One of the area’s foremost experts on the outdoors, Mike White, author of 50 of the Best Strolls, Walks, and Hikes Around Reno, returns with a new guidebook dedicated to Carson City and its surrounding areas in northern Nevada. With over three hundred days of sunshine a year, this capital city’s parks, trails, lakes, and soaring peaks provide the perfect attractions for residents and visitors alike. This guide provides readers with the most precise information for a wide range of detailed paths and trails throughout the greater Carson City region and includes interesting sidebars about human and natural history for each trip.
From Virginia City and the Carson River on the east to the Sierra Nevada mountains to the west, this comprehensive guidebook offers the most complete guide for walkers, joggers, and hikers. Whether you are looking for a short and easy stroll on a city path or an extended hike along the Tahoe Rim Trail, this is your all-inclusive resource for your next outdoor adventure.
When David Brill’s now-classic account of his 1979 thru-hike of the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail was released in 1990, it immediately struck a chord with veterans and aspirants of one of the world’s longest continuously marked footpaths. Over the years, the book has continued to sell through multiple printings.
As Far as the Eye Can See: Reflections of an Appalachian Trail Hiker, now in its fifth (thirtieth-anniversary) edition and eighth printing, was recently released by the University of Tennessee Press. The new edition features a new preface on Brill’s 2019 40th-anniversary reunion in Maine with his AT buddies, as well as prefaces to earlier editions and three bonus chapters that bring Brill’s continuing connection with the trail to near the present.
In the years following release of As Far as the Eye Can See, first-person accounts of hiking the trail burgeoned into a literary genre, but Brill’s book was among the first to capture the physical and spiritual aspects of the long journey across fourteen states.
Brill and his fellow hikers, who are all portrayed in the book, were relatively early devotees on a pilgrimage that, within a few decades, would become a popular rite of passage. Indeed, by the end of 1979, a mere 837 people had reported finishing the entire AT route over the trail’s then 42-year history. The total now easily exceeds 20,000.
Brill credits his trail experiences with inspiring his career as a magazine journalist and book author and providing the theme for much of his subsequent writing on nature and adventure travel. The trail also did much to shape his enduring values and beliefs.
“Though it took me a while to realize it, the trail had shaped me, had given me a philosophy, had toughened me in some ways, had softened me in others, and taught me lessons I will never forget: lessons on survival, kindness, strength, friendship, courage, perseverance, and the ways of nature,” Brill writes in the book’s final chapter, “Coming Home.” “Those lessons have affected everything I’ve done since.”
Readers find that Brill’s experiences and observations on the healing power of nature from forty years ago are equally relevant in today’s world.
The book’s first edition received widespread critical acclaim. The San Francisco Book Reader wrote: “Evocatively written gems of observation full of native wisdom brimming over with thoughts and exploits…. You read and read again, this book is that rich.” Many other reviewers have commended the book on its honest portrayal of the trail experience and the literary quality of its prose. In its review, The Roanoke Times effused “Thoreau lives!”
“Reading Ephemeral by Nature is the next best thing to talking a walk with Stephen Lyn Bales. In addition to describing the plants and animals readers will encounter, Bales scouts out hidden side trails. A look at jack-in-the-pulpit will turn up dinosaurs, Darwin, and Finding Nemo, and consideration of cerulean warblers will lead to coffee in Columbia and a discussion of why the sky is blue. Each chapter begins with one of his delightful drawings, and you’ll find Bales’ artistic eye is as discerning and detailed as his writing.”—Patricia K. Lichen, author of Passionate Slugs and Hollywood Frogs and Kidnapping the Wild One
In this captivating collection of twelve essays, a testament to a lifetime’s fascination with the outdoors and its myriad wonders, naturalist Stephen Lyn Bales examines a variety of flora and fauna that in one way or another can be described as “ephemeral”—that is, fleeting, short-lived, or transient.
Focusing on his native East Tennessee, Bales introduces us to several oddities, including the ghost plant, a wispy vascular plant that resembles a rooster’s tail and grows mainly in areas devoid of sunlight; the Appalachian panda, an ancestor of today’s red panda that wandered the region millions of years ago and whose fossil remains have only recently been discovered; and the freshwater jellyfish, a tiny organism that is virtually invisible except for those hot summer days when clusters of them bloom into shimmering “medusae,” sometimes by the thousands. Other essays consider such topics as the plight of the monarch butterfly, a gorgeous insect whose populations have dropped by 90 percent in only the last two decades; the reintroduction of the lake sturgeon, one of nature’s most primitive and seldom-seen fish, into the waters of the Tennessee Valley; and the surprising emergence of coyote-wolf and coyote-dog hybrids in the eastern states.
Written with insight, humor, and heart, Ephemeral by Nature is as entertaining as it is instructive. Along with a wealth of biological details—and his own handsome pen-and-ink drawings—Bales fills the book with delightful anecdotes of field trips, species-protection efforts, and those thrilling occasions when some elusive member of the natural order shows itself to us, if only for a brief moment.
Stephen Lyn Bales, senior naturalist at Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville, is the author of Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley and Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935–1941, both published by the University of Tennessee Press.
Chosen for the 2024 Illinois Reads Program by the Illinois Reading Council
One of Chicago’s landmark attractions, Graceland Cemetery chronicles the city’s sprawling history through the stories of its people. Local historian and Graceland tour guide Adam Selzer presents ten walking tours covering almost the entirety of the cemetery grounds. While nodding to famous Graceland figures from Marshall Field to Ernie Banks to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Selzer also leads readers past the vaults, obelisks, and other markers that call attention to less recognized Chicagoans like:
Filled with photographs and including detailed maps of each tour route, Graceland Cemetery is an insider's guide to one of Chicago's great outdoor destinations for city lore and history.
The highpoints of the fifty states range from Alaska’s 20,320 foot high Mount McKinley to 345 feet at Lakewood Park in Florida. Some highpoints, such as Mount Mitchell in North Carolina and New Hampshire’s Mount Washington can be reached by automobile on a sightseeing drive. Others such as Colorado’s Mount Elbert or Mount Marcy in New York are accessible as wilderness day hikes. Still others, such as Mount Rainier in Washington or Gannett Peak in Wyoming, are strenuous and risky mountaineering challenges that should be attempted only by experienced climbers. Whatever your level of skill and interest, Highpoints of the United States offers a diverse range of experiences.
Arranged alphabetically by state, each listing has a map, photographs, and information on trailhead, main and alternative routes, elevation gain, and conditions. Historical and natural history notes are also included, as are suggestions for specific guidebooks to a region or climb. Appendices include a list of highpoints by region, by elevation, and a personal log for the unashamed "peak-bagger."
Whether you’re an armchair hiker or a seasoned climber, interested only in your state’s highest point or all fifty, this book will be an invaluable companion and reference.
An invaluable resource to anyone traversing the Escalante, this comprehensive guide details 43 hikes.
Publisher's Note: Realizing there are virtually no marked trails in the Escalante country (mostly canyons that wander and have many intersections, challenging anyone to write explicit description), this book includes directions to the trailhead, how to follow a particular route with choices of side canyons along the way, and occasional alternate endings. Some of the hikes may be appropriate for beginners. Some only the most experienced should attempt.
Eastern Massachusetts offers incredible trail-running opportunities, ranging from popular long-distance routes like the Bay Circuit Trail to lesser-known loops that run through the mountains and forests of the Quabbin watershed and Merrimack Valley region, and trails that pass alongside the shores of Cape Cod. All over the Bay State, there are trails suitable for runners of all levels waiting to be discovered and explored.
Avid trail runner Ben Kimball offers a selection of fifty-one of eastern Massachusetts’s most spectacular trail sites, including detailed trail descriptions, topographic maps, directions, parking information, safety tips, and much more. Both experienced and novice trail runners will find Trail Running Eastern Massachusetts to be an invaluable resource for exploring nature and getting a good workout, in the Boston area and beyond.
When longtime author Robert Root moves to a small town in southeast Wisconsin, he gets to know his new home by walking the same terrain traveled by three Wisconsin luminaries who were deeply rooted in place—John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and August Derleth. Root walks with Muir at John Muir State Natural Area, with Leopold at the Shack, and with Derleth in Sac Prairie; closer to home, he traverses the Ice Age Trail, often guided by such figures as pioneering scientist Increase Lapham. Along the way, Root investigates the changes to the natural landscape over nearly two centuries, and he chronicles his own transition from someone on unfamiliar terrain to someone secure on his home ground.In prose that is at turns introspective and haunting, Walking Home Ground inspires us to see history’s echo all around us: the parking lot that once was forest; the city that once was glacier. "Perhaps this book is an invitation to walk home ground," Root tells us. "Perhaps, too, it’s a time capsule, a message in a bottle from someone given to looking over his shoulder even as he tries to examine the ground beneath his feet."
Walking the Steps of Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City’s Scenic and Historic Secrets is a revised and updated version of Mary Anna DuSablon’s original guidebook, first published in 1998. This new edition describes and maps thirty-four walks of varying lengths and levels of difficulty around the neighborhoods of Cincinnati, following scenic or historic routes and taking in many of the city’s more than four hundred sets of steps. Some of these walks follow the same routes laid out by DuSablon in the first edition of the guide; others have been revised to reflect changes in the city and its neighborhoods, the physical condition of the steps, and the scenic views of Cincinnati that they afford; and still others are altogether new.
In writing their descriptions of the walks, authors Connie J. Harrell and John Cicmanec have retraced each path and taken all new photographs of the steps as well as architectural and natural landmarks along the way. Cartographer Brian Balsley has drawn a fresh set of maps, and Roxanne Qualls, vice-mayor of Cincinnati, has graciously written a new foreword.
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