6 books
Jack Turner
Turner spent decades guiding in the Tetons and this strident book stems directly from it. His argument is that we’ve replaced actual wild experience with representations of it — nature documentaries, photographs, managed parks, permits, interpretive signs — and that…
David Darlington
Darlington spent years driving and walking the Mojave in the years around the fight over the California Desert Protection Act, and the book is built out of the people who live there and can’t agree on anything. Miners who see…
Keith H. Basso
Basso spent decades at Cibecue, and it started when an elder asked him to make a map with the real names on it. Apache place names turn out to be whole sentences — water flows down over a succession of…
Doug Peacock
Peacock came home from Vietnam a Green Beret medic who couldn’t be around people, drove into the Montana and Wyoming backcountry, and started following grizzlies. No gun. A camera instead, and years of sitting still in the timber watching bears…
David Roberts
This book changed my life. Roberts was a mountaineer who fell hard for the Ancestral Puebloans and spent years walking to their sites in the canyons of southeast Utah and northeast Arizona — cliff dwellings on ledges you need a…
Jon Krakauer
Chris McCandless graduated from Emory, gave his savings to charity, abandoned his car, burned his cash, and spent two years drifting the West under the name Alexander Supertramp before walking into the bush north of Denali in April 1992. He…
