National Bestseller: This fascinating account of one man’s 650-mile trek from San Diego to San Francisco captures the many layers of California’s fiendishly complex history.“[Makes] you fall, or refall, in love with California . . . wildfires and insane housing prices and all . . . What a journey, you think. What a state.” —San Francisco ChronicleIn 1769, an expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá sketched a route that would become, i...

Coast: the edge of land, or conversely the edge of sea. Range: a measure between limits, or the scope or territory of a thing. Coast Range, the debut collection of essays from writer Nick Neely, meticulously and thoughtfully dwells on these intersections and much more. The book's title refers to the region in which these essays are set: the California and Oregon coastal ranges. In deeply moving prose equal parts exhilarating and pensive, each essay explores an iconic organism (a f...

Nick Neely chronicles his 650-mile trek on foot from San Diego to San Francisco, following the route of the first overland Spanish expedition into what was soon called Alta California. Led by Gaspar de Portolá in 1769, the expedition sketched a route that would become, in part, the famous El Camino Real. It laid the foundation for the Golden State we know today, a place that remains as mythical and captivating as any in the world. Neely grew up in California but realized how little he knew...

• Winner of the BC National Award for Non-Fiction• Nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the 2011 Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Award.During Charlotte Gill’s 20 years working as a tree planter she encountered hundreds of clear-cuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites. Charged with sowing the new forest...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize“The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . . There is an ambition about [Dillard's] book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel.” — Eudora Welty, New York Times Book ReviewPilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, where Annie Dillard set out to chronicle incidents of "beauty tangled in a rapture w...

This memoir of life in the American desert by the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang is a nature writing classic on par with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey recounts his many escapades, adventures, and epiphanies as an Arches National Park ranger outside Moab, Utah. Brimming with arresting insights, impassioned arguments for wilderness conservation, and a raconteur's wit, it is one of Abbey's most critically ...

From the irrepressible author of Trout Bum and The View from Rat Lake comes an engaging, humorous, often profound examination of life’s greatest mysteries: sex, death, and fly-fishing.John Gierach’s quest takes us from his quiet home water—an ordinary, run-of-the-mill trout stream where fly-fishing can be a casual affair—to Utah’s famous Green River, and to unknown creeks throughout the Western states and Canada. Along the way, he encounters an un...

Naturalist Craig Childs's "utterly memorable and fantastic" study of the desert's dangerous beauty is based on years of adventures in the deserts of the American West (Washington Post).Like the highest mountain peaks, deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to the most seasoned explorers. Craig Childs, who has spent years in the deserts of the American West as an adventurer, a river guide, and a field instructor in natural history, has devel...

From one of the finest nature writers at work in America today-a lyrical, dramatic, illuminating tour of the hidden domain of wild animals.Whether recalling the experience of being chased through the Grand Canyon by a bighorn sheep, swimming with sharks off the coast of British Columbia, watching a peregrine falcon perform acrobatic stunts at 200 miles per hour, or engaging in a tense face-off with a mountain lion near a desert waterhole, Craig Childs captures the ...

“Let’s get lost together . . . ”Lost in My Own Backyard brings acclaimed author Tim Cahill together with one of his—and America’s—favorite destinations: Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. Cahill has been “puttering around in the park” for a quarter of a century, slowly covering its vast scope and exploring its remote backwoods. So does this mean that he knows what he’s doing? Hardly. “I live fifty miles from the park,” says Cahill, “but proximity does no...

Two volumes of fiction from the National Book Award–winning author of Arctic Dreams : "Lopez feels a deep spiritual connection to the natural world." — San Francisco ChronicleTo National Book Award–winning author Barry Lopez, the desert and the river are landscapes alive with poetry, mystery, seduction, and enchantment. In these two works of fiction, the narrator responds viscerally and emotional...

In an effort to make sense of the deaths in quick succession of several loved ones, Kathleen Dean Moore turned to the comfort of the wild, making a series of solitary excursions into ancient forests, wild rivers, remote deserts, and windswept islands to learn what the environment could teach her in her time of pain. This book is the record of her experiences. It’s a stunning collection of carefully observed accounts of her life—tracking otters on the beach, cooking breakfast in the desert,...