Best of
Wilderness

2011

The Ultimate Hang


Derek Hansen - 2011
    

Be Brave, Be Strong: A Journey Across the Great Divide


Jill Homer - 2011
    But despite her perceived athletic mediocrity, the newspaper editor from Alaska harbors an outlandish ambition: the "world's toughest mountain bike race," a 2,740-mile journey from Canada to Mexico along the rugged spine of the Rocky Mountains. A race of that magnitude demands a daunting training plan, which Jill aspires to until she literally breaks the ice on a frozen lake in the Alaska wilderness. Serious frostbite proves to only be the beginning in a series of setbacks that threaten to change her dream from outlandish to impossible. But, as Jill explains to a skeptical friend, "The fact that something’s impossible has never been a good reason not to try.""Be Brave, Be Strong," is the true story of an adventure driven relentlessly forward as foundations crumble. This is a brutally honest account of one woman's incredible journey and simple discovery — to take on the world's toughest mountain bike race, one doesn't have to be the world's toughest woman. Not even close.

The Last Gold of Expired Stars: Complete Poems 1908-1914


Georg Trakl - 2011
    Although he was born over a century ago, his starkly original poems provide a window into the psyche of the early twentieth century with its anguish, melancholy, and occasional exaltation. From a life inflicted with drug addiction and mental torment, Trakl paints a vivid, musical portrait of his autumn soul. This bilingual edition includes all of Trakl's mature published work, as well as his youthful poems and prose, drama fragments and selected letters, and is the most comprehensive collection of his work in English to date.

Faith of Cranes: Finding Hope and Family in Alaska


Hank Lentfer - 2011
    Lentfer's storytelling achieves its joys and universality not via grand summations but via grounded self-giving, familial intimacy, funny friendships, attentive griefs, and full-bodied immersion in the Alaskan rainforest. The writing is honest, intensely lived, and overflowing with heart: broken, mended, and whole."a "David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and God Laughs & PlaysHank Lentfer listened to cranes passing over his home in southeast alaska for twenty years before bothering to figure out where they were going. On a very visceral level, he didn't want to know. After all, cranes gliding through the wide skies of Alaska are the essence of wildness. But the same animals, pecking a living between the cornfields and condos of California's Central Valley, seem trapped and diminished. A former wildlife biologist and longtime conservationist, Lentfer had come to accept that no number of letters to the editor or trips to D.C. could stop the spread of clear cuts, alter the course of climate change, or ensure that his beloved cranes would always appear. And he had no idea that following the paths of cranes would lead him to the very things he was most afraid of: parenthood, responsibility, and actions of hope in a frustrating and warming world. Faith of Cranes is Lentfer's quiet, lyrical memoir of his home and community near Glacier Bay that reveals a family's simple acts -- planting potatoes, watching cranes, hunting deer -- as well as a close and eccentric Alaskan community. It shows how several thousand birds and one little girl teach a new father there is no future imaginable that does not leave room for compassion and grace.

Song of the Departed: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl


Georg Trakl - 2011
    His reader is gifted with visions of a darker world, an autumnal place of surreal beauty and a dying splendor. It is not a world friendly to people—it is full of death, desolation, and decay, strange creatures and arcane gods. But it is beautiful nonetheless. Hauntingly beautiful."—Chris Faatz, Powells.com"I do not understand them; but their tone pleases me. It is the tone of true genius."—Ludwig WittgensteinSong of the Departed brings back into print poems written at the height of Georg Trakl's career. Trakl boldly confronted the conflicts created by the pursuit of truth amidst the fallenness of the human condition, writing of the unspeakable that lies beyond language, creating poetry that is intensely personal and eerily beautiful. Included in this revised edition are several new translations and an introduction by the translator.All roads disgorge to black decay.Beneath the golden boughs of night and starsThe sister's shadow flutters through the silent groveTo greet the spirits of the heroes, bleeding heads.And softly in the reeds drone the dark flutes of autumn.O prouder grief! you brazen altars;Tonight a mighty anguish feeds the hot flame of spirit:Unborn grandchildren.Georg Trakl was born in Austria in 1887. He served as a medical officer during World War I. As a lyric poet, he set a dark, introspective tone that deeply influenced the course of German expressionism. He died in 1914 after an overdose of cocaine.

Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness


Ana Maria Spagna - 2011
    "What connects us?" Spagna asks, and she reveals, again and again, the gift of community--easy and uneasy, deep and enduring and essential.

Mattie Mitchell: Newfoundland's Greatest Frontiersman


Gary Collins - 2011
    For the very few who experience it comes a sense of belonging; of being a fragile part of the mysterious whole; of profound peace; of wanting never to leave,” says Gary Collins in describing the inspiration that overtook him when he penned the final pages in this, the biography of Mattie Mitchell, a hunter, trapper, and guide of Mi’kmaq descent whose daring feats became known worldwide, but which history books somehow forgot.In researching the life and times of Mattie Mitchell, critically acclaimed author Gary Collins (author of the award-winning What Colour is the Ocean?) gleaned much insight on his subject from the diary and other personal papers of Marie Sparkes, granddaughter to the remarkable Mi’kmaq woodsman. Now, for the first time, Mattie Mitchell's legendary deeds are revealed in full, comprehensive detail.In 1998, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador recognized Mattie Mitchell’s contribution to the growth and prosperity of the province by opening its Mattie Mitchell Prospectors Resource Room. In 2001, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada recognized Mattie Mitchell as a person of national historic significance. In 2005, a plaque in Mattie Mitchell’s honour was placed in Gros Morne National Park.

The Fragrance of Grass


Guy de la Valdene - 2011
    Set in places as far afield as France and Montana, Saskatchewan and Florida, this is a beautifully written book that is also an elegant treatise on everything from dogs, birds, and wildlife to food, wine, and women.

The Early Years: The Journals of Richard L. Proenneke 1967-1973


John Branson - 2011
    Lucky for us he was a devoted writer, capturing in his journals life in Alaska's wilderness - the ebb and flow of nature and the daily lives of those making their home in the wilderness that would later become Lake Clark National Park and Preserve. Read along to experience Proenneke's way of life away from "the grind" and follow the seasons of Twins Lakes with an intrepid guide.

Camping & Survival: The Ultimate Outdoors Book


Paul Tawrell - 2011
    You will find details on how to hike/travel, in the summer and winter, “make a camp”, choose suitable equipment, and understand your environment. You will learn how to search for food and water, find shelter, “read” the weather, and how to take care of yourself if you are injured (First Aid). Interesting topics as PANNING FOR GOLD, tracking, camouflage, dangerous wild animals, birds, fish, edible plants, poisonous mushrooms, and basic survival techniques are also covered.

Crooked Creek


Maximilian Werner - 2011
    The Woods—Preston and Sara—must flee Arizona when they, along with Sara's parents and little brother Jasper, unwittingly get caught up in the plunder and sale of American Indian corpses and funerary objects. Preston, Sara, and Jasper end up in the Heber Valley of Utah, where they seek the support of Sara's Uncle Neff until they can be reunited with Sara's mother and father. But from the moment they ride into Heber, Preston and Sara learn that life in the valley is not as it appears, and that no matter how far we run, we cannot escape the past. Maximilian Werner is the author of Black River Dreams, a collection of literary fly fishing essays that won the 2008 Utah Arts Council's Original Writing Competition for Nonfiction: Book. Mr. Werner's poems, fiction, creative nonfiction, and essays have appeared in several journals and magazines, including Matter Journal: Edward Abbey Edition, Bright Lights Film Journal, The North American Review, ISLE, Weber Studies, Fly Rod and Reel, and Columbia. He lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and two children and teaches writing at the University of Utah.“Maximilian Werner is a fresh and grounded writer, a welcome and original new voice.” —Thomas McGuane, author of Driving on the Rim“Here in the deep measured prose of Max Werner is a western story, harsh and lush as the old world it depicts. Crooked Creek shows again that one of the natural laws of the wilderness—along with wind and stone and animals and family—is violence. Just as wind and water shaped the stone, trouble shaped these men. With its compelling, layered story, this rich book is a reader’s pleasure.” —Ron Carlson, author of The Signal“Max Werner’s Crooked Creek offers a haunting voyage into the past and into living landscapes sharpened by western light, resonating with the work of such authors as Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner. A narrative of the vitality of family bonds, it is also a tale of the heroic struggle to carry the burden of memory and to transform history’s nightmares into visions of possibility, as Octavio Paz once argued was the high calling of literature. Crooked Creek reminds us of the tough aesthetic that is required to sustain hope in family, in community, and in the staggering and heartbreaking beauty of nature that Werner’s prose powerfully illuminates, while also reckoning with the dark sins of betrayal and violence that are the legacies of the American West. Werner convinces us that no meaningful sense of place is possible otherwise.”—George Handley, author of Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

The Voice of the Dolphins


Hardy Jones - 2011
    In his work as a filmmaker he came to know many of these magnificent animals as individuals. "I know when I'm with them that I'm relating to creatures as intelligent, social, and imbued with emotion as I am." Hardy's life became even more closely entwined with dolphins when he learned that he and the dolphins share a genetic trait that imperils both his life and the survival of dolphins worldwide. Starting with the film that came from his first life-changing encounter with spotted dolphins in the Bahamas, he's made over 70 documentaries for PBS, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and foreign broadcasters. "Filming became my entree into the world of dolphins but not my ultimate purpose there. My true aim was to get inside the minds of these enormously intelligent and friendly animals." In coming years Hardy would apply what he had learned to killer whales in the Arctic fjords of Norway, and sperm whales off the Galapagos and the Caribbean Island of Dominica. "I became a pioneer in a parallel universe inhabited by highly intelligent, friendly, curious aliens. I came to love them and felt an intense need to protect them." For more than three decades Hardy has fought to end the slaughter of dolphins by Japanese fishermen and was instrumental in converting a dolphin hunter to a dolphin watch tour leader. In the late 1980s Hardy became aware of a threat to dolphins even more insidious that the blades of dolphin hunters - rising levels of chemical toxins in the oceans that were impacting marine life and human beings. Over succeeding decades these contaminants have reached crisis level. In 2003 Hardy was diagnosed with an incurable form of blood cancer that is linked to chemical toxins. "I've struggled with the side effects of medications, but my first lab tests after beginning treatment brought stunning results. My burden of monoclonal cells had been reduced by ninety-eight percent." The diagnosis spurred Hardy to seek the sources of the pollutants in his own body and to document their impact on marine life and human beings. Hardy continues treatment and maintains an active life traveling the world to campaign for dolphins, the oceans and the welfare of humanity."