wilderness

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bill Sherwonit's collection of writing about North America's highest peak — from indigenous accounts to modern expeditions. The mountain through many eyes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fletcher's collected shorter writing — the man who walked through time, walked through the Grand Canyon, and made the long walk a literary form.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gestalten's exploration of hunting, foraging, and gathering cultures around the world. The oldest human relationship with the land, still practiced.

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.