Conservation, National Parks, & Life Outdoors: Life Outdoors

This collected volume of original essays proposes to address the state of scholarship on the political, cultural, and intellectual history of Americans' responses to wilderness from first contact to the present. While not bringing a synthetic narrative to wilderness, the volume gathers competing interpretations of wilderness in historical context.

An exquisitely illustrated and expertly written account of the western landscape, as it was seen by Lewis and Clark.

Camping appears to be a simple proposition, a time-honored way of getting away from it all. Yet, as this book demonstrates, the simplicity of camping is deceptive, its history and meanings far from obvious. Why do some Americans find pleasure in sleeping outside, particularly when so many others, past and present, have had to do so for reasons other than recreation? A closer look at the history of camping since the Civil War reveals unexpected connections between its various forms and its deeper significance as an American tradition linked to core beliefs about nature and national belonging. Never only a vacation choice, camping has been something people do out of dire necessity and as a tactic of political protest. Still, the dominance of recreational camping as a modern ideal, and natural idyll, has erased its other forms from our collective memory. Camping Grounds rediscovers these unexpected and interwoven histories of sleeping outside. It uses extensive research to trace surprising links between such varied campers as veterans, tramps, John Muir, newly freed African Americans and early leisure campers in the nineteenth century; federal campground designers, Depression-era transients, family car campers, backpacking enthusiasts, countercultural youth, and political activists in the twentieth century; the crisis of the unsheltered and the tent-based Occupy Movement in the twenty-first. These entwined stories show how Americans camp to claim a place in the American republic and why public spaces of nature are critical to how we relate to nature, the nation, and each other.

Chronicles the author's eight-year research into the people, geology, legends, and history of a tiny cross-section of the Great Plains--Chase County, Kansas--to unearth some of the mysteries of nature.

Much of the Salmon River country is as primitive today as it was two hundred years ago when Lewis and Clark explored the river's headwaters. Award-winning photographer Mark Lisk and writer Stephen Stuebner present a colorful view of the area and some of the hardy people who live and work along one of American's most remote and celebrated rivers.

This book is part of CEI's special collections and can only be used in the library.

Nearly 1,000 miles of rugged scenery along the Continental Divide Trail link Yellowstone National Park to the border of Canada--and the story of that trek is exhilerating. Leland Howard's photographic tribute to this beautiful part of the Continental Divide, combined with Lynna Howard's reflective and insightful account of their experiences along the trail itself, lead the reader into parts of the country that remain for the most part wild and unexplored.

Few states pack so many different rocks into such a small area as Idaho. The ancient sedimentary formations of northern Idaho, the Idaho batholith in the central part of the state, the continental hot spot track and newly discovered meteorite impact crater of the volcanic Snake River Plain, and the active faults of the Basin and Range province are all chapters in an exciting geologic story. Both authors know the rocks of Idaho well through many years of active research and they related the story with authority, verve, and their usual style. Roadside Geology of Idaho is a book for laymen to enjoy and for geologists to use.

"Whether we climb them or view them from afar, they continue to pull at us, calling us home, those mountains." So writes editor Gregory McNamee in his eloquent introduction to this compelling anthology of mountain-inspired literature from sources as varied and far-flung as the peaks themselves. The writings take all manner of literary forms: folktales, myths, essays, travelogues, and poetry of both ancient and modern times. We hear from familiar voices--Whitman, Muir, Chekhov, Conan Doyle--and from those not so familiar but equally fascinating, including Russian naturalist Nikolai Prejevalsky and English "lady" adventurer Isabella Bird. The mountain experiences described in these works are enormously varied as well. They range from the powerful altitude-induced vision of Simón Bolívar atop Mount Chimborazo, to a Victorian-era pleasure trip in the Alps as recounted by Mrs. H.W. Cole, to V. K. Arseniev's tale of survival and rescue in a Siberian mountain storm. Yet whether they speak of profound spiritual journeys, easy pleasure trips, or face-to-face encounters with death, all these voices are raised in collective celebration of the glories and terrors of the most awe-inspiring of Earth's natural treasures.

Jon Krakauer introduces us to the wider fraternity of mountaineers--the daredevels, athletes and misfits who play a game whose stakes grow more dangerous with each climb

Reeling from the brain-altering effects of oxygen depletion, Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt. Everest in the early afternoon of May 10, 1996. He hadn't slept in fifty-seven hours. As he turned to begin the perilous descent from 29,028 feet (roughly the cruising altitude of an Airbus jetliner), twenty other climbers were still pushing doggedly to the top, unaware that the sky had begun to roil with clouds...

George Leigh Mallory is not the only man to have died tragically on the forbidding heights of Mount Everest, but he is surely the most famous. When he and Andrew Irvine disappeared into the mists not far from the summit in June 1924, they climbed into mountaineering legend. For more than 70 years, the fraternity of high-altitude adventurers could only speculate on their fate--until 1999 when Mallory's body was found at last, 2,000 feet below the summit. In Last Climb, world-class mountaineer David Breashears and mountaineering historian Audrey Salkeld sift new evidence looking for an answer to the enduring question: Did Mallory and Irvine reach the summit? Last Climb is more than a chronicle of a single attempt on Everest. It is a compelling account of the early Mallory expeditions into the unknown lands of the high Himalaya and an evocative portrait of an era when gentleman adventurers wore tweeds at 25,000 feet.

Dr. Van Tilburg's work requires a unique combination of emergency medicine, survival skills, agility, and extreme sports. In Mountain Rescue Doctor, Van Tilburg shares personal stories of harrowing and suspenseful rescues and recoveries, including the Mount Hood disaster, which claimed the lives of three climbers.

White Death is the story of avalanches, told through the tale of one group of mountaineers who climbed high into the northern Rockies of Glacier Park in January 1969. Mount Cleveland is not the highest mountain in the world but it’s one where the dragon roars most frequently and with the greatest ferocity: avalanches 10 or 15 times a day have been recorded. And avalanches have awesome force: one in Alaska contained a million cubic yards of ice and fell 10,000 feet in elevation, travelling up and over a three thousand foot mountain en route and throwing up a plume of ice into the air that was visible from 100 miles away. Five young men and a lot of snow and ice collided fatally on Mount Cleveland. The men vanished. Despite a huge rescue and recovery operation their bodies were not released by the snowfield that entombed them for 188 days.

John Muir's childhood immigration to the U.S. and coming of age on his father's Wisconsin farm provide a spare glue for Simpson's investigation of what land means to us now. Drawn by a sense that he is missing a critical link to where he lives, he reverses Muir's journey, visiting first the marsh that gave the 19th-century conservationist much of his early pleasure and then Muir's homeland in Scotland. Along the way he visits the people who currently live on the land that was the Muir farm, members of the displaced Ho-Chunk tribe and Scottish tenants and landlords whose lives echo the land use that shaped their culture.

Sam Gribley is terribly unhappy living in his family's crowded New York City apartment. So, armed with just the bare necessities - a penknife, a ball of cord, some flint and steel, and the clothes on his back - he runs away to the mountains. There, Sam must rely on his own ingenuity and the resources of the great outdoors to survive - and he discovers a side of himself he never knew existed.

Almost ninety writers describe America's natural world and the plants and animals that inhabit it.

A journey through and description of one of America's largest and least-known wilderness areas, the Uinta Mountains in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado.

Michael Dixon has spent years kayaking, hiking, camping, dog mushing, traveling, sailing, homesteading, climbing, and working while exploring the Great Land and the Last Frontier. Here is his story as told through articles that he wrote and published about his adventures.

“This is not primarily a book about the desert,” writes Edward Abbey in his introduction. “In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desertis a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite. If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument. What I have tried to do then is something a bit different. Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material. Not imitation but evocation has been the goal.”

The Emmy-winning CBS Sunday Morning correspondent chronicles his year traveling to every one of our National Parks, discovering the most beautiful places and most interesting people that America has to offer. When Conor Knighton decided to spend a year wandering through America's "best idea," he was worried the whole thing might end up being his worst idea. But after a broken engagement and a broken heart, Conor desperately needed a change of scenery. The ambitious plan he cooked up went a bit overboard in that department; Knighton set out to visit every single one of America's National Parks, from Acadia to Zion. Leave Only Footprints is the memoir of his year spent traveling across the United States, a journey that yielded his "On the Trail" series, which quickly became one of CBS Sunday Morning's most beloved segments. In this smart, informative, and entertaining book, he shares how his journey through these natural wonders ended up changing his worldview on everything from God and love to politics and technology. Whether he's waking up early for a naked scrub in a historic bathhouse or staying up late to stargaze along our loneliest highway, Knighton goes behind the scenery to provide an unfiltered look at our country. In doing so, he reveals the unforgettable stories behind the often beautiful, always fascinating lands that all Americans share.

William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map -- if they get on at all -- only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi." His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.

The acclaimed author of Blue Highways and PrairyErth chronicles his journey across America's waterways in his dory Nikawa (River Horse), encountering strange people, hostile cities, and hair-raising dangers.

Heat-Moon writes travel books like no one else. Quirky, discursive, endlessly curious, he embarks on American journeys off the beaten path. Sticking to the small places via the small roads, he uncovers a nation deep in character, story, and charm. "Quoz" refers to anything strange, incongruous, or peculiar. Quoz can be history and heredity; stories, retold or invented; strange characters with poignant dreams. It's places with names like Sublimity City, Kentucky, and Dull Center, Wyoming; unresolved crimes, violent and rippling; schemers and inventors and those missing a tooth or two; and the mysterious Quapaw Ghost Light of Oklahoma. For the first time since his 1982 Blue Highways, Heat-Moon is back on the backroads with a lyrical, funny, and magisterially told chronicle of American passage, of maps of the heart and mind.

Back in America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson decided to reacquaint himself with his native country by walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Georgia to Maine. The AT offers an astonishing landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes—and to a writer with the comic genius of Bill Bryson, it also provides endless opportunities to witness the majestic silliness of his fellow human beings. For a start there’s the gloriously out-of-shape Stephen Katz, a buddy from Iowa along for the walk. But A Walk in the Woods is more than just a laugh-out-loud hike. Bryson’s acute eye is a wise witness to this beautiful but fragile trail, and as he tells its fascinating history, he makes a moving plea for the conservation of America’s last great wilderness.

From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming a growing community of nomads: migrant laborers who call themselves "workampers." In a secondhand vehicle she christens "Van Halen," Jessica Bruder hits the road to get to know her subjects more intimately. Accompanying her irrepressible protagonist, Linda May, and others, from campground toilet cleaning to warehouse product scanning to desert reunions, then moving on to the dangerous work of beet harvesting, Bruder tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of the dark underbelly of the American economy--one that foreshadows the precarious future that may await many more of us. At the same time, she celebrates the exceptional resilience and creativity of these quintessential Americans who have given up ordinary rootedness to survive. Like Linda May, who dreams of finding land on which to build her own sustainable "Earthship" home, they have not given up hope.

In the Wilderness is the story of a poet's journey toward adulthood, set against an interior landscape every bit as awesome, as wondrous, and as fraught with hidden peril as the great Idaho forest itself. It is an examination of how both geography and faith can shape the heart and soul.

In this timeless classic, Jenkins describes how disillusionment with society in the 1970s drove him out onto the road on a walk across America.

Part armchair travelogue, part guide book, this projected three-volume series―divided into the western, central, and eastern United States―will introduce readers to all 155 national forests across the country. This Land is the only comprehensive field guide that describes the natural features, wildernesses, scenic drives, campgrounds, and hiking trails of our national forests, many of which―while little known and sparsely visited―boast features as spectacular as those found in our national parks and monuments. Each entry includes logistical information about size and location, facilities, attractions, and associated wilderness areas. For about half of the forests, Robert H. Mohlenbrock has provided sidebars on the biological or geological highlights, drawn from the "This Land" column that he has written for Natural History magazine since 1984. Superbly illustrated with color photographs, botanical drawings, and maps, this book is loaded with information, clearly written, and easy to use. This volume covers national forests in Alaska, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, California, Utah, Idaho, and Washington.

Camping has changed since the days of pine bough beds and bonfires. "No longer is it ethical to shape the land to suit our whims." Keeping this in mind, Jacobson explores the advances in modern camping, distinguishing high tech from high hype, and concludes that we can still make do without buying out the stores if we use a little ingenuity.

Hiking Idaho introduces you to the wonders of Idaho's spectacular backcountry--the hard, pink granite of the Sawtooth Mountains, beloved by climbers; the popular and very accessible Iron Bog and Fishpole Lakes; the Big Horn Crags in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, the largest wild tract in the lower 48 states; and less-explored pockets. In Hiking Idaho, you'll find outings suited to hikers of all levels of experience, ability, and persuasion, taking you to lush rain forests, quiet meadows, and colorful canyons. Seasoned Idaho outdoor enthusiasts describe 100 of their favorite hikes, with the help of photos and maps.

From the best in local dining to quirky museums, small-town festivals, and awesome nature escapes, this guide will have you saying again and again, "I didn’t know that!"” Whether you'’re a visitor or a local looking for something different, Idaho Off the Beaten Path will show you the Gem State you never knew existed. Drive the rugged Lolo Motorway and capture the spirit of Lewis and Clark, dig for star garnets at the Emerald Creek Garnet Area west of Clarkia, or celebrate Fossil Days in Hagerman with a weekend full of small-town, family fun.

With more than four million acres of wildlands, Idaho offers unparalleled opportunities for solitude and exploration. Discover the inland rain forest of the Salmo-Priest, the sand dunes of Bruneau Dunes State Park, the peaks and alpine lakes of the Sawtooth Wilderness, and more. Each carefully researched profile includes: a map showing major roads, trails, and access points; an overview of the landscape and its major features; a description of local recreational opportunities; suggested excursions--day hikes, backpack, overnighter, cross-country ski, or river trip--with detailed information on how to get there, what you'll see, and when the best times are to go; at-a-glance information on location, size, and management status. In addition, you'll learn how to protect and preserve wilderness areas, plan a safe trip, and prepare for natural hazards.

This is the first comprehensive guide to Idaho rivers which covers the state's flatwater and easy whitewater runs. There are no death defying rapids here, just great laid-back trips down easy-going streams and fun whitewater on exciting but safe rivers. All the runs can be done in an open canoe, but are also suitable for kayaks, inflatables, and drift boats.

Idaho’s backcountry wilderness is renowned for its stark beauty. Remarkably, some of the state’s most beautiful sites are easily accessible for the road traveler who is willing to drive the backcountry logging and forest service roads that few have cataloged. Brother and sister team Lynna and Leland Howard have spent years doing just that. With more than 114 photographs, 33 color maps, 31 detailed expeditions complete with GPS coordinates, Backcountry Roads—Idaho is an indispensable companion for the road explorer.

Electricity and energy don’t have to come off the public utility grid—alternatives abound in solar, wind, and water generated power. Design decisions can drastically affect power consumption, and bio-diesel and alternative fuels can help break the oil habit. Dave Black describes alternatives for engineering your home and lifestyle for independence, economy, and a more integrated way of life.

Packed with specially commissioned, crystal-clear, step-by-step illustrations for every survival technique, from what to do if you meet a bear in the woods to how to navigate by the stars, this book also includes exciting stories of real-life survival--what happened, who survived, and how they did it.

This handbook presents 77 essential skills for stopping climate change—and for living through it. It is a fun, compelling, and sly deconstruction of a survival guide that offers equal parts tongue-in-cheek suggestions, practical advice, factual information, and bluesky dreaming of ways to save the world. Each skill is presented on a spread featuring a bright, full-color instructional illustration, a brief introduction to the skill and its core ideas, a set of instructions, spin-off ideas, and scientific and environmental facts. The book also includes a resource guide that provides useful resources for the ecoconscious reader.

Step-by-step instructions and diagrams for tying the ten most useful knots and hitches, plus advice on determining the best knot for the task at hand, choosing the right rope for different applications, preparing new ropes for outdoor use, and caring and maintaining ropes for durability and reliability. Includes a left-handed illustration of every knot.

American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide collects poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present that focus on wildflowers and their place in our culture and in the natural world.

Throughout human history, plants have provided us with food, clothing, medicine and shelter. The Rocky Mountains are home to a diversity of plant species that have helped native peoples and settlers survive through the centuries. Edible and Medicinal Plants of the Rockies describes 333 common trees, shrubs, flowers, ferns, mosses and lichens that have been used by people from ancient times to the present.

A guide to 32 of the best and most common edible wild plants in North America, with detailed information on how to identify them, where they are found, how and when they are harvested, which parts are used, how they are prepared, as well as their culinary use, ecology, conservation, and cultural history.

Wild Berries of the West, a color field guide to the more than 150 berries and fruits of the western United States is indispensable for berry lovers, adventurous cooks, amateur botanists, and students of Native American lore. Learn how to find and identify edible berries, and try them in creative and mouth-watering dishes such as juniper berry chicken, huckleberry bread pudding, and groundcherry chutney.

This authoritative guide is a portable illustrated companion for the professional and amateur herbalist alike. It provides detailed descriptions of 125 of the most useful medicinal plants commonly found in North America, along with directions for a range of uses, remedies for common ailments, and notes on the herbal traditions of other lands.

Depicts over 600 climbing trails in the Wind River Mountains of western Wyoming, and lists the earliest recorded ascents.

Provides field marks of all species found in North America west of the 100th meridian, with a section on the birds of the Hawaiian Islands and includes illustrations.

"Wildlife and Plants of the Cascades" is a book within the "American Wildlife Region Series" that focuses on the diverse flora and fauna found primarily in the Cascade Mountain range, encompassing a large portion of the Pacific Northwest, including areas with lava beds, providing information on the most common wildlife and plant species in the region.

A guidebook of the hiking trails of Owyhee County and the Seven Devils Mountains in Idaho.

This books is part of CEI's special collections and can only be used in the library.

This guide covers all species of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, food and game fishes, seashells, and the principal marine invertebrates occurring annually in North America east of the Rockies and North of the 37th Parallel. It includes color plates, black-and-white maps, and illustrations.