middle son, a precocious daughter who can out-sail nearly everyone, and a grandpa who dreams in boat design schemata. Dysfunctional, maybe, but boy can the Johannssens race. If boating is in your DNA, you might recognize yourself here. If you don’t know a thing about boating, you’ll learn a lot—about sailing legends like Joshua Slocum, insight into the siren song of racing, and things to consider before buying that “free” boat in your neighbor’s backyard. Ultimately, the story reminds us adventure is often the best therapy, and that it’s wildly rewarding to trust some of life’s decisions to the wind.
Best Served Wild: Real Good for Real Adventures
Anna Brones's outdoor cookbook — recipes designed for campfires, trail stoves, and backcountry kitchens. Practical, unpretentious, and organized by the kind of trip you're taking.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Aron Ralston's memoir of the five days he spent pinned by a boulder in a Utah slot canyon — and the self-amputation that freed him — is difficult to read and impossible to put down. What lifts it beyond spectacle is Ralston's honesty about the recklessness that put him there.
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West
Stegner's biography of John Wesley Powell — the one-armed Civil War veteran who ran the Colorado River and tried to tell Washington that the arid West couldn't support the settlement patterns of the East. Nobody listened. Everything Powell predicted came true.
Beyond the Mountain
Steve House's memoir of becoming one of the best alpine climbers of his generation. The ascent of Nanga Parbat's Rupal Face — alpine style, in a single push — is the centerpiece. House writes about the physical and psychological cost of climbing at the highest level.
Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration
Starting in Mexico’s fir forests, onward through Nebraska’s cornfields, into southeastern Canada, and looping past Boston and New York City, Sara Dykman rode her bike along a path millions upon millions have circuited before, although she was the first human to do so. In her adventure memoir Bicycling with Butterflies, she writes about tracing the ten-thousand-mile monarch migration route on a rig she built from secondhand parts. Her nine-month trek was filled with bike touring elements any long-distance cyclist will recognize: the generosity of strangers, the bliss of hot showers and ice cream, and a range of campsites from bunkhouses to culverts to soccer fields. Along the way, Dykman brings us into the perspective of the butterflies, and you’ll discover the intricacies of metamorphosis, milkweed varieties, and monarch habitat, as well as the customs of passionate butterfly advocates, or, as Dykman calls them, Crazy Monarch People. Read this book and be transported into the everyday magic of both two-legged and six-legged creatures great and small.
Big Sur
Kerouac's dark, boozy novel about a crack-up in a cabin on the California coast. Not the Beat celebration people expect — it's a book about a man coming apart, and the Pacific Ocean doesn't care. The descriptions of Big Sur's landscape are some of the most visceral he ever wrote.
Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West
Justin Farrell's sociology of Teton County, Wyoming — the wealthiest county in America and a case study in what happens when the ultra-rich buy the landscape. Conservation as class privilege. Wilderness as real estate. A book that will make you uncomfortable.
Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
Carolyn Finney examines why American wilderness has been coded as white space — and what that erasure has cost. Part history, part cultural criticism, part personal reckoning. Essential reading for anyone who thinks the outdoors belongs to everyone but hasn't asked why it doesn't feel that way.
Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry
Camille Dungy's anthology traces Black nature writing from the colonial era to the present. The poems challenge the assumption that nature writing is a white tradition. Dungy's introduction alone is worth the book.
Black Sun
Abbey's strangest novel — a love story set at a fire lookout in the Arizona high country. Darker and more personal than The Monkey Wrench Gang, it's the book where Abbey's tenderness and his nihilism collide. Not his most famous, but possibly his most revealing.
Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West
Hampton Sides follows Kit Carson across the nineteenth-century West — from the fur trade to the Mexican-American War to the brutal subjugation of the Navajo. It's a page-turner built on a tragedy, and Sides never lets the adventure obscure the violence.
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
McCarthy's anti-western is the most violent novel in American literature and also one of the most beautiful. Set in the borderlands of the 1850s, it follows a band of scalp hunters through a landscape so vast and indifferent it becomes its own character. Not a book about nature — a book about what happens to people in nature's absence.
Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier…
Wallace Nichols compiles the neuroscience research on why water makes people feel better — calmer, more creative, more connected. The science is real. The writing occasionally drifts toward self-help, but the core argument is compelling: we are hardwired for water.
Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
In this spellbinding travel narrative, poet and award-winning journalist Kapka Kassabova returns to her roots in the borderland between Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece. Nestled near the Black Sea and one of Europe’s greatest wildernesses, this rugged corner of the world has been overrun by shifting borders for millennia. From ancient Greece through the Ottoman Empire, to the Cold War and today’s Syrian refugees, the story takes switchbacks between cultures and centuries. One moment you’re sipping coffee with an armed border guard at The Disco cafe, the next you’re firewalking with an old woman carrying religious relics over hot coals. Boars and bears and wolves roam the old-growth beeches and oaks. And snakes, it seems, are everywhere. Is it 2016 or the 4th century BC? This kaleidoscopic exploration of boundaries—natural and man-made, real and imaginary—will forever change your bearings on the map.
Born to Run
Like most runners, journalist Christopher McDougall found himself plagued by a parade of injuries. Unlike most runners, he decided to seek a cure—and test his own limits—deep within the folds of Mexico’s Copper Canyon region. What he learned, both from scientists and from the expert (and injury-free) long-haul runners of the canyon’s indigenous Tarahumara tribe, sparked the minimalist running revolution—and eventually, the maximalist whiplash that followed.
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves together indigenous wisdom and botanical science to argue that plants and people are meant to be in relationship. Each essay is an act of attention — to moss, to strawberries, to the grammar of animacy in the Potawatomi language. The book that made a generation rethink what it means to be a naturalist.
Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism
Rick Bass writes about the Yaak Valley of Montana — the wildest place in the Lower 48 — and the fight to protect it. Bass has spent decades arguing for the Yaak's wilderness designation. These essays are the sound of a man who won't stop.
Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2’s Deadliest Day
Amanda Padoan and Peter Zuckerman tell the story of the 2008 K2 disaster from the perspective of the high-altitude workers — the Sherpas, Baltis, and HAPs who make Himalayan climbing possible and die in disproportionate numbers. A necessary corrective to the Western-climber-as-hero narrative.
Cabin Porn: Inspiration for Your Quiet Place Somewhere
Zack Klein's collection of photographs of cabins, shelters, and hideaways in wild places around the world. No text to speak of — just image after image of small structures in big landscapes. The architectural equivalent of a deep breath.
Camp 4: Recollections of a Yosemite Rockclimber
Steve Roper's memoir of the golden age of Yosemite climbing — the 1960s and '70s, when Camp 4 was a republic of dirtbags and every big wall was a first ascent. The stories are legendary. The writing is unpretentious and exact.
Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther
East of the Mississippi, the big cats of North America have been driven to extinction in every state except Florida, where a small population of panthers not only hangs on, but has made an improbable revival. Longtime Tampa Bay Times journalist Craig Pittman spent decades tracking the panther's story into muggy palmetto thickets and air-conditioned boardrooms to pen Cat Tale, an environmental exposé that reads like a hard-boiled detective novel. We’re talking about the Sunshine State, so there are alligator wrestlers, a bow hunter nicknamed Scuttlebutt, and many murky undrained swamps, but Pittman reports the only-in-Florida fixings with sharp wit and clear affection for his home. If you thought the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone was the only major wildlife recovery of late, Cat Tale will inspire you with its cast of heroes, from whistleblowers to biologists to the panthers themselves. Who doesn’t love a good comeback story?
Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam
Andrew Pham bicycled across Vietnam twenty years after his family fled the country. The journey is external — heat, roads, food — and internal — identity, memory, belonging. A Vietnamese American returning to a place that's both home and foreign.
Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast
Daniel Duane's memoir of a year spent surfing in Santa Cruz. Literary, self-aware, and honest about the gap between the surfer he wanted to be and the surfer he was. One of the few surf books that reads as well on land as it does in the water.
Challenge of the North Cascades
Fred Beckey's account of climbing in the most rugged mountains in the lower 48. Beckey was the most prolific first-ascensionist in American history, and the North Cascades were his home range. Technical, obsessive, and irreplaceable.
Chasing Waves: A Surfer’s Tale of Obsessive Wandering
Amy Waeschle's surf travel memoir — chasing swells from the Pacific Northwest to Central America to Indonesia. A woman's perspective in a genre dominated by men, told without apology.
Chomolungma Sings the Blues
Ed Douglas's sharp, funny, and critical essays about Himalayan climbing and the culture that surrounds it. Douglas is one of the best mountaineering journalists alive, and he's not afraid to puncture the mythology.
Cliffhanger: New Climbing and People on the Rocks
Julie Ellison's profiles of contemporary climbers — the people pushing the sport in new directions. Diverse voices, modern ethics, and climbing as culture rather than conquest.
Climbers
M. John Harrison's novel about climbing in northern England — the obsession, the relationships it destroys, the moments of transcendence on gritstone. Not an adventure story — a literary novel that happens to take place on rock. One of the best novels ever written about climbing.
Climbing Free: My Life in the Vertical World
Lynn Hill free-climbed the Nose of El Capitan in 1993 — a feat many thought impossible. Her memoir covers that historic ascent and the decades of climbing that led to it, from Yosemite's Camp 4 to limestone cliffs in France. Matter-of-fact about achievements that changed the sport.
Climbing Ice
Yvon Chouinard's technical manual and manifesto from 1978 is part how-to, part philosophy, and part visual document of the golden age of alpine climbing. The gear innovations he describes here became the foundation of both his climbing career and Patagonia.
Cloud Dancers: Portraits of North American Mountaineers
Jonathan Waterman's profiles of the most influential climbers in North American history. Oral history meets biography, with Waterman's own mountaineering credentials lending authority to the portraits.
Cold Wars: Climbing The Fine Line Between Risk And Reality
Andy Kirkpatrick's account of climbing the hardest winter routes in the Alps — alone, underfunded, and frequently terrified. Kirkpatrick writes about fear better than any climber alive. Funny in a way that makes the danger feel more real, not less.
Colorado 14er Disasters, 2nd Edition
Mark Scott-Nash documents the accidents, rescues, and deaths on Colorado's fourteen-thousand-foot peaks. Sobering, instructive, and a reminder that mountains this accessible can still kill you.
Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had
Rick Bass's tribute to his bird dog Colter — a slim, beautiful book about a man and his dog in the Montana wilderness. Bass writes about animals the way most people wish they could talk about the ones they love.
Coming Into the Country
McPhee's book about Alaska is really three books: urban Alaska, rural Alaska, and the bush. The third section — about people who chose to live far from everything — is the most powerful. Nobody writes about place and the people who inhabit it like McPhee.
Confessions of a Barbarian
Abbey's journals, published posthumously. Raw, unfiltered, sometimes ugly, always alive. This is Abbey without the craft — the notebook version of the man who wrote Desert Solitaire. Essential for anyone who loves his work and wants to see the machinery behind it.
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays
Paul Kingsnorth's essays about giving up on mainstream environmentalism and finding something harder and more honest in its place. Kingsnorth argues that most green activism is just another form of progress worship. Uncomfortable, necessary, beautifully written.
Conquistadors of the Useless: From the Alps to Annapurna
Lionel Terray's autobiography is one of the great mountaineering memoirs. From the Alps to the Andes to the Himalaya, Terray climbed everything with a joy and ferocity that makes most modern adventure writing seem cautious by comparison. The title alone is worth the cover price.
Country Driving
Peter Hessler drove across China in a rented car, following the Great Wall, watching a village industrialize, and navigating a country reinventing itself at highway speed. The third book in his China trilogy, and the one most about landscape and what happens to it when money arrives.
Courage and Misfortune: The Mountaineers Anthology Series: Vol 2
A collection of mountaineering writing selected by Peter Potterfield — the moments where courage and misfortune meet on the mountain. Classic accounts from the full range of climbing literature.
Crossing Denali: An Ordinary Man’s Adventure Atop North
Mike Fenner's account of climbing Denali as a regular person — not a professional climber, not a sponsored athlete. The honesty about fear, exhaustion, and self-doubt makes it more relatable than most summit narratives.
Crossing Open Ground
Barry Lopez's essay collection roams from the Arctic to the Sonoran Desert, from stone horse intaglios to the relationship between landscape and imagination. Each essay is a small, precise act of attention. Lopez at his most accessible.
Crossings: A Decade of Surf Travel
Outer Hebrides. Marshall Islands. Haida Gwaii. Tanzania. Vanuatu. Madagascar. Russia. Oregon-based writer Michael Kew heeds the siren song of hard-to-reach locales as few do, and his book Crossings pulls together thirty-five true stories earned from a decade of global surf travel. 400+ pages might seem daunting, but Kew, who’s been likened to Paul Theroux and Jack Kerouac, writes with such an uncanny ear for people and places even non-surfers will be stricken with wanderlust: “Peering into the flames, I wedged my elbows comfortably between driftwood scree, shoes stirring the coarse, gray beach sand. Opposite the fire pit, through the torquing yellows and oranges, sat new friend Roderic: Burly, stubble-faced and densely clothed, alternating between beer and cigarette, he looked more like a typical commercial fisherman than surfer. Yet this was no typical surfscape.” Real adventure travel—the kind that isn’t comfortable, safe, or easily consumed—reminds us that while the world can seem small at times, it remains a very, very big place.
Crystal Horizon: Everest—The First Solo Ascent
Reinhold Messner soloed Everest without supplemental oxygen in 1980 — an achievement so audacious it still doesn't seem possible. His account of the climb is characteristically intense and interior. Nobody has ever been alone at that altitude before or since.
Dark Shadows Falling
Joe Simpson — of Touching the Void fame — on the ethics of high-altitude mountaineering. Written after witnessing dying climbers being stepped over on Everest, it's a furious indictment of the commercialization of the world's highest peaks.
Dazzling Blue
Jamie Brisick's essays on surf culture — the style, the characters, the places where surfing intersects with art, music, and literature. Brisick writes about surfing the way a jazz critic writes about music.
Deep Play
Paul Pritchard's memoir of climbing the hardest routes in Britain and Patagonia. Pritchard was one of the most talented rock climbers of his generation before a falling rock ended his climbing career. The writing matches the climbing: bold, exposed, committed.
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
A teenager who strolled away from a deadly plane crash in the jungle. A sailor who was rescued after spending two months adrift on the Atlantic. An alpinist who dragged his injured body to safety across an unforgiving landscape. Sure, luck played a factor for all of them, but Gonzales mashes up hard science with adrenaline-splashed anecdotes to suggest that some people are just hard-wired for survival—while explaining how the rest of us can still tip the odds in our favor.
Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves
James Nestor went to a freediving competition expecting a quirky sports story and came back with a book about the ocean's effect on human consciousness. From sperm whale communication to breath-hold physiology to the deepest places on earth, it's a journey into water and the people drawn to it.
Denali: A Literary Anthology
Bill Sherwonit's collection of writing about North America's highest peak — from indigenous accounts to modern expeditions. The mountain through many eyes.
Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness
Amy Irvine's response to Desert Solitaire — a woman's reckoning with Abbey's legacy, the modern West, and what it means to love a landscape that's being loved to death. Sharp, personal, and willing to take on the old man.
Desert Notes and River Notes
Two of Lopez's slimmest, most mysterious books, published together. Prose poems disguised as field notes, or field notes elevated to prose poetry. The desert and river landscapes are real but also interior — Lopez writing at his most compressed and luminous.
Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey spent two seasons as a ranger at Arches National Monument in the late 1950s and wrote the book that defined the literature of the American desert. It's cantankerous, beautiful, politically furious, and deeply in love with red rock and silence. The chapter on floating the Colorado River before the dams is an elegy for a world that no longer exists.
Desolation Angels
Kerouac's novel drawn from his time as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades and his subsequent travels. Rawer than Dharma Bums, and haunted by the solitude of the mountaintop. The lookout chapters are among the best things he wrote.
Dharma Bums
Kerouac's novel about mountain climbing, Buddhism, and the search for meaning in postwar America is looser and warmer than On the Road. Based on his friendship with Gary Snyder (thinly disguised as Japhy Ryder), it captures a moment when wilderness and spiritual practice converged in the American imagination.
Dishonorable Dr. Cook: Debunking the Notorious Mount McKinley Hoax
Peter Cherici investigates Frederick Cook's fraudulent claim to have climbed Denali in 1906. A detective story about lies, ego, and the early days of American mountaineering, when the summit was less important than the story you told about it.
Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks
Mark Spence's history of how America's national parks were created by removing the indigenous people who lived in them. Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier — each park was somebody's home before it was nobody's. Essential and uncomfortable.
Distant Shores
Chris Burkard's photography of remote surf breaks in Iceland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, and other places where the water is cold enough to kill you. The images are stunning — empty lineups, volcanic coastlines, surfers as small figures in enormous landscapes.
Down the Great Unknown
Edward Dolnick's account of John Wesley Powell's 1869 expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon — ten men, four wooden boats, no maps. A ripping adventure narrative built on meticulous historical research.
Down the River
Abbey floating rivers across the American West, ranting and rhapsodizing in equal measure. Part travelogue, part environmental polemic, entirely Abbey. The Glen Canyon chapter is a eulogy for a drowned landscape.
Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West
If anyone is qualified to weave a substantive examination of water challenges in the West with a tale of one woman’s solo journey down the length the mighty Green River, it’s journalist and paddler Heather Hansman. Using her river adventure as the story’s framework, Hansman explores the myriad of challenges surrounding water in the West, providing just enough data and detail to educate, without losing the reader to the mind-numbing jargon that defines most water-related writing.
Drawn: The Art of Ascent
Jeremy Collins's illustrated exploration of climbing — each route rendered as art, each summit as a drawing. Collins is a climber who draws and a drawer who climbs, and this book is the rare place where both practices converge.
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
Bill McKibben argues that we no longer live on Earth — we live on a different planet, one he spells Eaarth, where the climate has already changed enough to make the old assumptions obsolete. Not a book about preventing disaster. A book about living in one.
Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild
Ellen Meloy spent years tracking desert bighorn sheep across the canyonlands of Utah. This is her account — lyrical, digressive, deeply strange, and animated by a love for wild animals so intense it borders on obsession. Meloy died before the book was published.
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard in rural Georgia, surrounded by the remnants of the longleaf pine forest that once covered the South. Her memoir alternates chapters of family history with natural history of the ecosystem — poverty and beauty tangled together.
Edge of the Map: The Mountain Life of Christine Boskoff
Johanna Garton's biography of Christine Boskoff, one of the most accomplished female mountaineers in history, who died in an avalanche in China in 2006. A story about ambition, love, and the mountains' indifference to both.
Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains
Krakauer's collection of adventure essays — climbing the Eiger, ice fishing in Alaska, descending into the Carlsbad Caverns — established the voice that would carry Into Thin Air and Into the Wild. The essay on the Stikine ice cap is as good as anything he's written.
Elusive Summits
Victor Saunders on four expeditions to unclimbed peaks in the Himalaya and Karakoram. Wry, self-deprecating, and technically precise. Saunders writes about failure as well as anyone writes about success.
Emilio Comici: Angel of the Dolomites: Passion, Pitons, Politics and the First Big Walls
David Smart's biography of the Italian climber who pioneered big-wall climbing in the Dolomites in the 1930s. Comici's routes were decades ahead of their time. His life — tangled with fascism and tragedy — was as dramatic as his climbing.
Encounters with the Archdruid: Narratives About a Conservationist and Three of His Natural Enemies
What happens when legendary environmentalist and Sierra Club founder David Brower is forced to spend time with a miner, a real estate developer, and a dam builder? Exactly what you’d expect: fiery arguments, ideological head-butting, and alpha-male posturing, all in the name the protection (or destruction) of our wild places. A tantalizing storyline when told by anyone, but when written by master wordsmith John McPhee, the book becomes a classic piece of environmental literature.
End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood
The story opens with a furious 14-year-old Jan Redford scrambling high up a chossy rock face, angry at her dad for keeping her out of the “men’s work” involved in moving the family to a rural cabin outside of Québec. The experience was both terrifying and liberating, and from that night onward her complicated love affair with mountains shaped her life, through losing her boyfriend in an avalanche, and later a marriage that restrained and suffocated her. This is a coming-of-age memoir of a climber finding her way in the alpine and also of a woman and mother carving out her sense of identity in a masculine world. When do we set turnaround times in our everyday lives, and how do we sustain a healthy kinship with anger and fear? Redford often writes that she’s “chickenshit,” yet this book is anything but: Its moods gracefully swing from gritty humor to soul-searching agony to the unfettered, sweet freedom of climbing.
Endurance
Not Lansing's book but Frank Worsley's — the navigator of the Endurance tells his own version of the story. The 800-mile open-boat journey across the Southern Ocean, narrated by the man who navigated it with a sextant and dead reckoning. The seamanship alone is worth reading.
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
Alfred Lansing's account of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition is the gold standard of survival literature. When Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed by pack ice in 1915, he kept 27 men alive through an Antarctic winter, an open-boat crossing of the Southern Ocean, and a traverse of South Georgia Island that had never been attempted. Lansing tells it in prose as spare and relentless as the ice itself.
Enduring Patagonia
Gregory Crouch's memoir of climbing in Patagonia's granite towers — Cerro Torre, Fitz Roy, and the rest of the Chaltén massif. Wind, ice, and vertical rock described with the intensity of someone who spent years getting beaten down by all three.
Eric Shipton: Everest and Beyond
Peter Steele's biography of the British mountaineer who explored more of the Himalaya than anyone of his generation. Shipton was the anti-expedition leader — small teams, light packs, no oxygen. His approach to mountains was a philosophy before it was a style.
Erosion: Essays of Undoing
Terry Tempest Williams could write a grocery list that speaks truth to power. In this new collection of essays from one of America’s most devoted defenders of public lands, she examines the nature of erosion—on our riverbanks and desert mesas, but also on us. Is it destruction or metamorphosis when we’re shaped by the elements of wind and fire, time and truth? And what of democracy, weathered by storms? In these stories, we visit with the native peoples of Bears Ears National Monument, the owls that swoop by Williams’s porch, and protestors, politicians, and prairie dogs—singular characters, all. We consider policy and spirituality, the suicide of a brother, the rockslides of desecration. But even through the despair, these essays rise to a hymn, a summons to howl. Erosion is a tonic, like the landscape of the Colorado Plateau, of which Williams says: “One drinks deeply from this well-spring of wonder, especially in drought.”
Escalante’s Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest
David Roberts retraces the 1776 Domínguez-Escalante expedition through the American Southwest — the first Europeans to cross the Colorado Plateau. Roberts walks the same ground 240 years later and finds both the landscape and the history more complicated than the maps suggest.
Escape Routes
David Roberts's collection of adventure essays spanning four decades. From Alaskan first ascents to archaeological mysteries in the Southwest, Roberts writes with the authority of someone who has been both participant and chronicler.
Everest 1953: The Epic Story of the First Ascent
Mick Conefrey's account of the expedition that put Hillary and Tenzing on the summit — told with fresh research and attention to the politics, personalities, and national rivalries that made the climb possible. The backstory is as dramatic as the summit day.
Everest: Expedition to the Ultimate
Messner's account of climbing Everest without supplemental oxygen in 1978 — the first time anyone had done it. A short, intense book about pushing the human body to its absolute limit and coming back altered.
Everest: The First Ascent
Harriet Tuckey's biography of Griffith Pugh, the physiologist whose research on oxygen, hydration, and altitude acclimatization made the 1953 Everest expedition possible. The scientist behind the summit — overlooked for decades, finally given his due.
Everest: The Mountaineers Anthology Series, Vol. 4
Greg Child's selection of Everest writing — the best accounts of the world's highest peak, from Mallory to the modern era. An anthology that captures how the mountain changed, and how it didn't.
Everest: The West Ridge
Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld's 1963 traverse of Everest via the unclimbed West Ridge remains one of the boldest ascents in Himalayan history. Hornbein's account is spare and honest, and the photographs are extraordinary. A mountaineering book that's also a meditation on risk and partnership.
Explorers’ Sketchbooks: The Art of Discovery & Adventure
Huw Lewis-Jones's collection of field sketches by explorers, naturalists, and adventurers. Darwin's finches, Shackleton's ice, botanical illustrations from the Amazon. The drawings people made before cameras, when seeing meant drawing.
Extreme Eiger: The Race to Climb the Eiger Direct
Leni and Peter Gillman's account of the 1966 race between American and German teams to climb the Eiger Nordwand by its direct line. Two teams, two styles, one wall, and a death that changed everything.
Face to Face: Polar Portraits
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 of mountain folks called Mountain Heros: Portraits of Adventure. Face to Face honors modern water people like surfer Kelly Slater and swimmer Lynne Cox while also plucking historical badasses from obscurity, like beloved Sir Thomas Lipton, who lost the America’s Cup five times. 500 words or so of each person’s biography are interspersed with intimate and action-oriented portraits, and Lewis-Jones’s British perspective brings a much more worldly array of personalities than you’d get from an American author. Flip through or plunging dive—either way, you’ll come away longing for the briny deep.
Facing the Wave
Gretel Ehrlich traveled to Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami and wrote about what she found — destroyed coastlines, displaced communities, and a culture's relationship with impermanence. Ehrlich brings a poet's attention to a journalist's subject.
Faith of Cranes: Finding Hope and Family in Alaska
Hank Lentfer's memoir of raising a family in a remote Alaskan community, told through the rhythm of sandhill crane migrations. Quiet, lyrical, and grounded in the conviction that paying attention to wild things is a form of faith.
Falcon
Helen Macdonald's earlier book — a natural history and cultural history of falcons, written before H Is for Hawk made her famous. Compact, precise, and animated by the same intensity of attention.
Fall of Heaven: Whymper’s Tragic Matterhorn Climb
Messner retells the story of Edward Whymper's first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, adding his own mountaineer's understanding to the most famous disaster in climbing history. Four men fell to their deaths on the descent. The rope may or may not have been cut.
Fatal Mountaineer
Robert Roper's biography of Willi Unsoeld — the man who traversed Everest via the West Ridge, named his daughter after the mountain, and died on Mount Rainier. A life lived at the edge of every possible boundary.
Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine
Julie Summers investigates the life of Andrew 'Sandy' Irvine, who disappeared with George Mallory near the summit of Everest in 1924. Did they summit? The question remains open. Summers builds the portrait of a young man who walked into clouds and never came back.
Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food
Wild foods such as venison, foraged berries and greens, and gathered seafood made up nearly half of the American diet just two hundred years ago—to eat was to be wholly connected with seasons and place. Since then, they’ve become a luxury or even black market item, and today most of the developed world will never have the opportunity to eat anything truly uncultivated. Geographer and environmental anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva asks, “So many edible species and varietals have disappeared to standardization, uniformity, and predictable tastes. What pleasures are we missing?” In her global search for answers, she tries flash-frozen wood ants in Copenhagen (tastes like sour sprinkles), examines the relationship between hunting and conservation in the Congo, and ponders the future of lobsters on the Maine coast. Sensuous and ceaselessly curious, Feasting Wild is the next best thing to breaking bread around a campfire with John Muir and M.F.K. Fisher.
Field Notes
Barry Lopez's collection of short fictions — each one a precise, mysterious vignette about landscape and the human figures who pass through it. Not nature writing. Not fiction exactly. Something in between that only Lopez could have made.
Field Notes from a Catastophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
Elizabeth Kolbert's early climate reporting, before The Sixth Extinction made her famous. She travels to melting glaciers, drowning islands, and warming permafrost, building the case with the same calm, devastating clarity that defines all her work.
Figures in a Landscape
Paul Theroux's essays about people and places — from Africa to the American South. Theroux is one of the great travel writers, and these pieces show his range: sharp observation, occasional cruelty, and a refusal to romanticize.
Fika: The Art of the Swedish Coffee Break
Anna Brones on the Swedish tradition of slowing down for coffee, pastry, and conversation. Part recipe book, part cultural meditation. A gentle argument for stopping.
Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession
Craig Childs on the ethics of taking artifacts from the wild. Who owns a thousand-year-old pot found in a Utah canyon? The museum? The government? The Pueblo descendants? Nobody? Childs doesn't answer the question so much as make you feel the weight of it.
Finding Beauty in a Broken World
Terry Tempest Williams mosaic-making in Ravenna, prairie dog research in Utah, genocide aftermath in Rwanda. Three seemingly unrelated subjects braided into a meditation on pattern, destruction, and the human need to assemble meaning from fragments.
Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer
David Roberts investigates the 1934 disappearance of a 20-year-old artist and wanderer in the Utah canyonlands. Ruess walked into the desert and never came back. Roberts traces the life and weighs the theories, but the mystery endures — which is probably how Ruess would have wanted it.
Fire
Sebastian Junger's short book about wildfire in the American West, Hopi fire ceremonies, and the culture of hotshot crews. Compact and intense, with the same narrative velocity that powered The Perfect Storm.
Fire on the Mountain
Abbey's novel about a New Mexico rancher fighting the government's attempt to seize his land for a missile range. Less well-known than his desert nonfiction but equally defiant. The old man on the mountain is Abbey's purest fictional self.
Fiva: An Adventure that Went Wrong
Gordon Stainforth's account of a climbing accident in Norway in 1969 that killed his brother and left him hanging on a rope for hours. Written decades later, it's a meditation on survival, guilt, and the memories that don't fade.
Flight to Arras
Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance missions over France during the German invasion of 1940. This is his account — lyrical, philosophical, and haunted by the certainty of defeat. The author of The Little Prince at war, seeing the landscape from above as it burns.
Forget Me Not
Jennifer Lowe-Anker's memoir of losing her husband, Alex Lowe — considered the best American mountaineer of his generation — in an avalanche on Shishapangma, and eventually marrying his climbing partner Conrad Anker. A book about grief, love, and the impossible arithmetic of starting over.
Found: A Life in Mountain Rescue
“I love the cold. I love the struggle, the realness, the ridiculousness, and the tenderness of it. Rescue missions are not actually work, not a career; money, power, and prestige mean nothing out here.” Set in the wild, craggy peaks of Washington’s Cascades, Found is a deeply drawn memoir about volunteer mountain search and rescue. There are epics and gory injuries, yes, yet this story burns brightest when describing the motley volunteer community: individuals united by their will to abandon cozy beds at 2 a.m., risking real jobs and angry families, not to mention their lives. With 20 years of experience in picking up bloody boots and hauling fully loaded litters down scree fields, Loewen is an SAR rarity as a young mom. A wry sense of humor—body bag for a birthday present, anyone?—spliced with compassion creates an achingly true picture, scene after scene, of the raw grace we find in the outdoors.
Fragile Edge: A Personal Portrait of Loss on Everest
Maria Coffey's book about the partners left behind when climbers die. Coffey's own partner, Joe Tasker, disappeared on Everest in 1982. She traveled to the Himalaya to understand why climbers keep going, and her book is the most honest account of what the mountains cost the people who stay home.
Free Spirit: A Climber’s Life
Messner's autobiography — from the Dolomites to the fourteen 8,000-meter peaks to his post-climbing life as a museum builder and politician. The full arc of the most important mountaineer of the twentieth century.
Freedom Climbers
Bernadette McDonald's history of Polish mountaineering during the Cold War. Behind the Iron Curtain, Polish climbers developed an approach to the Himalaya — winter ascents, new routes, alpine style — that was bolder than anything the West was doing. Many of them died. This book is their monument.
Geoffrey Winthrop Young
Alan Hankinson's biography of the British mountaineer, poet, and educator who lost a leg in World War I and returned to the Alps on a prosthetic. Young was the bridge between Victorian and modern mountaineering — his influence shaped a generation.
Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu
J. Maarten Troost moved to the South Pacific with his wife and wrote about what he found — kava ceremonies, shark-infested waters, colonial history, and the absurdity of a pale Westerner trying to fit in. Funny and self-aware.
Ghost Wave: The Discovery of Cortes Bank and the Biggest Wave on Earth
Chris Dixon's investigation of Cortes Bank — a submerged island 100 miles off San Diego that produces some of the largest waves on earth. Part surf history, part oceanography, part story of the obsessives who chase waves that could kill them.
Glorious Failures: The Mountaineers Anthology Series Vol 1
Peter Potterfield's collection of mountaineering writing about expeditions that didn't reach the summit. The failures are often more revealing than the successes — what happens when the mountain says no.
God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre
Richard Grant traveled into the Sierra Madre of Mexico — a region controlled by drug cartels, where the Tarahumara run and the law doesn't reach. Dangerous, vivid, and written by a man who kept going when common sense said stop.
Gold Fame Citrus
In Watkins’ poetic and post-apocalyptic debut, a relentless wave of sand called the Amargosa Dune Sea drifts across the southwest, swallowing whole everything in its path—including, if they’re not careful, young lovers Luz and Ray, along with a child they rescued while fleeing Los Angeles. Sure, it’s just a novel, but where people were once drawn west for its titular trio, this dystopian spin on the effects of climate change offers a chilling preview of what might eventually drive us out.
Grand Controversy: Pioneer Climbs in the Teton Range and the Controversial First Ascent of the Grand Teton
The disputed history of who first climbed the Grand Teton — a controversy that has simmered since the 1890s. Surveyor's claims, rival parties, and the politics of first ascents in the American West.
Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail
Ben Montgomery tells the story of Emma Gatewood, who in 1955, at age 67, became the first woman to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail — in sneakers, with a homemade bag. She did it twice more. The story behind the legend is tougher than the legend.
Great Plains
Ian Frazier drove back and forth across the Great Plains for years, collecting stories, histories, and observations about the most overlooked landscape in America. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, missile silos, and abandoned towns — Frazier finds everything. A masterpiece of American nonfiction.
Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness
Doug Peacock spent years alone with grizzly bears in the Yellowstone backcountry, trying to recover from Vietnam. The bears were his therapy. The wilderness was his refuge. Peacock was the model for Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang, and this book explains why.
H is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald trained a goshawk while grieving her father's death. The result is a memoir that's also a natural history, a literary biography of T.H. White, and an investigation into the wildness we seek when domesticated life fails us.
Hangdog Days
In the annals of climbing history, the ‘80s have been written off as something of a spandex-clad stepchild to the sport’s mid-century golden era, where now-legends like Royal Robbins and Yves Chouinard ruled the rock. That didn’t sit well with Smoot, who dedicated two decades to combing through modern climbing’s rowdy adolescence—and his own memories of controversial game-changers like Todd Skinner—to document both the dirtbag antics and bold innovation that paved the way for the sport’s freakishly athletic superstars of today.
Hatchet
Gary Paulsen is one of the all-time masters of children’s literature, and Hatchet is arguably his magnum opus. Ask any adult who read the book as a child and they’ll recount the violent plane crash in the rugged Canadian wilderness, 13-year-old Brian’s realization that he is the lone survivor, his panicked struggle to build a fire, and his ensuing fight for survival armed only with his wits and a trusty hatchet.
Hayduke Lives
Abbey's sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang — more sabotage, more desert, more defiance. Written in the last year of his life and published posthumously. Not as tight as the original, but animated by the same furious love of the land.
Hazard’s Way
Roger Hubank's novel about climbing in the Lake District — ambition, rivalry, and the English mountains as a testing ground for character. Literary fiction set on rock.
Heart Mountain
Gretel Ehrlich's novel set in Wyoming during World War II, when a Japanese American internment camp was built in the shadow of the Absaroka Range. Landscape and injustice, cattle ranches and barbed wire. Ehrlich writes Wyoming the way nobody else can.
Heart of Darkness
Conrad's novella about a journey up the Congo River is the most influential short work of fiction in the English language. Marlow's search for Kurtz is a journey into the center of colonial violence, human capacity for evil, and a darkness that has nothing to do with Africa.
Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsango River
Peter Heller's account of the first attempt to kayak the Tsangpo Gorge in Tibet — the deepest canyon on earth, with rapids that had never been run. One member of the team drowned. The others kept going. Adventure journalism at its most committed.
Hello, Bicycle: An Inspired Guide to the Two-Wheeled Life
Anna Brones's celebration of cycling as a way of life — commuting, touring, culture, and the simple joy of moving through the world on two wheels. Accessible and enthusiastic.
Hermann Buhl: Climbing Without Compromise
Messner and Horst Höfler's biography of the Austrian climber who soloed the first ascent of Nanga Parbat in 1953 — one of the most audacious acts in mountaineering history. Buhl climbed for 41 hours straight, hallucinating near the summit. He died four years later on Chogolisa.
Hide and Seek: The Architecture of Cabins and Hide-Outs
Gestalten's photographic survey of cabins, treehouses, and hideaways around the world. Architecture as escape — each structure a small argument for simplicity and solitude.
Hideouts: Grand Vacations in Tiny Getaways
More from Gestalten's shelter obsession — tiny hotels, micro-cabins, and weekend retreats designed to disappear into the landscape. The photographs do the talking.
High Infatuation: A Climber’s Guide to Love and Gravity
Steph Davis's essays about climbing, BASE jumping, and the relationships that survive — or don't — at the edge. Davis writes about risk and love as if they're the same subject, which for her they are.
High Tide: A Surf Odyssey
Chris Burkard's photography of surfing at the extremes — Arctic breaks, remote Pacific islands, storm swells in Iceland. The images are enormous and cold and beautiful.
Himalayan Passage: Seven Months in the High country of Tibet, Nepal, China, India, & Pakistan
Jeremy Schmidt and Patrick Morrow spent seven months crossing the Himalaya from Pakistan to Burma. The journey covers the full range of the world's greatest mountain chain — glaciers, monasteries, border crossings, and landscapes that change with every valley.
Hit the Road: Vans, Nomads and Roadside Adventures
Gestalten's guide to van life — the rigs, the routes, the people who traded addresses for odometers. Photography-driven, aspirational, and honest enough to include the parking lots.
Honouring High Places: The Mountain Life of Junko Tabei
Born in 1939 in rural Japan, Junko Tabei became the first woman to climb Mt. Everest in 1975 and complete the Seven Summits, and she continued to climb big, scary peaks until she passed away in 2016. Who was this 4’9” mountaineer behind the Tokyo Ladies Climbing Club (slogan: “Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves.”), who balanced a home with a beloved climber husband and two kids and was renowned for her superhuman strength and gentle giggle? Honouring High Places is Tabei’s first book in English, a translated collection of memoirs and photographs filled with the details of post-WWII culture, groundbreaking expeditions, and a life fully enraptured by mountains. In addition to her long list of remarkable firsts, it’s arguable that in the history of world climbing Tabei should also win for “best smile,” and Honouring nearly reads like a series of meditative love letters—to the alpine, to lost climbing partners, to family, to life itself.
Horizon
Barry Lopez's final book — a lifetime of travel distilled into meditations on landscape, memory, and the approaching horizon of his own death. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, from the Galápagos to the Australian outback, Lopez writes his farewell to the world he spent fifty years trying to understand.
Hound of the Sea: Wild Man. Wild Waves. Wild Wisdom.
Garrett McNamara's memoir of surfing the biggest waves on earth — including his record-setting ride at Nazaré. McNamara's childhood was chaotic and his path to big-wave surfing was unlikely. The waves are the least surprising part of the story.
House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest
Craig Childs follows the trail of the Ancestral Puebloans across the desert — from Chaco Canyon to the Mogollon Rim — looking for evidence of where they went when they left. Part archaeology, part desert travel, part detective story about a civilization that didn't vanish so much as disperse.
How to Read Nature: Awaken Your Senses to the Outdoors You’ve Never Noticed
Tristan Gooley teaches you to read the natural world — shadows, wind, animal behavior, plant growth — as a system of signs. The outdoors as a text, and Gooley as the translator.
How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea
Gooley again, this time on water — rivers, tides, puddles, ocean swells. Every body of water is communicating something. This book teaches you to listen.
How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art
Kathleen Meyer's backcountry sanitation guide — practical, funny, and more necessary than any other book on this list. Somebody had to write it. Meyer wrote it well.
Hudson Bay Bound: Two Women, One Dog, Two Thousand Miles to the Arctic
Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho connected over a shared love of paddling as teenagers at a Minnesotan outdoor camp. Later, as college graduation approached, Raiho suggested an expedition inspired by the 1935 book Canoeing with the Cree, a classic outdoors tale of two men who paddled from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay, wending two thousand miles through muddy rivers, whitewater rapids, windy lakes, polar bear country, and dozens of riverfront towns and Indigenous communities. Aiming to be the first women to undertake the route, they set off in a seventeen-foot Langford Prospector dubbed Kawena Kinomaeta, meaning “no worries” in Cree, and eventually adopted a tough scruff of a dog named Myhan as their third boat companion. Hudson Bay Bound shares all the exuberance, self-doubt, relationship spats, exhaustion, and basic truths of their three-month voyage: “When in doubt, don’t think too much, and walk around the block in your hiking boots.” Isn’t it time you planned a big adventure with your best friend?
HW Tilman: The Seven Mountain-Travel Books
Tilman's complete mountain travel writing collected in one volume — from the Himalaya to Patagonia to the remote corners of Africa and Central Asia. Tilman was the master of understatement, and his books are the antidote to every overwrought expedition narrative ever written.
I Promise Not To Suffer: A Fool for Love Hikes the Pacific Crest Trail
Gail Storey's memoir of hiking the PCT with her husband — a journey she undertook not out of love for hiking but out of love for the man doing it. Funny, honest about misery, and ultimately a book about what marriage looks like at 7,000 feet.
Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
Searching for a Northeast polar passage from Europe to China, sixteenth century Dutch navigator William Barents and his crew of sixteen made a few attempts to sail through the Arctic, going farther than any Europeans had before. Proving that the third time is not always the charm, in the winter of 1596 they became stranded, stuck hard in the sea ice off of Nova Zembla, two hundred miles north of Siberia. Barents and his men built a cabin from their boat’s salvaged lumber—ominously, their sole carpenter perished before construction had even begun—and hunkered down for a year of desperate survival, keeping the constant threats of polar bears, frostbite, hunger, and one another at bay. Journalist Andrea Pitzer ventured to the Arctic more than once to track this story, studying Barents’ ship log and other direct accounts from his crew. Icebound is an engrossing, bone-chilling history, an open porthole into the dreams and nightmares of the great Age of Exploration.
Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams
The June 1962 issue of Summit magazine arrived with a revelation: a story about an unknown, unclimbed range somewhere in British Columbia. Spectacular towers of raw, bare rock scratched the sky, and if the pictures weren’t enticement enough to chase “Riesenstein Peak,” the caption surely was: “Who will be the first to climb it?” It was a setup, of course, a sly joke and commentary on the peakbagging grandiosity of the time, and Katie Ives, the literary-minded editor of Alpinist, uses the hoax to frame her exploration of our complex relationship with “the mountains of the mind,” as she quotes Robert Macfarlane—the dreams, longings, and imaginings of people who yearn for summits. It’s a high aim with big thoughts, but Ives roots Imaginary Peaks in the very grounded lives of the three pranksters who knew that all journeys are inner ones and that what matters most about the mountains isn’t getting on top, but who we are when we’re in them.
Imagining the Arctic: Heroism, Spectacle and Polar Exploration
Huw Lewis-Jones on the visual culture of Arctic exploration — the paintings, photographs, maps, and illustrations that shaped how the world imagined the north. A history of seeing ice.
Impossible Owls: Essays from the Ends of the Earth
Touching upon sumo wrestlers, migrating vultures in Pennsylvania, tiger tourism in India, and, briefly, Star Trek: Enterprise, this collection of eight essays by Grantland and MTV News writer Brian Phillips roams widely across the globe and human experience. Wandering from sports writing to travel journalism to pop culture commentary, Impossible Owls perches somewhere between the warm humor of David Sedaris and the sharp social observations of Chuck Klosterman. While there are actual owls, the heart of these essays is the eyes-wide-open investigation of humanity in terrain both wildly remote and suburban. In Lost Highway,” we meet professed alien abductees and explore forgotten towns along Route 66. “Out in the Great Alone” takes us on the Iditarod, but we spend more time with the locals than the racers. Owls is fun and curious, inviting us to consider that for all its shrinking, our modern world remains at least a little untamed and wonderfully strange.
In Monte Viso’s Horizon
Will McLewin's slim, beautiful book about walking in the Italian Alps — Monte Viso and the surrounding valleys. Literary mountaineering at its most refined.
In Patagonia
Bruce Chatwin's book about Patagonia is one of the great travel narratives — though what exactly it is remains debatable. Part travel, part history, part fiction, part hallucination. Chatwin walked through Patagonia collecting stories the way other people collect stamps. Nothing quite like it exists.
In Search of Al Howie
In 1991, wearing racing flats and little more than his signature lion’s mane of red-gold hair, with neither a GPS watch nor a trainer to set pace, Canadian Al Howie blazed two world records back to back: one for a 1,300-mile race, finishing in sixteen days, nineteen hours, and one for a 4,533-mile cross-Canada race, averaging sixty-three miles a day for over two months. Yes, two months. Ultra, shmultra—and now we think a fifty-miler is tough. In this moving biography of an obscure legend, screenwriter Jared Beasley sketches a soulful portrait of an embattled figure who, fueled by fish n’ chips and beer and instinct, won dozens of mega-distance races in the 1980s and ’90s, inspiring many with his working-class heroism and singular devotion to mileage. In Search of Al Howie will leave you yearning for a recent yet distant unplugged era in human-powered adventure, when a free spirit kindled righteous pursuits of endurance as a way of life.
In Search of Captain Zero: A Surfer’s Road Trip Beyond the End of the Road
Allan Weisbecker sold everything and drove from New York to Central America looking for an old surfing buddy and perfect waves. What he found was murkier — drugs, corruption, and the realization that you can't surf your way out of middle age.
In Search of the Old Ones
The book that launched a thousand forays into the desert canyons of southern Utah and northern Arizona chronicles David Roberts’ unlikely evolution from bleeding edge alpinist to Native American archaeology geek. The young Alaskan climbing gun fell hard for the grit of red soil, the call of a canyon wren, and most of all the powerful, obsessive allure of the Ancestral Puebloans who wrote the canyon walls with paint and sculpted soaring cliff dwellings. His book beautifully conveys how curiosity becomes passion, how intrigue becomes compulsion, and for budding fans of the Southwest and the people once known as Anasazi there’s no better place to start.
In Search of the South Pole
Huw Lewis-Jones's visual history of Antarctic exploration — the maps, photographs, paintings, and artifacts of the heroic age and beyond.
In Suspect Terrain
McPhee on the geology of the Appalachians — the oldest mountains in North America, worn down to nubs by time. The companion piece to Basin and Range, looking east instead of west.
In the Cairngorms
Nan Shepherd's poems about the mountains she wrote about in The Living Mountain. Slighter than the prose, but animated by the same intensity of attention.
In The Footsteps Of Scott
Roger Mear and Robert Swan retraced Scott's route to the South Pole in 1985 — on foot, without resupply. A modern expedition in the shadow of the most famous failure in polar history.
In the Kingdom of Ice
Leave it to Hampton Sides to resurrect the almost-forgotten tale of the USS Jeannette, a harrowing story that details Captain George De Long’s ill-fated 1887 voyage to the North Pole. Wrongly convinced by several of the world’s leading scientists of an unfrozen, open-polar sea, De Long and crew sailed into directly into a disaster of their own making that included an ice-crushed vessel, heavy casualties, and permanent relegation to the “failures” chapter of maritime history.
In the Loyal Mountains
Rick Bass's short stories set in Montana's Yaak Valley — the landscape he's spent his life defending. The fiction has the same fierce attachment to place as his nonfiction.
In the Presence of Grizzlies: The Ancient Bond Between Men and Bears
Doug Peacock's second bear book — more focused than Grizzly Years on the biology and politics of grizzly conservation. Peacock has spent more time with wild grizzlies than almost anyone alive, and his authority is absolute.
In the Shadow of the Sabretooth
Doug Peacock connects the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions to the modern biodiversity crisis. The sabretooth is the metaphor — we killed them, and we haven't stopped killing. Peacock at his angriest and most urgent.
In the Zone: Epic Survival Stories from the Mountaineering World
Peter Potterfield's collection of mountaineering survival narratives — the moments when everything goes wrong and the only option is to keep moving. Gripping and well-curated.
Inner Ranges
Geoff Powter's history of Canadian mountaineering — from the railroad surveyors to the modern alpine elite. The Rockies and the Coast Range as seen by the people who climbed them first.
Into the Heart of the Sea
Nathaniel Philbrick's account of the Essex, the Nantucket whaling ship rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820 — the event that inspired Moby-Dick. The crew's subsequent ordeal in open boats is one of the most harrowing survival stories in maritime history.
Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver
As a world record-breaking cave diver and National Geographic filmmaker, Jill Heinerth has plunged into uncharted depths around the globe, from the icy tunnels of an Antarctic iceberg to the cerulean cenotes of the Yucatán Peninsula. Filled with scientific and adventurous firsts as well as claustrophobia-inducing squeezes, Into the Planet is an earnestly told story of life as a professional underwater explorer. Although she didn’t learn how to dive until her late twenties, from a young age Heinerth felt that water gave her a freedom she’d never known on land. She shares the hard-earned euphoria of “swimming through the veins of Mother Earth,” but also the terrifyingly narrow margins for error, as she recounts her own close calls and death after death of colleagues and friends. With the hiss and click of a rebreather, Planet submerges the reader between blackness and light, pausing, every so often, for a heart-stopping view of the sublime wilderness below.
Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
Wade Davis's monumental history of the British Everest expeditions of the 1920s — and the World War I trauma that drove them. The climbers who went to Everest were survivors of the trenches. The mountain was where they went to feel something other than horror. The definitive book on early Everest.
Into the Wild
The story of Chris McCandless, a young man who gave away his savings, abandoned his car, and walked into the Alaska backcountry with a bag of rice and a .22 caliber rifle. Krakauer traces McCandless's journey from suburban Virginia to the Stampede Trail with a mix of admiration and dread, and in doing so raises the question every outdoor person has had to answer: where's the line between freedom and recklessness?
Into Thin Air
Jon Krakauer's account of the 1996 Everest disaster is the book that changed how the world thinks about high-altitude mountaineering. Krakauer was on assignment for Outside magazine when a rogue storm killed eight climbers in a single night, including two of the most experienced guides in the business. The result is a harrowing, self-interrogating narrative that never lets the reader — or its author — off the hook.
Island of the Blue Dolphins
Scott O'Dell's children's novel about a girl stranded alone on an island off the California coast for eighteen years. Based on the true story of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island. Simple, devastating, and one of the books that made a generation of readers care about wildness.
It Happened Like This
Adrienne Lindholm's memoir of working as a backcountry ranger in Yellowstone — the solitude, the grizzlies, the beauty, and the slow unraveling of a relationship that couldn't survive the isolation.
Journey On the Crest: Walking 2600 Miles from Mexico to Canada
Cindy Ross's account of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in the early 1980s — before the trail was famous, before Strayed, before anyone had written a bestseller about it. An honest, unpolished account of walking a long way.
K2
David Roberts's history of climbing on the world's most dangerous mountain — every major expedition, every disaster, every attempt on the savage mountain. Roberts is the most reliable chronicler in mountaineering literature.
K2: the 1939 Tragedy
Andrew Kauffman and William Putnam's account of the 1939 American K2 expedition that ended with the death of Dudley Wolfe and three Sherpas. The first serious attempt on K2, and a disaster that foreshadowed the mountain's lethal reputation.
K2: The Price of Conquest
Lino Lacedelli's long-delayed account of the first ascent of K2 in 1954 — finally setting the record straight about who reached the summit and what really happened with the oxygen. Italian mountaineering politics at their most bitter.
Karakoram: Climbing Through the Kashmir Conflict
Steve Swenson's memoir of thirty years climbing in the Karakoram — not just the mountains but the geopolitics of climbing in one of the most contested regions on earth. Swenson kept returning while wars raged in the valleys below.
Kiss or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber
Intense, unyielding, unapologetic, and at times straight-up angry, world-renowned alpinist Mark Twight holds nothing back in this collection of essays about life in the cold, deadly mountains. Whether recounting his first-ascent exploits in the Alaska Range or sharing his thoughts on nonconformity, Kiss or Kill gives readers the opportunity to spend a few hours inside Twight’s head—and emerge either tougher and more committed to their craft….or perhaps intimidated and looking for a comfy romance novel to cleanse their mental palette.
Kon Tiki
Thor Heyerdahl's account of crossing the Pacific on a balsa-wood raft to prove that ancient South Americans could have settled Polynesia. The theory is debatable. The voyage is not — 101 days on the open ocean with five companions and a parrot, armed with a hypothesis and no backup plan.
Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave
Peter Heller — who wrote Hell or High Water — learns to surf in his forties. The humility of being a beginner, the ocean's indifference to your credentials, and the joy of catching a wave badly. Warm and self-deprecating.
Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Expedition
Buddy Levy's account of the 1881 Greely expedition to the Arctic — 25 men went north, 6 came back. Starvation, mutiny, cannibalism, and one of the most controversial rescue operations in American history.
Ladies of the Canyons: A League of Extraordinary Women and Their Adventures in the American Southwest
Lesley Poling-Kempes profiles the women — archaeologists, writers, artists — who explored the canyonlands of the Southwest in the early twentieth century. Women who did the work, rarely got the credit, and left records that are only now being recognized.
Landmarks
Robert Macfarlane's glossary of landscape language drawn from the British Isles — words for weather, water, earth, and stone that are disappearing from common use. A companion piece to Wild Words, and one of the inspirations for it.
Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road
Kate Harris bicycled the Silk Road from Turkey to Tibet, chasing the ghost of Marco Polo and her own childhood dream of exploration. The question at the book's center: is there still anywhere left to explore?
Lassoing the Sun: A Year in America’s National Parks
Mark Woods spent a year visiting national parks while his father was dying. The parks become a framework for thinking about beauty, family, and what we preserve.
Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance
Peter Stark's collection of essays about how the body fails in extreme environments — hypothermia, altitude sickness, dehydration, drowning. The science of dying, told with narrative precision.
Learning to Breathe
Andy Cave grew up in a Yorkshire mining community and became one of Britain's best Himalayan climbers. His memoir spans both worlds — the claustrophobia of the coal face and the exposure of the north face. A working-class life in climbing.
Learning to Fly: A Memoir of Hanging On and Letting Go
Steph Davis's memoir of her evolution from rock climber to BASE jumper. A book about pushing limits and what happens when the limits push back.
Let My People Go Surfing
Yvon Chouinard's business memoir and environmental manifesto. How a blacksmith who made climbing gear in his garage built Patagonia into a billion-dollar company without abandoning his principles. The most influential outdoor business book ever written.
Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures
Wade Davis on the indigenous cultures disappearing around the world — from the high Arctic to the Amazon to the mountains of Tibet. Davis argues that the loss of cultural diversity is as catastrophic as the loss of biodiversity. Passionate, erudite, and urgent.
Light Years: A Memoir
Le Anne Schreiber's memoir of leaving New York to live alone in rural upstate. A quiet book about solitude, observation, and what happens when you stop moving. The landscape is the Catskills; the subject is attention.
Lighting Out: A Golden Year in Yosemite and the West
Daniel Duane's memoir of a year spent climbing in Yosemite and exploring the West after college. Young, restless, and hungry for rock. Duane writes about climbing the way he writes about surfing — with literary self-awareness and genuine love for the sport.
Limits of the Known
David Roberts's meditation on exploration, risk, and the approaching end of his own life — written after a terminal cancer diagnosis. Forty years of adventure distilled into a farewell. Roberts at his most reflective and personal.
Live Lagom: Balanced Living, the Swedish Way
Anna Brones on the Swedish concept of lagom — not too much, not too little, just right. A lifestyle book with more substance than most, rooted in a genuine cultural tradition.
Live! From Death Valley: Dispatches from America’s Low Point
John Soennichsen's collection of stories from Death Valley — the people, the history, the extreme environment. A portrait of the hottest, driest, lowest place in North America and the strange attraction it holds.
Living High
Linda Gill's memoir of living and climbing in the Pacific Northwest. A quiet book about the mountains of Washington and the life built around them.
Long Distance: Testing the Limits of Body and Spirit in a Year of Living Strenuously
Bill McKibben spent a year training for cross-country ski racing and thinking about what physical effort means in a sedentary culture. The skiing is the frame; the questions about embodiment and endurance are the point.
Lost in the Jungle
Yossi Ghinsberg's account of being stranded alone in the Bolivian Amazon for three weeks after a backpacking trip went wrong. Starvation, parasites, hallucinations, and a rescue that came just in time. Raw survival narrative.
Lost on a Mountain in Maine
Donn Fendler was twelve years old when he got separated from his Boy Scout troop on Mount Katahdin in 1939 and spent nine days lost in the Maine wilderness. His account, written as a boy, has the plainspoken terror of someone too young to embellish.
Lou Whittaker: Memoirs of a Mountain Guide
Lou Whittaker guided on Mount Rainier for decades and led expeditions to K2 and Kangchenjunga. His memoir is the story of a life spent in the Pacific Northwest mountains — practical, unpretentious, and grounded in the daily work of keeping people alive above treeline.
Magdalena: River of Dreams: Colombia
Anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and award-winning author of twenty books, including One River, The Wayfinders, and Into the Silence, Wade Davis has a soul of many passions. One of his strongest is for Colombia, the land and people that stole his heart as a teenager in 1968, before cocaine and civil war transformed one of the earth’s most ecologically and geographically diverse regions into a nightmare of bloody terror. After decades of strife, the country now is healing, creating national parks, restoring Indigenous rights, and opening to travel. Charting the wonders of this renewal, Davis turned to Colombia’s lifeline, the thousand-mile long Magdalena River. With four maps and vivid photography, his new book journeys to snowcapped peaks, the Amazon rainforest, impossibly green wetlands, and coastal sands—where “magical realism is simply journalism.” Best shelved between Gabriel García Márquez and Norman Maclean, Magdalena is a magnetic chronicle of the sacredness of water as the source of all things.
Mālama Honua: Hōkūle‘a—A Voyage of Hope
Through photography, interviews, crew stories, and a foreword by Desmond Tutu, the hardcover Mālama Honua shares the travels of a double-hulled canoe named Hōkūle’a. Built in the 1970s, this sailing canoe was created to revive the art and science of ancient Polynesian wayfinding techniques: understanding the distinct patterns of ocean swells, reading the stars for clues, predicting the weather from animal behavior and wind. No GPS, National Weather Service, or Apple products allowed. Because as one of the book’s modern day navigators says, “If you can read the ocean…you will never be lost.” The book begins in 2014 and covers a multi-year boat journey to communities in New Zealand, Australia, Africa, and South and North America, steered onward by captain Nainoa Thompson, the first native Hawaiian since the 14th century to sail without modern instruments from Hawaii to Tahiti. Visually luscious, educationally inspiring, and totally badass—how many times have you relied upon your smartphone today?—this book is a treasure of hard-won knowledge and experience.
Menlove: The Life of John Menlove Edwards
Jim Perrin's biography of the brilliant, tormented Welsh climber who pioneered some of the hardest routes in Britain in the 1930s and '40s. Edwards was a psychiatrist, a conscientious objector, and a closeted gay man. He took his own life at 52. Perrin writes about him with devastating empathy.
Mer de Glace
Alison Fell's novel set against the backdrop of Alpine climbing — ambition, desire, and the Chamonix aiguilles. Literary fiction on ice.
Midnight Wilderness: Journeys in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Debbie Miller's portrait of the Arctic Refuge — its caribou, its wolves, its vast tundra silence. Miller lived near the refuge for years, and her book is both a natural history and an argument for leaving the last great American wilderness alone.
Miles from Nowhere: A Round-the-World Bicycle Adventure
Barbara Savage and her husband bicycled 23,000 miles around the world in the early 1980s. Her account is joyful, harrowing, and heartbreaking — Savage was killed in a cycling accident shortly after the book was completed.
Minus 148 Degrees: First Winter Ascent of Mount McKinley
Art Davidson's account of the first winter ascent of Denali in 1967 — when temperatures dropped to minus 148 degrees with wind chill. Three climbers survived a storm that should have killed them. The cold is a character in this book.
Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Walk Home
Nando Parrado's own account of the 1972 Andes crash — the companion to Piers Paul Read's Alive, told by one of the survivors who walked out. More introspective than Read's version, and haunted by what it took to survive.
Mixed Emotions: Mountaineering Writings of Greg Child
Greg Child's collected climbing writing — from Himalayan expeditions to Australian rock. Child is one of the best writer-climbers of his generation, and these pieces capture the full range of mountaineering experience.
Mountain Heroes: Portraits of Adventure
Huw Lewis-Jones's visual portraits of mountaineers — the faces behind the expeditions. Photography and biography combined.
Mountaineering Literature
Keri DeTore and Zsofia Pasztor's bibliography and guide to the literature of mountaineering. A reference work for anyone building a climbing library.
Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit
Robert Macfarlane's first book — a cultural history of why humans climb mountains. Macfarlane traces the idea of the mountain from something feared and avoided to something desired and pursued. The book that launched one of the most important nature writers of our time.
Mt. McKinley: The Pioneer climbs
Terris Moore's history of the early attempts on Denali — from Cook's fraud to the first true ascent. Authoritative and well-researched.
Mudflats and Fish Camps: 800 Miles Around Alaska’s Cook Inlet
Erin McKittrick's journey around Cook Inlet by foot and packraft — tidal flats, bear country, and the wild edges of Alaska's most populated region.
My First Summer in the Sierra
John Muir's journal of his first summer in the Sierra Nevada in 1869 — the trip that converted him from wanderer to prophet. The ecstasy is genuine. The prose is rapturous. The mountains are still there.
My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism
David Gessner paddles the Charles River from its source to Boston Harbor, arguing for an environmentalism rooted in joy and wildness rather than guilt and abstraction.
My Journey to Lhasa
Alexandra David-Néel disguised herself as a Tibetan beggar and walked to Lhasa in 1924 — the first European woman to enter the forbidden city. The journey took four months on foot through some of the most dangerous terrain in Asia. Fearless doesn't begin to cover it.
My Kenya Days
Thesiger in East Africa — the final years of a life spent among traditional peoples in landscapes the modern world was closing in on. Elegiac and uncompromising.
My Old Man and the Mountain: A Memoir
Leif Whittaker's account of climbing Everest while reckoning with the legacy of his father Jim, the first American to summit. A son's story about following — and not following — in a famous father's footsteps.
My Penguin Year: Life Among Emporers
Lindsay McCrae spent a year filming emperor penguins in Antarctica for the BBC. His account of the experience — the isolation, the cold, the extraordinary behavior of the birds — is a memoir of attention at the bottom of the world.
My Side of the Mountain
There’s a vocal contingent of present-day adventurers who credit My Side of the Mountain with sparking a lifelong devotion to the outdoors. It’s the story of 12-year-old Sam Gribley, who runs away from home and builds a self-sufficient life in the wilds of the Catskill Mountains. He lives in a hollowed-out hemlock tree, captures and trains a falcon, makes pancakes out of acorns, and engages in other whimsical deeds that have captured the imaginations of generations of adventure-hungry kids.
Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage
Hermann Buhl's autobiography, culminating in his solo first ascent of Nanga Parbat in 1953. Buhl climbed for 41 hours without pause, reaching the summit alone at sunset. The most extraordinary single feat in Himalayan history, told by the man who did it.
Nature Noir: A Park Ranger’s Patrol in the Sierra
Jordan Fisher Smith spent fourteen years as a ranger in the American River canyons — the land that was supposed to be flooded by Auburn Dam but never was. He write from a place of great knowing about a landscape caught between preservation and neglect, with meth labs, murders, drownings, and wildfire countered by moments of wonder.
Nature Obscura
Kelly Brenner's guide to the natural world hiding in urban environments — the ecology of cities, from sidewalk mosses to peregrine falcons nesting on skyscrapers.
Night Flight
Saint-Exupéry's novel about early airmail pilots flying over South America at night — when navigation meant reading the stars and the mountains were invisible until they killed you. Spare, tense, and luminous.
Night Naked: A Climber’s Autobiography
Erhard Loretan climbed all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks in a style faster and lighter than anyone before him. His autobiography is as stripped-down as his climbing — no excess, no sentiment, just movement.
No Easy Way
Mick Fowler's account of climbing unclimbed peaks in the Himalaya, Karakoram, and beyond. Fowler is a tax inspector by day and one of the world's most adventurous alpine climbers by vacation. The combination is quintessentially British.
Of Wolves and Men
Barry Lopez's study of wolves — their biology, their mythology, and humanity's centuries-long war against them. Published in 1978, it helped change how Americans thought about predators. The research is deep and the writing is Lopez at full power.
Off the Road: Explorers, Vans, and Life Off the Beaten Track
Gestalten's van life compendium — the rigs, the roads, the aesthetic of living out of a vehicle. Coffee-table format, wanderlust content.
Oil and Honey: The Making of an Unlikely Activist
Bill McKibben's memoir of a year spent fighting the Keystone XL pipeline and learning to keep bees in Vermont. The activist and the beekeeper as parallel lives — one loud, one quiet, both essential.
Oil Notes
Rick Bass's early memoir of working as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi — before Montana, before the Yaak, before he became an environmental writer. The irony of a future conservationist hunting for oil is never stated but always present.
On the Burning Edge: A Fateful Fire and the Men Who Fought It
Kyle Dickman's account of the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona that killed nineteen members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots in 2013. Dickman was a former hotshot himself, and his understanding of fire behavior and crew culture gives the narrative a depth that journalism alone couldn't provide.
On the Plains of Snakes: A Mexican Journey
Paul Theroux drove the length of the U.S.-Mexico border and deep into Mexico, talking to migrants, cartel survivors, factory workers, and priests. Theroux at his most engaged — the cynicism replaced by something closer to grief.
On the Rez
Ian Frazier spent years on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, befriending an Oglala Sioux man named Le War Lance. The result is a book about poverty, history, humor, and the resilience of a people who've survived everything America has done to them.
On the Ridge Between Life and Death: A Climbing Life Reexamined
David Roberts's memoir of his climbing years — from Harvard Mountaineering Club expeditions in Alaska to the death of his climbing partner and the long reckoning that followed. Roberts examines why young men risk their lives on mountains, and whether the answer changes as you age.
On the Road
Kerouac's novel of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty crossing and recrossing America is the foundational text of the Beat Generation. The road is the point — not the destination, not the arrival, just the movement itself.
On the Run: Running Across the Globe
On the Run is yet another hardcover, stitch-bound delight from Berlin-based publisher Gestalten, a book that feels as good to hold as it is to read, though no one’s judging if you just want to look at the photos. Inside are runners from a wide range of backgrounds and abilities, including profiles of Mimi Anderson, a fifty-seven-year-old mother of three who holds world records in endurance running; Justin Gallegos, the first professional athlete with cerebral palsy; and Brazil’s Ghetto Run Crew, an urban club taking back Rio de Janeiro’s dangerous streets one step at a time. Adding to the stoke are daydream-worthy descriptions of twenty-five marathons and trail runs, from Greece’s Athens Authentic Marathon to California’s Badwater 135 in Death Valley. Spanning the individual and universal in radiant images and stories, On the Run is two-hundred-and-fifty-some pages of runner’s sweet, sweet high, a celebration of how much putting one foot in front of the other can do for the human spirit.
One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest
Wade Davis's masterwork — the story of his mentor Richard Evans Schultes's botanical explorations in the Amazon, interleaved with Davis's own journeys through the same rivers and forests decades later. A double narrative about plants, indigenous knowledge, and the vanishing of both.
One Year on a Bike: From Amsterdam to Singapore
Martijn Doolaard bicycled from Amsterdam to Singapore and photographed the journey. The images are gorgeous — the book is a visual diary of landscapes and encounters across two continents.
Oracle Bones
Peter Hessler's second China book — built around the discovery of ancient oracle bones inscribed with the earliest Chinese writing, but really about modern China's relationship with its own past. Hessler weaves together archaeology, journalism, and the lives of ordinary people navigating extraordinary change.
Ordinary Wolves
“Why, Yellow-Hair Boy, you looked mad as a wolverine in a trap.”
Like a sled dog nose down on the trail, Ordinary Wolves pulls you without hesitation into a life different from what most will ever know—sub-freezing “no-sun winters,” the smell of seal oil at dinner, worrying about whether a moose could crash through the ground-level skylight of your sod igloo. But this wild world is the only one young Cutuk Hawcly has ever known. Raised on the Alaskan tundra with his brother, sister, and idealistic father a day’s sled-drive from neighbors, Cutuk has grown up fishing, hunting, and everyday living on the remote Kuguruk River. He aspires to the on-the-land intuition of hunter Enuk Wolfglove, yet when 12-year-old Cutuk visits the closest village—with its snowmobiles and bright nylon jackets—the native kids choke him in a headlock because he is white and “hideously uncool bundled in our caribou parkas and mukluks, black bear and wolf ruffs, down overpants, beaver hats, wolverine mittens, fox mitten liners…” As Cutuk grows up, the Arctic old ways and the modern world clash over and over. Which path to follow?
Ordinary Wolves is fiction, but author Seth Kantner is no tenderfoot. His parents moved to the northern Alaska wilderness in the 1950s and his dad apprenticed to an Iñupiaq couple in Arctic survival, decades earlier than today’s many reality show survivalists (and yes, even before Dick Proenneke got fish-hungry). Cutuk’s story is at times funny and other times brutally raw, inspired by real people and real emotions in a landscape often overly romanticized. It shines firelight on the true, unapologetic Last Frontier we’ve been seeking since Jack London was just a wolf pup.
The book earned some moose-sized praise when first published, yet many don’t know Ordinary Wolves outside of the Northwest. It’s up for statewide Alaska Reads programming this year, and we’ve heard from friends who’ve read it six-plus times and counting. A tenth anniversary edition is now out—it’s howling to be rediscovered.
Our Towns
James and Deborah Fallows flew a single-engine plane around America for five years, landing in small towns and reporting on what they found. The opposite of decline narrative — a book about the places where things are working, told without sentimentality.
Over the Edge: The True Story of the Kidnap and Escape of Four Climbers in Central Asia
Greg Child's account of four American climbers kidnapped by militants in Kyrgyzstan in 2000. The escape involved pushing a guard off a cliff. A climbing trip that became a war story.
Over the Top, Humorous Mountaineering Tales: The Mountaineers Anthology Series Volume III
The comic side of climbing — collected stories of epic failures, absurd bivouacs, and the moments when the only appropriate response to a mountain is laughter.
Packrafting! An Introduction and How-To Guide
The book that defined the sport. Technical, practical, and written by the man who proved you could carry a boat in your backpack and open up terrain that was previously inaccessible.
Paddling Hawaii
Solo paddling along the coasts of the Hawaiian Islands — reefs, open crossings, and the kind of self-reliance that comes from decades of doing things alone in the ocean.
Paddling North: A Solo Adventure Along the Inside Passage
A solo kayak journey up Alaska's Inside Passage at age 60-something. No support boat, no satellite phone, no concessions to age. Pure competence and joy.
Paddlng My Own Canoe: A Solo Adventure on the Coast of Molokai
The first of the Sutherland trilogy — solo paddling along Molokai's sea cliffs, sleeping on ledges, swimming into sea caves. A woman alone with the Pacific, entirely on her own terms.
Painted Mountains
A climbing expedition to the Karakoram told with literary grace. The mountains are painted in the title and in the prose — vivid, layered, and colored by the cultures at their base.
Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie
The scientific investigation behind The Serpent and the Rainbow — the ethnobotany of Haitian zombie powder, Vodou pharmacology, and the boundary between death and not-death. Academic but riveting.
Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings
A solo sailing journey from Seattle to Juneau through the Inside Passage, reading the water and the history simultaneously. The sea as text — tides, currents, and the layers of meaning left by the people who navigated these waters before engines existed.
Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss
Biography of the Austrian climber who insisted on climbing without pitons in the early 1900s — a purist whose ethics were fifty years ahead of the clean climbing movement. He fell to his death at 27.
Pickets and Dean Men: Seasons on Rainier
What it's actually like to work as a climbing ranger on Mount Rainier — rescues, body recoveries, crevasse falls, and the strange normalcy of living on a glacier. Unglamorous and gripping.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Annie Dillard spent a year watching the natural world around a creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. What she produced is less nature writing than nature theology — a mystic's journal of attention so fierce it borders on violence. The prose is extraordinary. The seeing is harder.
Pipe Dreams: A Surfer’s Journey
The greatest competitive surfer of all time on his childhood, his rivalry with Andy Irons, and what it's like to spend your life inside waves. More introspective than you'd expect from an eleven-time world champion.
Platte River
Three novellas set in Montana — hunting, fishing, and the landscape of the Northern Rockies rendered in prose so vivid it feels like weather.
Postcards From Ed
Collected letters — to friends, enemies, editors, and the government. The private Abbey, funnier and more tender than the public one, still furious about the same things.
Postcards from the Ledge
Collected climbing writing from expeditions across four continents. Witty, self-deprecating, and technically informed — the best kind of climbing journalism.
Psychovertical
Growing up in a violent household in Hull, then finding salvation on the hardest winter routes in the Alps. The connection between the two is never stated and never needs to be. Fear as a constant companion, on the wall and off it.
Pure Land: A True Story of Three Lives, Three Cultures and the Search for Heaven on Earth
Three stories converge at a remote canyon in the Grand Canyon — a Japanese hermit, a pair of hikers, and a murder. The landscape is the constant; the human stories are the variables.
Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert
Essays about the red rock desert of southern Utah — its ecology, its politics, its hold on the imagination. The desert as lover, as teacher, as the thing that won't let go.
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
Terry Tempest Williams watched the Great Salt Lake rise and flood the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge while her mother was dying of cancer. The book braids the two losses — landscape and family — into something that feels inevitable. Williams writes about grief the way Abbey writes about anger: without flinching.
Reinhold Messner: My Life at the Limit
The autobiography told in interview form — every expedition, every controversy, every mountain. The most important mountaineer of the twentieth century in his own words, unfiltered.
Remote Places to Stay: The Most Unique Hotels at the End of the World
Gestalten's collection of extraordinary lodgings in extraordinary places — treehouses, ice hotels, desert camps, and cliff dwellings. Aspiration as architecture.
Riding Into the Heart of Patagonia
As a NOLS instructor in Chile's Aysén Region in 1993, Nancy Pfeiffer watched a man on a horse gracefully navigate a swollen river. Standing with her college students, hungry and wet and not at all at ease, she vowed to return on horseback—to try to experience the land like a local. At the age of 38, she saddled up for lessons at home in Palmer, Alaska, where she worked as a mountain guide, and few years later she was back in Coyhaique, looking to buy a horse and head south. Riding Into the Heart of Patagonia is a memoir of growth—of a self-reliant adventurer learning patience and ceding the urge to control—and also of a changing countryside, with dams proposed and roads being paved. Pfeiffer's observations beckon: flowering calafate, gnarled branches in the lenga forest, the deeply rooted, welcoming people. It all smells of horsehair and rivers and mud and maté, and I didn’t want any of it to end.
Rising: Becoming the First North American Woman on Everest
The 1986 Everest summit via the West Ridge — the hardest route, without supplemental oxygen, told by the first North American woman to stand on top. No fanfare, no self-mythology. Just the climb and what it cost.
River Notes: A Natural and Human History of the Colorado
The Colorado River from source to delta — its geology, its dams, its indigenous history, and what's left after a century of diversion. Compact and devastating.
River of Doubt
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 ended with TR contracting malaria, gravely injuring himself, and begging his son to leave him for dead. The book offers a revealing peek into the life and psyche of one the most spirited U.S. Presidents.
River of Lost Souls
The history of the Animas River watershed in southwestern Colorado — from Ancestral Puebloans to the Gold King Mine spill. A river poisoned by mining and a community reckoning with the consequences.
River Town
Two years teaching English in a small city on the Yangtze during China's transformation. The river rises, the city changes, and the outsider watches with the precision of someone who knows he's seeing something that won't last.
River, One Man’s Journey Down the Colorado From Source to Sea
Walking and floating the entire Colorado River from its Rocky Mountain headwaters to the Sea of Cortez — a journey almost no one has done, through some of the most contested water in the West.
Rock the Boat: Boats, Cabins, and Homes on the Water
Gestalten's survey of floating architecture — houseboats, sailing vessels, and structures built on or over water. The aesthetic of life afloat.
Rock the Shack: The Architecture of Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-Outs
More Gestalten shelter photography — cabins, sheds, and retreats designed to minimize the boundary between inside and outside.
Ron Fawcett: Rock Athlete
The autobiography of Britain's greatest rock climber of the 1970s and '80s. Fawcett climbed harder than anyone in the country and did it with a joy that was infectious. Working-class Yorkshire grit on gritstone.
Roof of the Rockies
A history of mountaineering in Colorado — from the survey era to modern climbing. The fourteeners and the people who first stood on them.
Rough Beauty: 40 Seasons of Mountain Living
A decade in a remote cabin in the Colorado Rockies — solitude, snowstorms, bears, and the slow process of making a home in a place that doesn't make it easy.
Rowing into the Son: Four Young Men Crossing the North Atlantic
Four college-age rowers crossed the North Atlantic in a 29-foot boat. Fifty-seven days, no motor, no support vessel. The youth and audacity are the point.
Running Home: A Memoir
Running as a way of processing grief, motherhood, and wildness — trails in New Mexico, ultramarathons, and the discovery that forward motion is its own form of prayer.
Sacred Summits
The collected climbing diaries — Changabang, Kongur, and the expeditions that defined British Himalayan climbing in the late 1970s. Spare, honest, and haunted by what was coming. The author died on Everest in 1982.
Sailing Alone Around the World: a Personal Account of the First Solo Circumnavigation of the Globe by Sail
The first solo circumnavigation of the globe by sail, completed in 1898 in a 37-foot sloop. Understated, self-reliant, and the ancestor of every solo sailing narrative written since.
Sailing the Seas: Sailing Voyages and Oceanic Getaways
Gestalten's photography of sailing — blue water, wooden hulls, and the geometry of canvas and wind.
Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate
Cultural historian Mark Kurlansky, author of the bestselling books such as Cod, Salt, and Milk, turns his signature deep-dive lens to another focus, that of salmon, which until quite recently roamed abundantly wild throughout the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Textbook in size yet lyrically reverent, Salmon is a four-hundred page ode to a fish “beautiful in its many phases; thrilling in its athleticism; poetic in its heroic and tragic life story.” With stunning images both modern and historical—such as a massive, sixty-four pound Atlantic salmon caught on a rod in the British Isles or a Tlakuit fisherman using a dip net on the Columbia in 1910—and even a few recipes for beer bread and chowder, Kurlansky covers seemingly every angle of river dams, fisheries, aquaculture, and piscine ecology. From Japan’s markets to Alaska’s Bristol Bay, Salmon reveals the long, fabled journey of a fish whose survival is intertwined with our own.
Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer’s Quest to Find Zen on the Sea
Jaimal Yogis caps off a wild and tumultuous youth by running away to Hawaii, where he chases his dreams of living on the beach and riding warm, tropical waves. But his rebellious adventure soon transforms into an inward-facing journey, as he unexpectedly commits to the study of mindfulness and meditation. In his resulting travels from Buddhist monasteries to infamous surf breaks, Yogis explores the parallels between mindfulness and surfing, and he finds equanimity in the whole-hearted pursuit of both.
Sandstone Spine: Seeking the Anasazi on the First Traverse of Comb Ridge
The first complete traverse of Comb Ridge in southern Utah — 100 miles of sandstone monocline, packed with Ancestral Puebloan ruins. Archaeology on foot, in one of the most remote landscapes in the Lower 48.
Savage Arena
Himalayan climbing at its most intense — Changabang, the Eiger in winter, K2. Written with raw emotional power by a climber who didn't separate the physical from the psychological. The author died on Everest in 1982, the same expedition as his partner Boardman.
Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art
The investigation into what really happened to Michael Rockefeller when he disappeared off the coast of New Guinea in 1961. The answer involves headhunting, revenge, and a colonial legacy darker than the official story allowed.
Scraping Heaven: A Family’s Journey Along the Continental Divide Trail
Hiking the CDT with children — 3,100 miles from Mexico to Canada as a family. The logistics alone are staggering. The story is about what happens to a family when the trail becomes home.
Seasons: Desert Sketches
“I have just stapled my hair to the roof,” begins Seasons, a glimmer of the wry wit to come in this posthumous collection of writing from the late Ellen Meloy. Originally recorded as audio stories for NPR Utah in the 1990s, these essays evoke the Colorado Plateau and Southwest canyon country Meloy called home and muse. As with her Pulitzer-shortlisted The Anthropology of Turquoise and Eating Stone, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Meloy is funny and insightful as she links humans and nature in surprising ways. From the profound beauty of Navajo culture milling about the post office to the admirable anarchy of little old ladies in Buicks, not much escaped Meloy’s observant eye for sifting connections out of the finest grains of redrock dust. Annie Proulx’s foreword and Meloy’s own illustrations help anchor this feather of a book, a slight 94 pages, into a vessel steadfast and endearing.
Seaworthy: Adrift with William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting
The nearly forgotten story of William Willis, who sailed a raft across the Pacific at age 61, then did it again at 73. A character so improbable he makes Heyerdahl look cautious.
Seven Summits
The first ascent of the highest peak on each continent — an idea that launched a thousand guided expeditions and changed the culture of mountaineering forever. The original account, before the concept became a checklist.
Sex, Death, and Fly Fishing
Essays about the obsessive life of the fly fisher — the rivers, the hatches, the solitude, and the nagging suspicion that all this time on the water means something beyond catching fish. The title says everything about the tone.
Shackleton’s Boat Journey
The navigator's account of the 800-mile open-boat crossing from Elephant Island to South Georgia — the most dangerous small-boat voyage in history. Where Lansing gives you the panorama, this gives you the tiller.
Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire
Travels among indigenous cultures in Borneo, Haiti, the Amazon, and the high Arctic — each journey an encounter with a radically different way of being human. The fieldwork that fed decades of books and lectures.
She Surf: The Rise of Female Surfing
The history and culture of women's surfing — from the Hawaiian queens to the modern shortboard era. Photography, essays, and profiles of the women who refused to sit on the beach.
Sherpa: The Memoir of Ang Tharkay
One of the first memoirs by a Sherpa climber — expeditions with Tilman, Shipton, and Herzog told from the other side of the rope. A corrective to the Western-first narrative, published decades before the rest of the world caught up.
Shopping for Porcupine
Growing up Iñupiat in the Alaska bush — subsistence hunting, snowmachines, and a childhood measured in seasons rather than school years. A memoir of a life lived closer to the land than almost anyone in modern America.
Silent Spring
This landmark exposé is the result of the nearly two decades that biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson spent in the weeds, studying the damaging effects of synthetic pesticide use on environmental and human health. Its release drew plenty of venom from chemical giants like DuPont, but it also led to a ban on the use of DDT and galvanized a surge in environmental activism that would, among other things, pave the way for the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Simple Fly Fishing: Techniques for Tenkara and Rod & Reel
Stripped-down fly fishing — tenkara rods, simple flies, no reels. The fishing equivalent of the climbing philosophy that built Patagonia: less gear, more attention.
Sixty Meters to Anywhere
What do you do after landing with a thud at an alcohol-soaked rock bottom? If you’re Leonard, you poke around down there for a bit, then grab a climbing rope and head for higher ground. Trading in his popular Semi-Rad charts and graphs—but retaining his trademark self-deprecating humor—for something a tad more serious, Leonard’s memoir traces a personal redemptive arc that speaks to the power of friendship and fresh air.
Sleeping on the Summits: Colorado Fourteener High Bivys
Bivouacking on every Colorado fourteener — sleeping bags on summits, sunrises at 14,000 feet. A project that turns peak-bagging into something contemplative.
Small Feet, Big Land: Adventure, Home, and Family on the Edge of Alaska
Raising children in remote Alaska — packrafting with toddlers, bears in the yard, and the daily logistics of a life that most people would consider impossible. The sequel to A Long Trek Home, now with kids.
Smoky Jack: The Adventures of a Dog and His Master on Mount Le Conte
In the honeysuckle-scented Tennessee summer of 1925, a pedigreed, professionally trained German shepherd is tapped to trade in his fugitive-chasing police work for life as a mountaintop guard dog. Whose ears wouldn’t perk up? This is the true life story of Smoky Jack, as told by his loyal companion Paul J. Adams. With Adams as a naturalist outdoorsman and Smoky Jack for protection, the two became the first caretakers of little-visited Mount Le Conte, nine years before the peak and surrounding hills became Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Together they spent nearly a year under towering hardwoods, red spruce, and massive hemlocks, exploring trail-less ridges and hollows, sniffing out bears and rabbits in the rhododendrons, guiding conservationists and hikers, and blazing paths that many of today's ten million annual visitors still use. Historical images hint of a unique, magical era in our country's past, and if dogs could whistle, one of Smoky Jack’s favorites surely would have been “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
Some Stories: Lessons from the Edge of Business and Sport
Chouinard on risk — in climbing, in business, in life. Short essays drawn from decades of doing things the hard way. The philosophy behind Patagonia, distilled to its essentials.
Soul of Nowhere
Childs at his most extreme — solo desert travel in the canyonlands of the Southwest, sleeping in alcoves, following water through slot canyons where no water should be. The landscape is the character; the human is just passing through.
South! The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917
Shackleton's own account of the Endurance expedition. Less polished than Lansing's version but more immediate — the voice of the man making the decisions, not the historian reconstructing them.
Southern Mail
The first novel — airmail pilots over the Sahara and the Spanish coast, written from the cockpit. Romantic, dangerous, and suffused with the light of North Africa. The apprentice work that led to Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars.
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
How diseases jump from animals to humans — Ebola, SARS, HIV, and the next pandemic. Quammen spent years tracking viruses through jungles and labs, and the book reads like a thriller because the threat is real. Published in 2012. Everything in it proved correct.
Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone
Part science storytelling and part memoir, Spineless takes us around the world and down in deep-sea submersibles to explore the mysteries of jellyfish. Yes, jellyfish. You’ll learn a lot about the world’s oceans and cutting-edge science, yet all the research stays afloat with enthusiasm: “There’s a copepod that says ‘Fooled you!’ when it releases bioluminescent globs of light…” We also meet people who’ve dedicated their lives to the soft-bodied-yet-mighty jelly, and while there’s no red-beanied Steve Zissou, this cast of characters could hold their own in a movie: a Frank Zappa-obsessed Italian marine biologist, engineers infatuated with jellyfish propulsion systems, a quirky inventor of a sting-blocking lotion. Author Juli Berwald, a former ocean scientist, threads in just enough of her personal story to get you thinking about your own shelved dreams. If you grew up wanting to be the next Jacques Cousteau or Sylvia Earle, or even a Wes Anderson oceanographer, this book is for you.
Spirit Run: A 6000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land
Working beside his mother at an apple plant in Yakima, Washington, teenage Noé Álvarez dreamed of a life different from that of his Mexican immigrant parents. He became a first-generation college student, but struggled until he discovered Peace and Dignity Journeys, a grassroots, months-long marathon that takes indigenous participants from Canada to Guatemala. Scraped together by volunteers and little funding, PDJ connects runners to the land and native communities along the way. Sporting neon yellow shoes, one change of clothes, a journal, and a sixteen-hundred-page dictionary—“that, I argued to myself when I packed, contained all the books in the world”—Álvarez struck south from British Columbia with an eclectic band of Dené, Gitxsan, Tohono O’odham, Purépecha, Maya, and Apache runners. Read this soul-searching memoir for a deeper look at the capacity to suffer and transcend through movement, and for a range of real-life characters whose stories will stay with you long after the running ends.
Spirited Waters: Soloing South Through the Inside Passage
A solo kayak journey through Alaska's Inside Passage — tides, bears, weather, and the particular solitude of traveling by paddle. Quieter and less known than it should be.
Stay and Fight
Stay and Fight is land-loving, community-rooted fiction in the tradition of Wendell Berry, though with a little more guerrilla resistance and a lot more sex. Following her boyfriend’s notions of self-reliance, Seattle-raised Helen Conley buys twenty steep, densely wooded acres in Appalachia, but the boyfriend soon abandons her. To everyone’s surprise, Helen stays, inviting a local family, Karen and Lily and their baby boy, to move in and join forces. The resourceful local women butt heads with college-educated Helen and her Foxfire-like “Best Practices Binder”—“look for morels in the creek bed, oyster mushrooms smell like anise”—but together they build a ramshackle off-grid refuge. Years of hard labor, roadkill dinners, and isolation go by, but the outside world eventually comes knocking, then suddenly snarling. How far would you go to protect all that you hold dear? This is one fine rabble-rouser of a tale, as determined as the bite of a snapping turtle.
Stehekin: A Valley in Time
Portrait of the Stehekin Valley in the North Cascades — a community accessible only by boat, foot, or floatplane. A place that exists outside the normal American timeline.
Stone Palaces
Essays about rock climbing, landscape, and the places where vertical stone meets human ambition. Literary climbing writing from a voice that deserves wider recognition.
Strange and Dangerous Dreams: The Fine Line Between Adventure and Madness
A psychologist examines the explorers and adventurers who crossed the line — Meriwether Lewis, Donald Crowhurst, Maurice Wilson, and others whose obsessions consumed them. Adventure as pathology, told with clinical empathy.
Summit Fever
A poet goes on a Himalayan expedition and writes about it like a poet — not a climber. The mountain is Mustagh Tower; the subject is what happens to a mind at altitude.
Summits & Secrets
Diemberger climbed two 8,000-meter peaks first and survived K2 in 1986 when thirteen others didn't. His memoir is philosophical, melancholic, and suffused with the awareness that every summit is borrowed time.
Surf Like a Girl
Photography and profiles of women surfers around the world — the culture, the style, the waves. A visual celebration of female surfing without apology or qualification.
Surf Tribe
Black-and-white portraits of surfers — faces weathered by salt and sun. Vanfleteren photographs surfers the way he photographs anyone: with unflinching intimacy. The ocean is implied but never shown.
Swallowed by the Great Land: And Other Dispatches from Alaska’s Frontier
Life in bush Alaska — subsistence hunting, extreme cold, and the slow encroachment of the modern world on a place that resists it. Kantner grew up in the Arctic and writes about it with the authority of someone who never left.
Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, with Some Unexpected Results
The global history of surfing — how it traveled from Polynesia to every coastline on earth, and what happened when it arrived. Surfing in Gaza, surfing in Iceland, surfing in war zones. The unexpected results are the best parts.
Swell
Seven years sailing solo around the Pacific on a 40-foot boat, surfing remote breaks, and learning to live without a plan. A young woman's voyage that became a way of life. One of the best adventure memoirs of the last decade.
Swell: A Sailing Surfer’s Voyage of Awakening
Having been a marina live-aboard for over three years, I know how many would-be sailors dream of bluewater voyages. But with trip logistics and obligations in the way, even the most dialed boaters rarely leave port. Against the odds, with a combination of good fortune, bartending shifts, and more than a year of hard boat prep, Liz Clark cast off from Santa Barbara in her early 20s and she’s been sailing and surfing the world ever since. Over a decade and 20,000 nautical miles later, Captain Clark brings us Swell, a memoir named after her beloved 1966 Cal-40. It’s a life seemingly so charmed it scarcely seems real, but Clark shares both sunshine and grime, from remote tropical islands and a surf sisterhood to broken-down engines and relationships both damaging and generous. With enchanting illustrations and photos, Swell offers an open-hearted exploration of how to stay aloft from one safe anchorage to the next, navigating the unknown terrain in between.
Tapping the Source
A surf noir novel set in Huntington Beach — murder, drugs, and waves. Dark, propulsive, and the best fictional treatment of Southern California surf culture ever written.
Tarka the Otter
An otter's life in the rivers of Devon, told with a naturalist's precision and a novelist's sympathy. Published in 1927, it remains one of the finest animal narratives in English — unsentimental, ecologically exact, and devastating.
Teaching a Stone to Talk
Dillard's essay collection — shorter and stranger than Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and in some ways more powerful. Each essay is an act of attention so concentrated it feels like prayer.
Tears of the Dawn
Scottish winter climbing at its hardest — ice-choked gullies, blizzards, and the particular masochism of climbing in Scotland when you could be anywhere else. Lines writes about cold the way other people write about warmth.
That Untravelled World: An Autobiography
Shipton's own memoir — decades of Himalayan exploration, from the 1930s Everest expeditions to Patagonia and beyond. The father of lightweight expedition style, telling his story with characteristic understatement.
That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America’s Public Lands
We know that public lands in the United States are under threat, but author Mark Kenyon shows us that they have been since the beginning of the republic. In his debut book, Kenyon lays out the contentious history of U.S lands and profiles some of the modern-day scuffles led by groups ranging from extractive energy corporations to mobs of gun-toting insurrectionists. That Wild Country will leave you better informed, more in love with public lands, and poised to step up and protect them.
The 9th Grade: 150 Years of Free Climbing
How have we gone from fearfully inching up gritstone to audacious on-sights of 5.14d, a level of climbing recently seen as humanly impossible? This is the question at the heart of The 9th Grade, an insider’s round-the-world study of the history, culture, and personalities that propelled free climbing from the early days of the Victorian era to the recent and astonishing first free ascent of the Dawn Wall. American climbing fans shouldn’t be put off by its Euro-centric approach—getting outside the echo chamber of Yankee climbing culture will turn you onto faces you should know but might not, like Patrick Edlinger, Catherine Destivelle, and Yuji Hirayama (Sharma, Hill, and Honnold are here, too). With deep-dive anecdotes and more than 350 photographs, it’s a feast for rock-hungry eyes and soul.
The Abundance
Dillard's selected essays, drawn from across her career. The best introduction to her work — from Tinker Creek to the Arctic to the writing desk. The prose is a force of nature.
The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors
In 2013, Mills embeds with Expedition Denali, a group of Black mountaineers aiming to plant their crampons on the summit of the team’s namesake peak. Peppering their story with those of other Black adventurers, he makes the case that beyond those glacier-strewn Alaskan slopes, there’s a much bigger mountain to climb—one that hopefully bridges a racial gap in both outdoor participation and representation to create a more equitable and just outdoors for all.
The Adventurer’s Son: A Memoir
Dial's son went missing in the jungles of Borneo. This is the story of the search — a father using every skill from a lifetime of wilderness travel to find his child in the most difficult terrain on earth. The ending is not what you want.
The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love
It begins with a prophecy, scratched onto a palm leaf by the village astrologer: “He will marry a girl from far, far away…” Born in a hut on the edge of the Indian jungle, PK rises from humble beginnings to become an artist in New Delhi, where he falls in love with a traveling Swedish woman. Lotta matches the prophecy, but when she has to head back home the stars appear stuck just short of alignment. It’s 1976, and plane tickets to Sweden aren’t cheap, so PK sets off on a secondhand Raleigh with no map and little more than a sleeping bag and $80. His journey takes him 7,000 miles over the roads of Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and Europe. Cosmic and totally groovy, it’s a profound true story of one man’s passage from wild, rural India to the modern Western world, and how an adventurous mindset knows no boundaries.
The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
Childs on the animals he's encountered in the wild — mountain lions, grizzlies, ravens, rattlesnakes. Each essay is a close encounter rendered with the intensity of someone who gets closer than most people dare.
The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning: A Polar Journey
Is it a cookbook? A field journal memoir? A photo album with cool archives, like a scan of a 1912 polar menu featuring “Plum Pouding Union Jack” and penguin? Yes, yes, and yes. But, cooking and cleaning...in Antarctica? Two young women, one an activist, the other a backcountry cook, organized a remote island cleanup project to pick up man-made litter. They cajoled 54 volunteers and constructed one makeshift kitchen to feed everyone for a summer. The experience is told by scrapbook: journal entries, maps, 40 recipes, menus, and to-do lists. Photos historical and modern show the characters drawn to the austral extremes over the last century, from Shackleton to today’s international scientists and adventurers. Maybe it’s the honey oatmeal bread, musings of Russian and Chilean researchers, or dreamlike images of icebergs and whale flukes, but taken together, in what would seem by the title to be the least likely compelling read, it’s a surprisingly hearty chronicle of the bottom of the world.
The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky
Meloy's essays about color, landscape, and the sensory experience of being alive in the desert. The turquoise is literal — the stone, the water, the sky — and metaphorical. Nobody wrote about the desert's palette like Meloy.
The Art of Freedom: The Life and Climbs of Voytek Kurtyka
Biography of the greatest alpine climber most people have never heard of. Kurtyka's ascents in the Himalaya and Karakoram were decades ahead of their time, and McDonald's portrait captures both the climbing and the philosophy behind it.
The Art of Rough Travel: From the Peculiar to the Practical, Advice from a 19th Century Explorer
Francis Galton's Victorian guide to expedition logistics — how to pack a mule, purify water, navigate by stars, and treat snakebite. Reprinted from the 1872 original. Equal parts practical and absurd.
The Ascent
A thriller set on Everest — a climbing expedition unravels as the mountain reveals secrets buried in the ice. Genre fiction that takes the mountain seriously.
The Bear
Off in the future, society has collapsed, leaving behind only a girl and her father as the last people on the planet. They live in an idyllic setting, the stuff of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dreams: a mountainside cabin near a lake, with loons and eagles and trout for neighbors. Together they pick blueberries, grow beets, and hunt and fish for food. The father teaches his daughter how to read the signs of nature, from the night sky to the painted turtle she keeps as a summer pet. Then one dark day, the girl discovers she’s all alone and far, far from home. The Bear has been a bookstore favorite from Miami to Santa Cruz and recently won a Banff Mountain Book Award. Some say it reads like a bedtime story, others feel it’s a post-apocalyptic parable, and I think it’s a little like oatmeal with peanut butter: simple yet satisfying, sticking with you long after you’re done.
The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny
If you’ve studied outdoor education, you’ve learned about heuristic traps: human factors like leadership trust or summit fever that affect decision-making. Should you make a move in the storm or wait it out? And if you can only choose one, do you eat your friend’s heart, liver, or brains? Hmmm. Many think of the Donner Party as a distant textbook chapter, but historian Michael Wallis brings new life—and death—to the survival saga. As the 1846-47 winter snowdrifts pile up to twenty-two feet in the eastern Sierra, you’ll feel like you’re there, shivering under wool blankets, eating through the rations until it’s live mice on the menu, then shoe leather, then pet dogs, then…Samuel Shoemaker’s arm. Out of the eighty-seven migrants who started, only forty-six survived. Would you have done anything differently? With maps, photos, and diary excerpts, this full-bodied chronicle invites you to jump on the wagon train and consider the question for yourself.
The Bill McKibben Reader
Selected writing spanning the career — from The End of Nature to climate activism. The evolution of America's most important environmental writer, from quiet essayist to arrested protester.
The Boardman Tasker Omnibus
The collected climbing writing of Boardman and Tasker — two of Britain's finest mountaineers, published together. Both died on Everest in 1982. The prize named after them is the highest honor in mountaineering literature.
The Bond
The untold story of the 1961 first ascent of Denali's Wickersham Wall — one of the most audacious climbs in North American history, buried for decades by a dispute between the climbers. McCartney finally tells his side.
The Book of Eels
Who knew there could be an international bestseller all about eels? Turns out, as Patrik Svensson writes, quite a few knew. Centuries of leading thinkers—Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, Rachel Carson—have been captivated by eels and their mysterious life cycles, the details of which remain elusive today. Originally published in the author’s native Sweden, The Book of Eels is part natural history and part memoir, as eloquent in surveying modern science as it is in exploring Svensson’s relationship with his father, who grew up catching eels in a creek near his childhood home. With buckets of fishing gear, flashlights, a can of worms, and lyrical words, Svensson shows us “how little a person can really know, about eels or other people, about where you come from and where you’re going.” From birth to dying and all that lies between, this ode to faith and metamorphosis will move you to surprising depths.
The Book of Yaak
Bass's manifesto for the Yaak Valley — the last wild valley in Montana, under constant threat from logging. Part nature writing, part plea, part rage. Bass has been fighting for this place for thirty years.
The California Surf Project
Burkard's photography of surfing the California coast — from the Oregon border to the Mexican border, every break along the way.
The Call Of The Ice: Climbing 8000-Meter Peaks in Winter
Winter climbing in the Himalaya — the coldest, most dangerous pursuit in mountaineering. Moro has made more winter first ascents above 8,000 meters than anyone alive.
The Call of the Wild
London's novel about Buck, a domesticated dog stolen from California and thrown into the Yukon gold rush, where he gradually reverts to wildness. Written in 1903, it remains the most visceral exploration of the animal self buried inside domestication.
The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains
Growing up rough in the Canadian Rockies, becoming one of the best alpinists in the world. Blanchard's memoir is unflinching about the cost — the broken relationships, the dead friends, the moments when climbing asks for everything.
The Climb
Boukreev's account of the 1996 Everest disaster — the counterpoint to Krakauer's Into Thin Air. A different perspective on the same catastrophe, told by the strongest climber on the mountain that day.
The Colors of Nature
An anthology of nature writing by people of color — voices that have been present in the landscape all along but absent from the genre. Essential correction to a tradition that has been overwhelmingly white.
The Complete Walker IV
The backpacking bible — updated and expanded, covering every piece of gear, every technique, every consideration for walking in the wilderness. Fletcher invented the genre of the long walk, and this book is the manual.
The Conquest of Everest: Original Photographs from the Legendary First Ascent
The 1953 expedition in photographs — the images that defined Everest in the public imagination. Hillary, Tenzing, the South Col, and the summit ridge as they looked when no one had been there before.
The Conquest of Mt. McKinley
Belmore Browne's account of three attempts on Denali in the early 1900s — including the expedition that came within 200 feet of the summit before a storm turned them back. The heartbreak of almost.
The Control of Nature
McPhee on humanity's attempts to control natural forces: the Mississippi River, Icelandic lava flows, Los Angeles debris flows. Each essay is a case study in hubris and engineering, told with McPhee's trademark compression and structural elegance.
The Crossing of Antarctica: Original Photographs from the Epic Journey That Fulfilled Shackleton’s Dream
Photographs from the 1958 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition — the crossing Shackleton died trying to complete. Hillary drove tractors to the South Pole; Fuchs crossed the continent. The images of ice and machinery are surreal.
The Crossing: Book 2 of The Border Trilogy
The second McCarthy border novel — a young man crosses into Mexico to return a wolf to the wild. The wolf doesn't survive. Neither does the old world McCarthy is eulogizing. The prose is as good as anything written in the twentieth century.
The Culinary Cyclist: A Cookbook and Companion for the Good Life
Recipes organized around cycling life — food for before, during, and after rides. Brones brings the same Scandinavian-inflected simplicity she brings to everything.
The Danakil Diary
Thesiger's first expedition — crossing the Danakil desert of Ethiopia in the 1930s, through one of the most hostile landscapes on earth, among people who had killed every previous European expedition. He was twenty-three.
The Devil’s Highway
The book’s title refers to a region along the Arizona-Mexico border that’s so hot, bleak, and unforgiving that even Border Patrol agents generally keep their distance. It’s here, in May 2001, that coyotes guide over two-dozen immigrants hoping to launch a better life into the United States—and it’s here that more than half of them die. Urrea’s gripping, Pulitzer Prize-nominated telling manages to humanize an issue that’s long been a political lightning rod.
The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks
Life on the Farallon Islands — 27 miles off San Francisco, surrounded by the densest population of great white sharks on earth. Casey spent time with the researchers who study them, and her account of shark behavior is both terrifying and awe-inducing.
The Dog Stars
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 his friends) lives in a compound with his beloved dog, Jasper, and a survivalist and arms aficionado named Bangley, who saw it all coming. Curmudgeonly Bangley is as happy as he’ll ever be, but Hig misses his wife and longs for contact. He hikes into the mountains to fish and he flies a small plane to look for signs of life. No good can come of this, argues Bangley, and events prove him right...or do they? Heller, who made his bones writing magazine stories, delivers a strangely optimistic and regenerative dystopian tale, one that might—might—satisfy even Bangley.
The Duke of the Abruzzi: An Explorer’s Life
Biography of the Italian prince who was one of the greatest expedition mountaineers of the early twentieth century — K2, the North Pole, Ruwenzori. Royal privilege in the service of genuine exploration.
The Emerald Mile
The subtitle summarizes its engrossing, fast-paced storyline, but The Emerald Mile is much more than a run-of-the-mill adventure yarn. It’s a substantive history lesson of the West’s past and present: Coronado’s 14th-century expedition to the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell’s first descent of the Colorado, the United States’ river-damming efforts (and the ensuing pushback from Ed Abbey et.al.), the culture of river guiding in the West, and more. It’s an adventure classic that stealthy educates and never bores.
The Encyclopedia of Surfing
The definitive reference — every break, every surfer, every era, every contest. Warshaw spent decades compiling what is essentially the complete history of wave riding.
The End of Nature
The book that introduced climate change to a general audience in 1989. The argument was simple: by altering the atmosphere, we have ended the thing we called nature — the world that existed independent of human will. Everything since has confirmed it.
The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and Antarctic
Kolbert curates the best polar writing — from the heroic age to the climate crisis. Nansen, Cherry-Garrard, Lopez, and contemporary scientists, all gathered at the poles.
The Epic Voyage of the Seven Little Sisters: a 6700-mile voyage alone across the Pacific
Willis sailed a raft across the Pacific at 61, then again at 73. The voyages were more dangerous and more improbable than Kon-Tiki, and almost nobody remembers them.
The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears
The science and politics of grizzly conservation, distilled from decades of fieldwork and advocacy. Peacock and Louisa Willcox make the case that the bear's fate and ours are inseparable.
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons
Powell's own account of the 1869 first descent of the Colorado through the Grand Canyon — ten men, four boats, no maps, one arm. The expedition that opened the last blank space on the American map.
The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird
The true story of an Irish national who traveled the world stealing rare raptor eggs — from Patagonian cliffs to Arctic tundras — and the detective who caught him. A crime story set in the world of falconry and obsessive egg collecting.
The Fall
A literary thriller set in the Alps — two climbers on the Eiger Nordwand, decades of secrets, and a fall that echoes through time. Mawer writes climbing with the precision of someone who understands both the rock and the psychology.
The Falling Season: Inside the Life and Death Drama of Aspen’s Mountain Rescue Team
A year embedded with Aspen's search and rescue team — the rescues, the body recoveries, the volunteers who show up in the middle of the night. The unglamorous reality of mountain emergencies.
The Fear Project: What Our Most Primal Emotion Taught Me About Survival, Success, Surfing . . . and Love
An investigation into the neuroscience of fear, tested in the surf. Big waves as a laboratory for understanding the brain's most ancient emotion.
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
In 2009, with little more than a glass cutter, LED flashlight, and a suitcase, young American Edwin Rist broke into the British Natural History Museum and ran off with 299 rare bird skins, including a few dozen prized king birds of paradise, which had been taken 150 years ago from the forests of New Guinea and the Malay Archipelago. Rist, it turns out, was motivated by an infatuation with fishing flies, but Johnson casts the story further into our relationship with feathers—from the Victorian era of Darwin and naturalist expeditions to fashion’s demands for ostriches and egrets to today’s anglers and their fly tie recipe lore. Throughout, Johnson skillfully threads in questions about our desire to claim, collect, and categorize nature. In this Susan Orlean meets Agatha Christie true thriller, you’ll first be hooked on the unfurling mystery, then pulled in deep by an eccentric cast of plume hucksters, big game hunters, scientists, “shady dentists,” and extreme fly-tiers.
The Fish’s Eye: Essays About Angling and the Outdoors
Frazier on fishing — which means Frazier on rivers, weather, patience, and the particular pleasure of standing in water trying to outsmart something with a brain the size of a pea.
The Fly Fisher: The Essence and Essentials of Fly Fishing
A beautiful, comprehensive guide to the culture and practice of fly fishing — technique, gear, destinations, and the philosophy that makes it more than a hobby.
The Forest Woodworker
Working with green wood in the forest — from felling to finished object, using hand tools and traditional techniques. A manual for making things the slow way.
The Founding Fish
McPhee on shad — the fish that fed the Continental Army, filled the rivers of the eastern seaboard, and is now mostly forgotten. Only McPhee could make a fish biography this compelling.
The Future of Ice
Ehrlich on the Arctic — glaciers, climate change, and the dissolution of the frozen world. Written with a poet's grief and a naturalist's precision.
The Gift: A Collage of Stories from a California Surfboard Builder and His Community
Marc Andreini shapes surfboards in Santa Barbara the way his mentors did — by hand, from foam and fiberglass, one at a time. A collage of stories from a community built around craft and waves.
The God of His Fathers: Tales of the Klondike
London's Yukon stories — gold rush desperation, Arctic cold, and the brutal Darwinism of the frontier. The raw material that became The Call of the Wild.
The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim
Fedarko and photographer Pete McBride hiked the entire length of the Grand Canyon — 750 miles through one of the most difficult landscapes in North America. The photographs are staggering. The text argues that the canyon is under threat from development, and the argument is convincing.
The Great Alone: Walking the Pacific Crest Trail
A photographic account of a PCT thru-hike — the landscapes rendered in large-format images that capture the scale of walking from Mexico to Canada.
The Great Outdoors: 120 Recipes forAdventure Cooking
A cookbook for people who cook outside — campfires, portable stoves, Dutch ovens. 120 recipes organized by meal and method, designed for actual wilderness conditions.
The Grizzly in the Driveway: The Return of Bears to a Crowded American West
At their population height, an estimated fifty thousand grizzly bears lived in the Lower 48 states, ambling from Alaska to Mexico and the Great Plains to California’s coast. Over the nineteenth century, humans hunted Ursus arctos horriblis to extinction in most states, and by 1980 only a few hundred remained, mostly around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Endangered Species Act protection gave the bears a chance to claw back from the brink, and now more than two thousand grizzlies hang their hats in the American West, rubbing shoulders with the region’s dominant species, Homo sapiens, sometimes with deadly consequences. Informed by a lifetime of residing, reporting, and hiking in grizzly country, Montana journalist Robert Chaney investigates the growing clash in his broadly researched The Grizzly in the Driveway. With perspectives from mountain bikers, tribal leaders, biologists, technology experts, and North America’s strongest animal, Chaney offers a wholehearted, big-thinking primer on the dilemma of coexistence and the control of nature.
The Guide
Peter Heller’s previous 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 likely salve. It opens three years after The River, when Jack, a young Colorado rancher and guide, takes a last-minute gig at an ultra-exclusive fly-fishing lodge near Crested Butte. Spinning with grief, he’s hoping for healing, or at least distraction, but finds trouble the moment he drives up the narrow canyon. The property is bordered, his irritable manager warns, by one neighbor who shoots at interlopers and another whose dogs killed a trespassing angler. Heller, a fly fisherman himself, casts words as poetry, whether describing a backlit hatch, rigging a rod, or “the spreading rings of rising trout, dapping silently like slow rain,” but it’s the mystery that hooks you. Why is there a hidden camera in Jack’s cabin thermostat? And why do you need a gate code to get out?
The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific
Theroux paddled a kayak through the islands of the Pacific — Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia — in his characteristically abrasive, observant, and entertaining style. The kayak was the excuse; the cultures were the subject.
The Hearts of Men: A Novel
We first meet Nelson as a 13-year-old Boy Scout in the summer of 1962, his shirt and shorts squeaky clean, sash heavy with merit badges, bowlines impeccable. He strives to be loyal, brave, and kind—terms of the Scout Law. At Camp Chippewa in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, Nelson’s the ideal citizen. But his overachieving doesn’t earn any friends until Jonathan, a popular scout, takes an unexpected interest in him. This panoramic coming-of-age novel strides across three American generations, from the echoes of World War I to today in Afghanistan, and from shattering tragedies to sweet first loves. There are times you want to look away from this book, and times you want to hold it close. Through it all, Camp Chippewa remains central, with its tidy tents and fields of lightning bugs. Can the moral compass of summer camp keep us oriented throughout our lives?
The Hermit’s Story
Short stories set in the Montana wilderness — wolves, bears, and the people who live among them. Bass's fiction has the same intensity as his nonfiction, and the landscape is always a character.
The Hidden Tracks: Wanderlust Off the Beaten Path
Long-distance trails and walks around the world, curated and photographed. The paths less traveled — not the famous thru-hikes but the ones you've never heard of.
The Hidden World of the Fox
The natural history of the red fox — biology, behavior, and the relationship between foxes and the humans whose cities they've colonized. Compact and vivid.
The Hinterland: Cabins, Love Shacks and Other Hide-Outs
More Gestalten shelter architecture — remote cabins, off-grid hideaways, and the buildings people construct when they want to disappear.
The History of Surfing
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 one else is even close. But if the word “history” sounds musty, fear not: The writing crackles with vitality, the pace moves quickly, and Warshaw is mindful to place surfing’s tides within broader cultural currents, showing how each influenced the other. Surfer or not, this is a book any adventurer will love.
The Home Place
Raised in rural South Carolina on his grandmother’s farm, Lanham found kinship with the natural world, building new roots on the same lands upon which his ancestors were once enslaved. His memoir unspools across a series of poetic, yet unflinching essays about home, land, relationships, race, and, of course, birds that dispel the notion that it’s only the bold-named white naturalists of yore who deserve a spot in the classic nature-writing canon.
The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks
Williams visits twelve national parks and writes about each one as a meditation on American identity, public land, and what we choose to preserve. Personal, political, and unapologetically in love with the idea of public wilderness.
The Impossible Climb: Alex Honold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life
The story behind the free solo of El Capitan — not just the climb itself but the years of preparation, the community of Yosemite climbers, and the question of what drives someone to attempt something with no margin for error.
The Island
Paulsen's young adult novel about a boy alone on an island in a northern lake. Stripped down and elemental — survival as a form of attention.
The Last American Man
In 1978, at age seventeen, Eustace Conway took one look at his future in an ever-complicated world and decided he wanted nothing to do with the stuff. Instead, he devoted himself to the Appalachian backwoods, carving out a spartan existence that would allow him to exist in harmony with the richness of the land. Or so he thought. When a curious Gilbert tags along for a bit, she discovers that the pursuit of a simpler life is anything but straightforward.
The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest
Meloy's final book — essays about nuclear testing, endangered species, and the contradictions of living in a landscape that is both beautiful and bombed. The desert as contested ground.
The Last Hero – Bill Tillman: A Biography of the Explorer
Tilman was the greatest explorer-mountaineer of the twentieth century and among the most eccentric. He climbed Nanda Devi, sailed to the Arctic in his seventies, and disappeared at sea at 79. The biography matches the subject — spare, tough, admirable.
The Last Nomad: One Man’s Forty Year Adventure in the World’s Most Remote Deserts, Mountains and Marshes
Thesiger's final autobiography — a life of desert crossings, marsh dwelling, and mountain travel condensed into a single volume. The last of the great Victorian-style explorers, looking back.
The Last of His Kind: The Life and Adventures of Bradford Washburn, America’s Boldest Mountaineer
Washburn pioneered aerial mountain photography and made first ascents across Alaska. Roberts's biography captures a man whose ambition was matched only by his photographic eye.
The Last Season
A backcountry ranger disappeared in the Sierra Nevada in 1996. This investigation into his life and disappearance is also a portrait of the kind of person who chooses to live alone in the mountains — brilliant, difficult, and drawn to places where the maps end.
The Last Step (Legends & Lore edition): The American Ascent of K2
The 1978 American expedition that put four climbers on K2's summit — the first American success on the mountain. Ridgeway's account captures both the achievement and the toll.
The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure
Two obsessives in Borneo — one collecting tribal art, the other defending the rainforest. Their stories converge in a place that is being destroyed as fast as it can be documented.
The Life of My Choice
Thesiger's autobiography — the full sweep, from Ethiopia to the Empty Quarter to the marshes of Iraq. The definitive account of a life spent choosing difficulty over comfort, wilderness over civilization.
The Little Prince
A pilot crashes in the Sahara and meets a child from a tiny planet. The most-translated French book in history, and the most elegant fable ever written about what matters and what doesn't.
The Lives of Rocks
Bass's short stories about geology, landscape, and the people shaped by the land they live on. The rocks are literal — Montana's geology — and metaphorical. The writing is dense and luminous.
The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland
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 he offers “field-note, memoir, natural history, and philosophical meditation,” but what Nan Shepherd’s tidy book really is is a love letter to her beloved Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland. Her observations are as sharp the first fall frost, her words as clear as a high mountain stream. The “light is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity,” she writes. John Muir raptured over the Sierra, but Shepherd writes of the Cairngorms with mentholated coolness, and hers is the superior effort, at least when it comes to knowing the “essential nature” that she was seeking from the very first page.
The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom
Seven prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Siberia and walked 4,000 miles to India. Through the Gobi Desert, over the Himalaya, on foot. The authenticity has been questioned. The story is extraordinary regardless.
The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs: Use Outdoor Clues to Find Your Way…
Gooley teaches outdoor navigation without instruments — reading wind, water, trees, stars, and animal behavior. A book that makes you feel illiterate in a language you should have known all along.
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
The true story of Percy Fawcett, the British explorer who vanished in the Amazon in 1925 searching for a lost civilization — and the modern journalist who went looking for him. Grann's investigation into Fawcett's disappearance becomes its own kind of jungle fever.
The Lost Grizzlies: A Search for Survivors in the Wilderness of Colorado
Bass searching for evidence that grizzly bears still survive in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. Part natural history, part quest narrative, part argument that wildness persists in places we've given up on.
The Lost Men: The Harrowing Saga of Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party
The other half of the Endurance expedition — the men who were supposed to lay depots on the opposite side of Antarctica, whose ship blew out to sea, leaving them stranded. Less famous than Shackleton's crossing, equally harrowing.
The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest
Roberts exploring Ancestral Puebloan ruins across the canyonlands — cliff dwellings, granaries, rock art. Each site is a detective story about a people who left and didn't leave a forwarding address.
The Man Behind the Maps
If you’ve skied, you’ve seen and used the art of James Niehues. The lifelong Coloradan wielded the paintbrush that created more than 260 of the mountain portraits that grace some of the world’s greatest ski areas’ maps. Niehues was a struggling freelance artist and designer living in Denver in the 1980s and trying to support a family when he approached ski map legend Bill Brown. Fortuitously, Brown was ready to leave mapmaking, and he symbolically handed over the brush. Thirty years and many, many trail maps later, Niehues is the legend and this 2019 book celebrates his work in nearly 300 lushly printed pages. It moves quickly through his background and technique before getting to the heart of the matter: all those mountain paintings, each on its own page, with no trail names to mar the topography.
The Man Who Climbs Trees: The Lofty Adventures of a Wildlife Cameraman
Remember how as a kid you shimmied up maples or oaks or elms, never once imagining how as an adult you’d do less and less of this because people would look at you funny? Not only did he never stop, Emmy-winning cameraman James Aldred branched out as a career photographer focused on treetop perspectives; his Twitter account reads “jungle canopy specialist,” and you’ve probably seen his work on the BBC or in National Geographic. A high-spirited memoir, The Man Who Climbs Trees is an enthusiastic love letter to big trees in Borneo, Peru, Australia, Costa Rica, and Northern California, including the tallest known tree on the planet, a nearly 380-foot giant. The life of a tree-climbing artist is not all swaying in the breeze, however—there’s also the risk of cerebral malaria, rope system accidents, and over-curious harpy eagles. In Aldred’s descriptions, the trees are both settings and characters, and you’ll wonder why we don’t yet have a catchy phrase for charismatic mega-arboribus.
The Man Who Walked Through Time
The first person to hike the entire length of the Grand Canyon — rim to rim, through the inner gorge. Fletcher did it alone in 1963, and his account invented the genre of the long contemplative walk.
The Monkeywrench Gang
Four misfits wage war on development in the American Southwest — burning billboards, cutting fences, and plotting to blow up Glen Canyon Dam. Funny, profane, and dead serious about the land it loves. The book that launched environmental direct action.
The Mosquito Coast
Theroux's novel about an American inventor who drags his family to the Honduran jungle to build a utopia. It goes wrong in every possible way. A dark comedy about American arrogance in the tropics.
The Mountain of My Fear / Deborah: Two Mountaineering Classics
Two early Roberts expeditions to Alaska — the first ascent of Mount Huntington and the attempt on Deborah. Young men on big mountains, learning what mountains can take from you.
The Mountains of My Life
Bonatti's autobiography — from the first Italian ascent of K2 (and the betrayal that haunted him) to solo first ascents in the Alps. The greatest Italian mountaineer of the twentieth century, telling his story with the passion of a man who was wronged and who never forgot it.
The Naked Mountain
Messner's account of the 1970 Nanga Parbat expedition that killed his brother Günther. For decades, Messner was accused of abandoning his brother for the summit. This book is his answer. The mountain is the jury.
The Natural Explorer: Understanding Your Landscape
Gooley on how to see the outdoors — not with instruments but with attention. Every walk becomes a reading exercise once you know what the trees, clouds, and puddles are telling you.
The Natural Navigator Pocket Guide
The field edition — stripped to the essentials of navigating by sun, stars, wind, trees, and puddles. Small enough to carry in a jacket pocket, dense enough to change how you walk through the world.
The Natural Navigator: The Rediscovered Art of Letting Nature Be Your Guide
A full course in navigation without instruments. Every chapter is a revelation — how moss grows, why puddles form where they do, what the stars are telling you. After reading it, you'll never walk without noticing again.
The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative
“The mountains are calling, and I must go.” If you’re reading AJ, you probably live by this John Muir quote, and you definitely don’t need a brain scan or stress hormone report to convince you nature is a good, good thing. But author Florence Williams, a skeptical New Yorker at heart, asks a reasonable question: why? She takes us around the world in The Nature Fix, a wide-ranging nonfiction tour of the science behind nature’s effect on humans. Meet Japanese researchers analyzing the mental health benefits of “forest bathing,” neuroscientists in Utah mapping connections between adventure and problem-solving skills, and Korean immunologists studying how short bursts of nature enhance cancer-killing cells. From gritty urban park trails to the Idaho wilderness, it’s a heady, thought-provoking investigation that even minimalist Muir would have packed into the backcountry, snug between his bread and tea.
The Nature Instinct: Learn to Find Direction, Sense Danger, and Even Guess Nature’s Next Move
The most advanced Gooley — how to read animal behavior, weather patterns, and landscape features to predict what's about to happen. Nature as a dynamic text, constantly updating.
The New American Road Trip Mixtape
Short essays about driving, camping, and the American landscape — the kind of book you read in a van with the windows down. Unpretentious and warm.
The New Nomads: Temporary Spaces and a Life on the Move
Gestalten on mobile architecture — vans, tiny houses, modular shelters, and the people who chose impermanence as a lifestyle.
The New Wilderness
Many dream of the camping trip that never ends. Surely our best selves are found in nature, right? In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a mother saves her daughter from pollution-induced asthma by moving to the Wilderness State, an experimental preserve where a small group of volunteers live nomadically as hunter-gatherers. The air is clean, the water runs clear, and the night sky sparkles. There’s also a Manual, capital M, a sort of Leave No Trace set of rules to keep the Wilderness State pristine, and Rangers for reinforcement. All effort is toward survival; when a person dies—from a cougar mauling, river crossing, or simply being left behind due to injury—there are no funerals. As years go by, the utopian vision oozes into disturbing desperation. Fans of Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood will love this dark, all-too-real story of our relationship with nature and each other.
The Ninemile Wolves
A pack of wolves returns to Montana's Ninemile Valley, and Bass documents the collision between wildlife and ranching culture. Short, urgent, and partisan — Bass doesn't pretend to be neutral about wolves.
The Old Ways
Walking the ancient paths of Britain, Palestine, Spain, and the Himalaya. Each path is a palimpsest — layers of footsteps, centuries deep. Macfarlane at his most lyrical, following routes that were old before roads existed.
The Outrun
Amy Liptrot's memoir of returning to Orkney to recover from alcoholism. The islands — their weather, their seals, their silence — become the instrument of her recovery. Sparse, windswept prose that reads like the landscape it describes.
The Overstory
I was skeptical about this book, with its nine human characters, sprawling timeline from 19th century New York to Occupy Wall Street, and magical realism meets science fiction meets eco-terrorism fable. What? But Richard Powers, who’s won a National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, knows how to build a fire. The Overstory has earned the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, thousands of impassioned reader reviews (both good and bad but mostly good), and, more important, the wholehearted love of the Lorax. In this novel (and in real life, too), the trees are as alive as the people—mulberries bleed, chestnuts groan, walnuts choke—and they create communities, transform the landscape, and talk nonstop: “We’d drown you in meaning” if only humans knew how to listen. Though massive as a redwood, Overstory’s tiniest moments whirl cinematically, like maple seeds spinning, searching for a spot to take root.
The Pacific Alone: The Untold Story of Kayaking’s Boldest Voyage
Ed Gillet kayaked solo from Monterey to Hawaii in 1987 — 2,200 miles of open Pacific, no support boat. The most audacious solo ocean crossing by human power ever attempted. Almost nobody knows about it.
The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader, California: Adventure, History, and Legend on the Long-Distance Trail
Lest you think Cheryl Strayed holds some sort of monopoly on waxing poetic about the Pacific Crest Trail, this anthology will disavow you of that notion. A mix of historical interludes, short stories by esteemed nature writers like Mary Austin and Barry Lopez, and journal-esque musings from regular ol’ hikerfolk, this collection proves that while a trail can be defined as a simple dirt path between Points A and B, its truer meaning can be found within the people who choose to walk its length.
The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader, Oregon and Washington: Adventure, History, and Legend on the Long-Distance Trail
An anthology of writing about the northern half of the PCT — the essays, fiction, and natural history tied to the trail's Oregon and Washington sections.
The Perfect Storm
The 1991 nor'easter that sank the Andrea Gail and killed six fishermen off the Grand Banks. Junger reconstructs the storm, the boat, and the lives of the men aboard with the narrative intensity of a novelist.
The Pine Barrens
McPhee's portrait of the million-acre wilderness in the middle of New Jersey — a landscape most people don't know exists, populated by people who've been there since before the Revolution. Classic McPhee: the hidden world revealed.
The Places in Between
Walking across Afghanistan in the winter of 2002, alone, just after the fall of the Taliban. Stewart carried a walking stick and a letter from a warlord. The villages, the hospitality, the danger — all rendered with the clarity of someone who understood he might not make it.
The Pursuit of Endurance: Harnessing the Record-Breaking Power of Strength and Resilience
A study of endurance athletes — ultra-runners, thru-hikers, long-distance swimmers — and the psychology of pushing past what the body says is possible.
The Rediscovery of North America
A short, fierce essay about the European plunder of North America — and what a different relationship with the continent might look like. Lopez at his most compressed and political.
The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned From Patagonia’s First 40 Years
The business philosophy behind Patagonia — environmental responsibility as a corporate practice, not a marketing strategy. A companion to Let My People Go Surfing, more focused on the supply chain.
The River
Award-winning writer Peter Heller has traveled the world as an expedition kayaker from the High Pamirs of Tajikistan to Central America to Peru. Which is to say, few can write about rivers—their shifting colors, sounds, and moods—like Heller. Now the Colorado author of the bestselling dystopian novel The Dog Stars merges his paddling experience with his mastery of suspenseful stories. The River tells of two earnest young men, college best friends from different backgrounds: Wynn, a Vermonter with a goofy smile who learned to canoe at summer camp, and Jack, a tough, skeptical rancher from the Rockies who grew up working outside. With fly rods and smoking pipes and a few good books, they’ve set off on a monthlong canoe trip in the Canadian wilderness, but the adventure takes an ominous turn from the start. Our one copy at Adventure Journal headquarters already has a long waitlist, so be ready to pass this gorgeously written thriller around.
The River Horse
Heat-Moon traveled across America entirely by water — rivers, canals, lakes, portages — from New York to Oregon. A coast-to-coast journey on the country's forgotten highway system.
The River Why
A comic novel about a young fly-fishing obsessive in the Pacific Northwest who retreats to a cabin on an Oregon river and discovers that catching fish isn't the same as understanding them. The funniest serious fishing novel ever written.
The Road to San Donato: Fathers, Sons, and Cycling Across Italy
A father-son cycling trip through Italy to find the village their ancestors left. The riding is the vehicle; the family history is the destination.
The Roskelley Collection: Stories Off the Wall, Nanda Devi, Last Days
Collected climbing writing from one of America's toughest Himalayan climbers. Roskelley was famous for his bluntness and his summit record. Both are on display.
The Sea Journal: Seafarers’ Sketchbooks
Field sketches from centuries of ocean voyaging — navigators, naturalists, and sailors drawing what they saw before cameras existed. Lewis-Jones curates the art of observation at sea.
The Sea-Wolf
London's novel about a literary critic shanghaied aboard a sealing schooner captained by Wolf Larsen — a Nietzschean brute who reads Herbert Spencer between beatings. The Pacific Ocean as a classroom in survival of the fittest.
The Secret Knowledge of Water: There Are Two Easy Ways to Die in the Desert: Thirst and Drowning
Childs tracking water through the desert Southwest — seeps, springs, flash floods, and the hidden hydrology that makes life possible in the driest landscapes. Two ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning. Both are real.
The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher
Fletcher's collected shorter writing — the man who walked through time, walked through the Grand Canyon, and made the long walk a literary form.
The Serpent and the Rainbow
The popular account of the Haitian zombie investigation — Vodou, pharmacology, and a Harvard ethnobotanist in over his head. The book that made Wade Davis famous, and the one he's been trying to live down since.
The Serpents of Paradise
Abbey's collected essays — the best of his shorter nonfiction, from desert solitude to environmental rage to the pleasure of watching a rattlesnake. The one-volume introduction to Abbey's voice.
The Seventymile Kid: The Lost Legacy of Harry Karstens and the First Ascent of Mount McKinley
The true story of the 1913 first ascent of Denali — not from the famous leader's perspective but from Harry Karstens, the frontier guide who actually got the expedition to the summit. A correction to the historical record.
The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific
Two years on the atoll of Tarawa in Kiribati — one of the most remote places on earth and one of the first to disappear from rising seas. Troost is funny about the discomfort and serious about the stakes.
The Sharp End of Life: A Mother’s Story
Ever wonder what it’s like to be Alex Honnold’s mom? According to Wolownick, who began climbing in her mid-50s as a way to spend time with her famous rockhound son, it’s not as scary as you’d think. In fact, it ends up kind of inspiring you to achieve the unthinkable, like becoming the oldest woman (at age 66) to summit Yosemite’s iconic El Capitan. Turns out that when your kid is a poster child for fearlessness, you might just adopt that mentality yourself.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
The Pulitzer-winning investigation into the current mass extinction event. Kolbert visits the sites where species are disappearing — coral reefs, rainforests, bat caves — and builds the case that we are living through the sixth great extinction, and we are its cause.
The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness
In the 30 years since this collection was released, Rick Bass’s name has become firmly lodged in American literature, especially in the canons of the environment and the West, yet too few know these three short pieces of fiction that stem from early in the petroleum geologist-turned-writer’s career. In “The Myth of Bears,” a wife tries to run away from her trapper husband and the harsh Yukon wilderness. With “Where the Sea Used to Be,” Wallis Featherstone and his dog Dudley search for oil in the Mississippi Delta: “Looking for the thing, the things no one else knew to look for yet, though he knew they would find it, and rip it into shreds. He considered falling in love." And in “The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness,” a woman explores a fierce intimacy with her family’s land in West Texas. At only 189 pages, this is a book best read by headlamp under a brightly lit, starkly beautiful, unsentimental night sky.
The Snow Child: A Novel
This Pulitzer Prize finalist feels like winter—wet snowflakes on eyelashes, the smell of a woodstove, fear of long, dark nights. Inspired by an old Russian folk tale, it’s a fictional story about a novice homesteading couple in 1920s Alaska who are unprepared for the frontier’s harsh demands. One day on a whim they build a childlike snowman; overnight the snowman vanishes, and a mysterious little girl appears from the woods. She is skittish around people yet sure-footed as a mountain goat in the snow, trapping animals for food with a wily red fox as her hunting companion. Named after alpenglow, she is fearlessly at home in the very wilderness that threatens the homesteaders. Where is she from, and why does she disappear at night? Is she a fairy tale come to life? The Snow Child shifts between the fantastical and the real, an immersive, haunting fable about finding hope in wildness that stays wild.
The Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen trekked into the Crystal Mountain of Nepal searching for the Himalayan blue sheep and the snow leopard. He found something else entirely. This is a book about grief, Buddhism, and the practice of paying attention — set against some of the most remote terrain on earth.
The Solace of Open Spaces
Ehrlich moved to Wyoming to recover from grief and found a landscape vast enough to hold it. Ranch life, winter storms, and the particular silence of the high plains. One of the essential books about the American West.
The Songlines
Chatwin's investigation into Aboriginal Australian song-paths — the invisible routes that crisscross the continent, sung into existence by the ancestors. Part travel, part anthropology, part philosophical notebook. Chatwin at his most ambitious and most controversial.
The Starship and the Canoe
Freeman Dyson designs starships at Princeton; his son George builds a kayak and lives in a treehouse in British Columbia. A book about two kinds of exploration — one into space, one into the wild — and the father-son rift between them.
The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica
The Stowaway starts in 1928 with 18-year-old Billy Gawronski, a first-generation New Yorker from a Polish Catholic family, jumping into the Hudson River at night as he tries to sneak aboard Admiral Richard Byrd’s ship. The Eleanor Bolle is bound for Antarctica and the South Pole—the most sought-after final frontier at the time, and certainly a hell of a lot more exciting than the Gawronski family upholstery business. The backdrop is Jazz Age America—think Rockefellers, flappers, and early years of The Explorers Club—when the U.S. careened forward with heady optimism. Using original Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times expedition footage and historical photos, documentary filmmaker Shapiro weaves a downright plucky true tale of polar fever. Beneath the romance, though, is a thoughtful take on an age-old question: Just what is it that emboldens some to knock down barriers in order to chase a dream? Stowaway is a well-researched and entertaining coming-of-age story of a boy, a country, and an era of exploration.
The Sun Is a Compass
A 4,000-mile human-powered journey from the Pacific Northwest to the Arctic, by bike, ski, foot, and packraft. Van Hemert is a biologist, and the journey is also an act of attention to the ecosystems she crosses.
The Survival of the Bark Canoe
McPhee travels through the Maine woods in a birch bark canoe built by Henri Vaillancourt — a young craftsman obsessed with replicating the ancient Algonquin design. The canoe is beautiful. The canoe builder is difficult. McPhee documents both.
The Tecate Journals: Seventy Days on the Rio Grande
Seventy days paddling the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico — through the border country, the canyons, and the politics that make this river the most contested waterway in America.
The Thousand-Mile Summer: In Desert and High Sierra
Fletcher's first long walk — from the Mexican border to Mount Whitney, through the desert and up into the Sierra. The book that proved a man could walk a thousand miles and write about it without boring you.
The Tiger
A man-eating Amur tiger stalks a remote village in the Russian Far East, and a tracker is sent to kill it. Vaillant's narrative is both a thriller and a natural history of the world's largest cat. The tiger is the antagonist. The deforestation that drove it to hunt humans is the real villain.
The Tower: A Chronicle of Climbing and Controversy on Cerro Torre
The complete history of Cerro Torre — the most disputed summit claim in mountaineering. Did Maestri reach the top in 1959? Cordes investigates the evidence, the personalities, and the obsession that has consumed climbers for sixty years.
The Traveling Feast: On the Road and at the Table with My Heroes
Bass drives across America cooking meals for the writers he admires — McGuane, Kittredge, Joyce Carol Oates. Each visit is a pilgrimage. The food is the excuse; the conversation is the point.
The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir
Silko's memoir of walking the desert near her Tucson home — rattlesnakes, rain clouds, turquoise stones, and the Laguna Pueblo worldview that infuses everything she sees.
The Unsettlers: In Search of Good Life in Today’s America
Adventurers obsess over self-reliance and paring down, taking only what’s absolutely needed. Simplicity begets style, we like to say. Unless you’re living in a utopian commune, that is—then we roll our eyes at such wooly-headed minimalism. But what really happens when we strip away everything but the necessities? So asks Mark Sundeen in The Unsettlers, an observant investigation into the lives of three American families pursuing “radical simplicity,” where making dinner and even personal entertainment become adventurous. Can streamlined lives remain relevant? And hasn’t every other generation asked this question? There aren’t many answers here, only inquiries, which sounds heavy, but Sundeen and the people he profiles are bracingly smart, fun, and non-preachy. The Unsettlers asks us not to change our ways, but to pause and study the trail we’re on—good habits for any explorer.
The Villain: The Life of Don Whillans
Perrin's biography of the most talented and self-destructive British climber of the twentieth century. Whillans was a genius on rock and a disaster everywhere else. Perrin writes about him with the same unflinching attention he brought to Menlove Edwards.
The Voyage of the Cormorant: A Memoir of the Changeable Sea
Beamish built a boat and sailed it down the Baja California coast, surfing the points along the way. Handmade craft, handmade journey. The slowest possible way to cover the distance.
The Watch
Bass's short stories — Montana, Texas, the landscapes where wildness and domestication collide. The fiction is leaner than the nonfiction, and the sentences are some of his best.
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
Susan Casey's book about the science and culture of giant waves — from rogue waves that sink ships to the surfers who chase hundred-foot swells — reads like a thriller built on physics. She goes everywhere the big water goes: Nazaré, Mavericks, the open North Atlantic.
The Way Out: A True Story of Ruin and Survival
Childs lost his home and his marriage and walked into the Grand Canyon in winter. A book about hitting bottom in the most literal landscape for it. Raw, unsparing, and ultimately about the possibility of starting over.
The Way Winter Comes: Alaska Stories
Two winters back, over a lunch of dried caribou along the Arctic’s Noatak River, Alaskan writer Seth Kantner told me I had to read Sherry Simpson’s The Way Winter Comes. First published a decade ago and awarded the Chinook Literary Prize, this little-known collection of essays immerses readers in short scenes of northern wilderness, animals, and people. Juneau-born Simpson’s journalistic accounts of everyday Alaska—“I ride behind a North Pole trapper named Phil on his Tabasco-red snowmachine”—intertwine with graceful lyricism—“In winter the flat, frozen surface of the upper Chena River becomes a boulevard for wildlife, where tracks inscribe a calligraphy of motion in the snow. Everything is going somewhere.” Seth was right. If this book had a spirit animal, it would be the wolverine: small in stature and surprisingly badass. Get the original hardcover if you can, or wait for the forthcoming version from Shorefast Editions.
The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
Based on the Massey Lectures — the argument that indigenous cultures hold knowledge essential to human survival, and that their disappearance impoverishes everyone. Davis at his most urgent and eloquent.
The White Spider
Harrer's history of climbing the Eiger Nordwand — from the first attempts in the 1930s through his own first ascent in 1938. The definitive account of the most famous wall in the Alps.
The Wild Places
Macfarlane sleeping rough in the last wild places of Britain and Ireland — cliff ledges, mountain summits, hollow trees, and salt marshes. The discovery that wildness persists even in the most settled landscape on earth.
The Wildest Dream: Mallory, His Life And Conflicting Passions
The most complete biography of Mallory — not just the climber who disappeared on Everest in 1924 but the teacher, the husband, the man shaped by the trenches of World War I.
The Worst Journey in the World
Apsley Cherry-Garrard's memoir of Scott's Antarctic expedition is widely considered the greatest polar narrative ever written. The winter journey to Cape Crozier to collect emperor penguin eggs is suffering on a scale that defies comprehension. Cherry-Garrard writes about it with devastating understatement.
The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands
Maps from fiction, fantasy, and imagination — Tolkien's Middle-earth, Stevenson's Treasure Island, and dozens of others. Lewis-Jones curates the cartography of places that exist only in books.
Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands: A Young Politician’s Quest for Recovery in the American West
Roosevelt before the presidency — ranching in the Dakota Badlands, hunting, and recovering from the death of his wife. The landscape that made the conservationist president.
Thin Air: Encounters in the Himalayas
Collected Himalayan climbing writing — K2, Everest, Gasherbrum. Child is one of the best writer-climbers of his generation, and these pieces span two decades of high-altitude experience.
Thirst: 2600 Miles from Home
It took Heather “Anish” Anderson 60 days, 17 hours, and 12 minutes to set a speed record on the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail in 2013, but the physical and emotional reckoning that followed lasted quite a bit longer. Her chronicle of that incredible feat and its fallout offers a glimpse into not only what it takes to earn a Fastest Known Time on one of the world’s most famous trails, but also what it can take out of you in the process.
This Cold Heaven
Six journeys to Greenland across six years — dog sleds, hunters, ice, and the Inuit culture shaped by the most extreme environment on earth. Ehrlich writes about cold the way she writes about everything: with a poet's precision and a survivor's authority.
This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back
My dad, a law-abiding rural county detective, always surprised me with his frequent humming of “Signs” by Five Man Electrical Band: “Hey! What gives you the right? To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep Mother Nature in.” Yet while the urge to roam freely might be universal, the U.S. is veering sharply toward a fenced-in future. Ken Ilgunas earned a following with his 2013 Walden on Wheels, and thank goodness he’s back with This Land is Your Land: part polemic, part travel story across America, and part primer on the history of land use laws. The Swedes call it allemansrätten and in Great Britain it’s the “right to roam”—an average citizen’s license to wander on publicly or privately owned land. How often do you encounter “No Trespassing” signs while camping, hiking, or just walking around the block? Before Americans need a membership card to get outside, everyone who moves should read this book.
This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West
An indictment of how public lands in the West are managed — for ranchers, miners, and developers, not for the land itself. Ketcham names names and doesn't flinch. Angry, documented, and necessary.
Through a Land of Extremes: The Littledales of Central Asia
The forgotten story of the Littledales, a Victorian couple who explored Central Asia more extensively than any Europeans of their era — across the Gobi, the Pamirs, and Tibet. Adventure as marriage.
Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart: An Adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail
A PCT thru-hike told without the usual transformation narrative. The trail is beautiful and boring and painful and transcendent, and Quinn writes about all of it with the honesty of someone who doesn't need the hike to have a moral.
Tilting at Mountains: Love, Tragedy, and Triumph on the World’s Highest Peaks
The first woman to climb all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks tells her story — not as a checklist but as a life shaped by mountains and the people lost on them.
Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World
Geological time as a framework for understanding climate change, resource depletion, and our species' myopia. A short, powerful argument that we can't solve long-term problems with short-term thinking.
To the Bright Edge of the World: A Novel
In 1885, shortly after the Alaska Purchase from Russia and before the gold rush, the U.S. Army’s Lieutenant Henry T. Allen was ordered on a 1,200-mile expedition to map the Copper and Tanana rivers of Alaska’s interior. Little was known about the uncharted region at the time, other than frightening legends and a few true tales of previous adventurers who never returned. To the Bright Edge of the World, a novel by Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey, reimagines the journey through fictionalized newspaper clippings, letters, and vintage art and photos, navigating the reader back and forth from actual history to the realm of magical realism. As she carefully reconstructs the wilderness of the late 19th century northern frontier, Ivey also twists the usual Western expedition narrative with a leading female character and an emphasis on First Nations culture. Suspenseful, absorbing, and at times darkly mythical, this is a book made for winter cabin reading.
Totem Pole
Pritchard was hit by a falling rock on the Totem Pole, a sea stack in Tasmania, and suffered a catastrophic brain injury. His memoir of recovery — relearning to speak, to walk, to think — is as harrowing and brave as his climbing ever was.
Touching the Void
Joe Simpson fell into a crevasse in the Peruvian Andes with a shattered leg, was cut loose by his climbing partner, and crawled back to camp over three days. Simon Yates, the partner who cut the rope, tells his side too. The result is the most gripping survival story in mountaineering — and an unflinching exploration of a decision that haunted both men for decades.
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
A geologist's reckoning with the American landscape through the lens of race — how the land was taken, who was erased, and what the rocks remember. Savoy brings scientific training and personal history to terrain that most nature writing ignores.
Tracking Gobi Grizzlies: Surviving Beyond the Back of Beyond
Few wildlife biologists can tell stories like Douglas Chadwick, a National Geographic contributor since 1977 who’s spent his life in the field with elusive and misunderstood animals—snow leopards in the Himalaya, wolverines and grizzly bears in North America. In this strange-but-true account he takes us into a mountainous corner of Mongolian desert, one of the world’s most difficult, remote landscapes, where only four to six inches of rain fall a year, most of the ground is stone, and temperatures range from 122 Fahrenheit to minus 40. How can anything live here? First confirmed by scientists as recently as the 1940s, the Gobi bear is the rarest of bears—a relative of grizzlies, shaggy-haired and shy yet playful, a tenacious champion of adaptation. With chapters like “Indiana Jones and the Gobi Death Worm” plus more than 150 images by photographer Joe Riis, it’s an exploration of survival and a reminder our world still holds mystery.
Tracking the Wild Coomba: The Life of Legendary Skier Doug Coombs
The life and death of the greatest steep skier of his generation. Coombs skied lines in Alaska and the Alps that nobody else would touch, then died on La Meije trying to save a friend.
Tracks: One Woman’s Journey Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback
In 1977, Davidson spent nine months trekking across the broiling, desolate Australian Outback, alone save for her dog and a motley crew of camels she’d spent two years training. While some at the time called her stubborn, foolish, and even crazy, her story is something else completely—a feminist rallying cry, a fascinating study in self-determination, and a celebration of the indomitable power of the human—and animal—spirit.
Travels in Siberia
Frazier drove across Siberia — the entire width of it — and wrote about what he found: emptiness, history, mosquitoes, and the ghost of the gulag. Thousands of miles of road that barely qualifies as road, rendered with Frazier's signature deadpan.
Treasure Island
The adventure novel that invented the genre. A boy, a map, a one-legged pirate, and an island full of buried gold. Stevenson wrote it for children and created something that adults can't put down either.
Two Old Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival
During a harsh winter, a nomadic tribe makes the difficult decision to leave two elderly women behind. At first the women are devastated, but they come to realize they don’t have to give up on life without a fight. To read Two Old Women is to stumble in the snowdrifts of Arctic Alaska, smell the sweet scent of birch woodsmoke, and fear the sharp twinges of starvation. Based on an oral Athabaskan legend, it’s a story rooted in Gwich’in culture, handed down to author Velma Wallis by her mother. And Wallis, who grew up in the six-hundred-fifty-person village of Fort Yukon, knows a thing or two about survival. As a teenager in the 1970s, she moved into her father’s remote trapping cabin, where she spent nearly a dozen years living off traditional subsistence skills. This short novel is a vital and classic tale, carrying embers from an ancient campfire onward into the night.
Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family’s Past Among Taiwan’s Mountains and Coasts
A granddaughter returns to Taiwan to trace her family's story through the island's mountains, forests, and coastline. Geology, botany, and memory braided together. Quiet and precise.
Two Wheels South: A Motorcycle Adventure from Brooklyn to Ushuaia
Brooklyn to the tip of South America by motorcycle — the Pan-American Highway and everything off it. Photography-driven, with the road itself as the organizing principle.
Two Worlds: Above and Below the Sea
Longtime National Geographic photographer David Doubilet has spent more than twenty-seven thousand hours underwater, often in pursuit of the images that have become synonymous with his name: over/unders, above and belows, or, as he calls them, half-and-halfs. Enabled by domed water housings, this technique offers the ability to be in two environments at once, and his first major book in twenty years, Two Worlds: Above and Below the Sea, shows those environments to be stunning in their beauty and fragile beyond compare. A whale shark yawns below fishermen, hoping for a krill handout. In the Caymans, a stingray glides as gracefully as the sailboat above. Tiny and vulnerable, a loggerhead turtle hatchling shelters in tangled golden sargassum. Like many photojournalists, the New York native began as a documentarian and was forged a conservationist by the changing planet. Two Worlds offers one hundred twenty-eight pages of lushly printed photographs, an afterward by astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan, and Doubilet’s well-earned and plainspoken message: Take a look at all this, and act.
Two Years Before the Mast
Dana shipped out of Boston as a common sailor in 1834 and wrote the most vivid account of seafaring life in the age of sail. The California coast before the gold rush, described by a Harvard man doing manual labor.
Ueli Steck My Life in Climbing
The autobiography of the Swiss Machine — the fastest climber of his generation, who soloed the north faces of the Alps in record times and died on Nuptse in 2017. Speed as philosophy.
Undaunted Courage
The Lewis and Clark expedition, told with narrative momentum and deep research. Ambrose follows the Corps of Discovery from St. Louis to the Pacific, through a continent that was anything but empty.
Under Sail in the Frozen North
Worsley sailing in Arctic waters — the navigator of the Endurance on his own, in the ice, doing what he was born to do.
Underlands
Macfarlane goes underground — into caves, catacombs, ice cores, nuclear waste sites, and the fungal networks beneath forests. The world beneath our feet, rendered with the same literary attention he brings to the surface.
Van Life: Your Home on the Road
If you thought the last wisp of van life soul had long since sputtered out, this new hardcover could convince you otherwise. As the guy behind the #vanlife hashtag, Foster Huntington knows all about four-wheeled labor-of-loves, and this overstuffed book showcases hundreds of crowd-sourced photographs he’s collected over the years. It features thoughtful interviews with van dwellers—how much they spent; the realities of gas mileage and engine maintenance; where they make space for surfboards, dogs, bookshelves, guitars, and dirt bikes. And from Australia to France to Michigan, there are shots of custom campers, Vanagons, Sprinters, and school buses, each with their own hard-earned style and affectionately named: Gigi, Chewy, Greta, Hayduke, Walter, The Bunkhouse Road-Tripper. You’ll spend less time worrying if adventure has lost its purity and more getting stoked by this ode to the art of a well-stocked vehicle and its promise of open horizons.
Vesper Flights
Macdonald's essay collection after H Is for Hawk — swifts, wild boar, mushrooms, and the act of paying attention to nonhuman lives. Each essay is a small masterpiece of noticing.
Virga and Bone: Essays from Dry Places
Childs in the desert again — virga that never reaches the ground, bones that last for centuries, and the dry places where life is most concentrated and most fragile.
Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins
Casey on dolphins — their intelligence, their communication, their suffering in captivity, and the humans who are obsessed with them. Part natural history, part investigation into an interspecies relationship we barely understand.
Walking It Off: A Veteran’s Chronicle of War and Wilderness
Peacock walking off Vietnam in the American wilderness. The companion piece to Grizzly Years — less about bears, more about the war that sent him to the bears in the first place.
Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to Yukon on the Grizzly Bear’s Trail
A thru-hike along the wildlife corridor from Yellowstone to the Yukon — following the path that grizzlies, wolves, and caribou need to survive. Conservation biology on foot.
Walking the Gobi: A 1600-Mile Trek Across a Desert of Hope and Despair
Crossing the Gobi Desert on foot at age 63 — 1,600 miles of sand, wind, and extreme temperature. Thayer is the kind of person who makes you reconsider what's possible.
Walking the High Desert: Encounters with Rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail
The Oregon Desert Trail on foot — sagebrush, ranches, and the rural communities of the high desert. A walk through a landscape most Americans have only seen from a car.
Walking to the End of the World: A Thousand Miles on the Camino De Santiago
The Camino from beginning to end — blisters, cathedrals, fellow pilgrims, and the slow transformation that a thousand miles of walking can produce.
Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape
McKibben walks from his home in Vermont to his other home in the Adirondacks, through a landscape where conservation and community are working. The optimistic McKibben — rarer than the angry one, and just as persuasive.
Wanderlust USA: The Great American Hike
Photography from America's great trails — the PCT, the AT, the CDT, and the trails nobody's heard of. Honan has walked more miles than most people drive.
Wanderlust: Hiking on Legendary Trails
Long-distance trails around the world, photographed and mapped. The global version of the hiking life.
Waterlog: A Swimmers Journey Through Britain
You’ll never regret plunging into the “wild swimming” world of British environmentalist Roger Deakin, who lived in a moated farmhouse. Yes, a moat. You’re already charmed, right? Inspired by a short story, Deakin decided to swim throughout Britain in as many bodies of water as possible, often diving into places that hadn’t seen a human swimmer in years. From lochs to ponds, from rivers to the sea, through farm runoff and past alarmed beach guards, Deakin stroked and kicked. Part amphibious adventure memoir and part right to roam manifesto, beneath Waterlog’s delightful quirk lies a serious treatise on public access and the belief that swimming is intrinsically transformative, for “When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens.” First published in 1999, this book has been a word-of-mouth bestseller with a fervent fan club, and the new Tin House edition with a foreword by Bonnie Tsui is sublimely subversive reading of the highest order.
Waves and Beaches: The Powerful Dynamics of Sea and Coast
What The Joy of Cooking is to home cooks, Waves and Beaches has been to sea lovers for nearly sixty years. The comprehensive tome is part fundamental instructional and part voluminous love letter to the alchemy of where land meets the sea. Willard Bascom, an engineer, adventurer, photographer, scientist, and cinematographer who pioneered a number of ocean technologies, including being one of the first to suggest neoprene as a wetsuit material, wrote the book in 1963. When Bascom died in a car accident in 2000, oceanographer Kim McCoy, Bascom’s friend and protégé, inherited the beloved manuscript. This third edition reflects both authors and their seventy years of experience on shorelines on all seven continents, as well as an update devoted to the history and effects of climate change. Four hundred pages stuffed with physics illustrations, encyclopedic text, and gorgeous photography makes for essential reading that belongs on the bookshelves of all coastal explorers.
Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World
“I had forgotten that my phone knew nothing of whether humans can fly, or the seasonal flow of the Rio Grande, that it had no actual experience because it had never been born, only programmed by someone who might never have set foot in New Mexico.” Winding up far off-route after trying to find a hot spring, science journalist M.R. Connor wonders at the extent GPS technology has commandeered our natural sense of direction, and she then heads out to investigate traditional techniques of human wayfinding with master navigators in the Canadian Arctic, Australia, and the South Pacific. She also ventures deep into modern psychology and the science behind why our brains need to free range; for example, a lack of natural spatial exercise can shrink the hippocampus, increasing risk for depression, PTSD, and Alzheimer’s. Combining a travel narrative with fascinating research, Wayfinding makes a captivating case for reconnecting with our senses and the journey rather than the destination.
Welcome to the Goddam Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Grat White North
A tiny outpost in the Norwegian Arctic and a dogsled camp fixed on a remote slab of Alaskan ice serve as frigid twin sirens for Braverman, who spends several years cycling through both places in an effort to harden her exterior and untangle her insides with equal measures of cold, isolation, and manual labor. In the process, she discovers a valuable truth—that sometimes it’s the suffering you choose that helps you work through the trauma you didn’t.
West With the Night: A Memoir
Markham grew up in Kenya, trained racehorses, and became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Hemingway said she could write rings around all of them. He was right.
When the Alps Cast Their Spell
A history of Himalayan mountaineering's golden age — the 1950s and '60s, when the great peaks fell one by one. Braham was there for some of it, and his perspective is both participant and historian.
Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens's novel about a girl growing up alone in the marshes of coastal North Carolina is a murder mystery wrapped in a naturalist's journal. The landscape — tidal flats, fireflies, oyster shells — is rendered with the precision of someone who has spent decades in the field.
Where the Pavement Ends: One Woman’s Bicycle Trip through Mongolia, China, & Vietnam
Solo bicycle travel through Asia — dirt roads, language barriers, and the hospitality of strangers. The pavement ends early and the real journey begins.
Where the Sea Used to Be
Bass's novel about oil exploration in Montana — the search for ancient seas buried beneath the mountains. Dense, geological, and animated by the tension between extraction and preservation.
Where the Water Goes: Life and Death on the Colorado River
Books about water rights tend to run, well, a little dry. But in this nonfiction look at the Colorado River and our complex dependence on its every drop, The New Yorker’s David Owen skillfully stokes curiosity for what’s around each bend. Owen’s voice is campfire casual, leading to “oh, now I get it!” moments as he unravels layers of human history and paradoxes of conservation and energy use. From archaic engineering feats to surprising “Law of the River” rules—wait, we haven’t changed that policy since the Gold Rush?—it’s a dusty, fascinating trail of whodunit from the Rocky Mountain headwaters to Mexico, and little is as simple as it seems. Where the Water Goes is important reading, and Owen’s no-stone-unturned reporting shows not only how we got here, but how we might steer onward to the future of the West.
White Fang
The inverse of The Call of the Wild — a wolf-dog hybrid moves from wilderness to domestication. London exploring the same territory from the other direction.
Why I Came West
Bass's memoir of moving to Montana's Yaak Valley and spending decades defending it. The personal story behind the activism — why a man from Texas chose the wildest place in the Lower 48 and refused to leave.
Why We Swim
Combining travel and sports writing with cultural history, Why We Swim is a bracing collection of stories from the world’s untamed waters and community pools, and writer Bonnie Tsui, a near-daily swimmer whose parents met poolside, is the perfect guide to the life aquatic. From the free-diving superpowers of Southeast Asia’s sea nomads to the habits of Olympian world record-holders, she ponders how humans have evolved for land yet been drawn for millennia to water: Neolithic cave paintings featuring swimmers date back ten thousand years. If you’re part selkie—a half-seal, half-human character of North Atlantic folklore—then Tsui might inspire you to try diving two hundred feet down in the ocean, or, if extreme cold is more your thing, joining the International Ice Swimming Association. Even if you’re like me, recovering from a childhood of failed pool lessons, here is the push to cannonball, once and for all, into the deep end.
Wild
While there’s no telling how many long-distance hiking dreams have sprung from its wake, Strayed’s memoir detailing the heartbreaking circumstances that inspired her now-famous ramble along the Pacific Crest Trail (and a Hollywood movie, to boot) is less a love letter to the backcountry than it is an ode to a more internal sort of adventure. Turns out you really can find yourself out there, if you’re willing to trade some sweat equity for the revelation.
Wild Geese: A Collection of Nan Shepherd’s Writing
Shepherd's uncollected essays and fiction — the work beyond The Living Mountain. The same attention, the same mountains, different angles of approach.
Wild Signs and Star Paths
The most recent Gooley — advanced natural navigation, from reading clouds to interpreting animal tracks. The outdoors as an endless curriculum.
Wildfire: On the Front Lines With Station 8
A season with a wildfire crew — the work, the risk, the culture, and the increasingly impossible conditions that climate change is creating for the people who fight fire.
Wildness: An Ode to Newfoundland and Labrador
A chef's love letter to the landscape and food of Newfoundland — wild game, foraged plants, and the connection between cooking and the land the ingredients come from.
Wildside: The Enchanted Life of Hunters and Gatherers
Gestalten's exploration of hunting, foraging, and gathering cultures around the world. The oldest human relationship with the land, still practiced.
Wildwood
Deakin's exploration of Britain's woods — coppicing, swimming in forest pools, sleeping in hollow trees. The companion piece to Waterlog, trading rivers for trees.
Wilfred Thesiger: My Life and Travels
The illustrated autobiography — Thesiger's life in photographs and text. The deserts, the marshes, the mountains, and the people he traveled with.
Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer
The authorized biography — the full arc of a life spent choosing the hardest path. Maitland had access to Thesiger's papers and the result is definitive.
Wind, Sand and Stars
Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wasn’t just the writer of The Little Prince, he was a pilot who helped pioneer postal aviation in the 1920s, when planes barely had instruments (he lamented that pilots of later, more-advanced planes were little more than accountants). Wind, Sand is his masterpiece of memoir and ode to the romance of flying in its earliest days. Saint-Exupéry crashed many times, including in the Sahara (a gripping account), but the book flies highest when he rhapsodizes about the joys of the sky. “The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth,” he wrote, and in this case it has unveiled the true face of the man.
Winter Count
Lopez's short fiction — spare, mysterious stories set in landscapes where the natural world presses against the human. Each story is a small window into a larger wilderness.
Winter Pasture: One Woman’s Journey with China’s Kazakh Herders
“Later, when I found myself hoisting thirty pounds of snow, tottering across the desert huffing and puffing like an ox, I couldn’t help but sigh: bad idea.” So notes eighty-eight pound Li Juan in her surprisingly humorous memoir about a winter living with nomadic Kazakh herders. Who knew wrangling camels could be laugh out loud funny? Li, from northwestern China’s Altai Mountains, struggles to find anyone willing to take her on their journey to the remote and windy tundra. But her mother remembers a family that owes them money, and they quickly agree; Li will be free labor and an easy way to cancel the debt. With several hundred camels, sheep, horses, and cows, together they venture by foot and horseback into the frozen steppes, where the night temps dip beyond twenty below and shelter is a tiny underground burrow. Li is a darling guide, and she writes candidly, evoking the beauty and harshness that comes with this close-to-the-earth way of life. A bestseller in China recently translated into English, Winter Pasture is the most delightful book I’ve read all year.
Winter: Notes from Montana
Bass's journal of a Montana winter — wood-cutting, snowshoeing, and the particular silence of the Yaak Valley under snow. A small book about a cold season in a wild place.
Wolf Girl: Finding Myself in the Wild
A memoir of regenerative ranching, wildness, and the rewilding of a life. Markegard raises livestock in partnership with the land — predators included.
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
Remembering a teenage incident, Aimee Nezhukumatathil suggests responding to a would-be friend’s insult like an axolotl, the Mexican salamander that appears serene, yet “when it eats—what a wild mess—when it gathers a tangle of bloodworms into its mouth, you will understand how a galaxy first learns to spin in the dark, and how it begins to grow and grow.” Braiding the microscopic with the universal in her memoir essay collection, World of Wonders, the award-winning poet and American-raised daughter of a Filipino mom and Indian father writes of nature as an elemental part of who we are. With imaginative prose dipping from joyful to bittersweet, Nezhukumatathil reveals lessons about identity, race, love, and family distilled from the navigation of an indigo bunting, the echolocation of a narwhal, or the defensive moves of the touch-me-not plant. This beautifully illustrated little book is one of the best things ever to happen to nature writing.
Writing Wild
Essays on nature writing as a practice — the craft, the tradition, and the writers who defined it. A companion for anyone trying to put landscape into words.
Young Men and Fire
Maclean's investigation of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire that killed thirteen smokejumpers in Montana. Written in his eighties, published posthumously. The prose is as precise as his earlier masterpiece, A River Runs Through It, and the subject is more devastating — young men outrun by fire on a steep hillside.