Eastern U.S.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A study of endurance athletes — ultra-runners, thru-hikers, long-distance swimmers — and the psychology of pushing past what the body says is possible.

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.

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.

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.

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.