You'll discover how it's possible to find North simply by looking at a puddle and how natural signs can be used to navigate on the open ocean and in the heart of the city. Wonderfully detailed and full of fascinating stories, this is a glorious exploration of a rediscovered art. About The Author: Tristan Gooley set up his natural navigation school, The Natural Navigator, after studying and practising the art for over ten years. His passion for the subject stems from hands-on experience. He has led expeditions in five continents, climbed mountains in Europe, Africa and Asia, sailed across oceans and piloted small aircraft to Africa and the Arctic. He is the only living person to have both flown and sailed solo across the Atlantic. Tristan is a Fellow of both the Royal Institute of Navigation and the Royal Geographical Society and is the Vice Chairman of Trailfinders. He lives with his wife and two sons in West Sussex. Table of Contents The perfect book for getting you started on your own adventure, The Natural Navigator is a wonderfully stimulating book. Tristan Gooley sidesteps technology to celebrate our own powers of observation, and suggests that the art of natural navigation is something we should never have forgotten.,Gooley is a fine writer with a philosophical passion for the subject ... his advice is at times glorious in its simplicity and fascinating in its execution ... his advice is so well structured that even enthusiastic amateurs will fin

    This is an adventure story about a voyage from one life chapter to another that involves a too-big sailboat, a narrow and unknown sea, and an appetite to witness a mythical blonde bear that inhabits a remote rainforest.Kim Brown Seely and her husband had been damn good parents for more than 20 years. That was coming to an end as their youngest son was about to move across the country. The economy was in freefall and their jobs stagnant, so they impulsively decided to buy a big broken sailboat, learn how to sail it, and head up through the Salish Sea and the Inside Passage to an expanse of untamed wilderness in search of the elusive blonde Kermode bear that only lives in a secluded Northwest forest. Theirs was a voyage of discovery into who they were as individuals and as a couple at an axial moment in their lives. Wise and lyrical, this heartfelt memoir unfolds amid the stunningly wild archipelago on the far edge of the continent.

    Jack Olsen's true account, traces the causes of the tragic night in August 1967 when two separate and unrelated campers, a distance apart, were savagely mangled and killed by enraged bears.

    Now 'the greatest living advocate of the global ecosystem' this is the story of the voyages that started it all. Staying with local tribes while trekking in search of giant anteaters in Guyana, Komodo dragons in Indonesia and armadillos in Paraguay, he and the rest of the team battled with cannibal fish, aggressive tree porcupines and escape-artist wild pigs, as well as treacherous terrain and unpredictable weather, to record the incredible beauty and biodiversity of these regions. The methods may be outdated now, but the fascination and respect for the wildlife, the people and the environment - and the importance of protecting these wild places - is not.Written with his trademark wit and charm, Adventures of a Young Naturalist is not just the story of a remarkable adventure, but of the man who made us fall in love with the natural world, and who is still doing so today.

    When Papa Pilgrim appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy with his wife and fifteen children in tow, his new neighbors had little idea of the trouble to come. The Pilgrim Family presented themselves as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal, with their proud piety and beautiful old-timey music, but their true story ran dark and deep. Within weeks, Papa had bulldozed a road through the mountains to the new family home at an abandoned copper mine, sparking a tense confrontation with the National Park Service and forcing his ghost town neighbors to take sides in an ever-more volatile battle over where a citizen’s rights end and the government’s power begins. In Pilgrim’s Wilderness, veteran Alaska journalist Tom Kizzia unfolds the remarkable, at times harrowing, story of a charismatic spinner of American myths who was not what he seemed, the townspeople caught in his thrall, and the family he brought to the brink of ruin. As Kizzia discovered, Papa Pilgrim was in fact the son of a rich Texas family with ties to Hoover’s FBI and strange, oblique connections to the Kennedy assassination and the movie stars of Easy Rider. And as his fight with the government in Alaska grew more intense, the turmoil in his brood made it increasingly difficult to tell whether his children were messianic followers or hostages in desperate need of rescue. In this powerful piece of Americana, written with uncommon grace and high drama, Kizzia uses his unparalleled access to capture an era-defining clash between environmentalists and pioneers ignited by a mesmerizing sociopath who held a town and a family captive

    Here is the unusual story of a young wildlife ecologist who has done just that. When her marriage ended in divorce, Anne LaBastille bought twenty-two acres of virgin forest on a lonely lake in New York State's vast Adirondack Park, and there built the log cabin that has been her home ever since.

    Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America’s endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it—from Thomas Jefferson’s celebrations of early abundance to the turn-of the-last-century origins of the teddy bear to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. In America, Wild Ones discovers, wildlife has always inhabited the terrain of our imagination as much as the actual land.The journey is framed by the stories of three modern-day endangered species: the polar bear, victimized by climate change and ogled by tourists outside a remote northern town; the little-known Lange’s metalmark butterfly, foundering on a shred of industrialized land near San Francisco; and the whooping crane as it’s led on a months-long migration by costumed men in ultralight airplanes. The wilderness that Wild Ones navigates is a scrappy, disorderly place where amateur conservationists do grueling, sometimes preposterous-looking work; where a marketer maneuvers to control the polar bear’s image while Martha Stewart turns up to film those beasts for her show on the Hallmark Channel. Our most comforting ideas about nature unravel. In their place, Mooallem forges a new and affirming vision of the human animal and the wild ones as kindred creatures on an imperfect planet.With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without the easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism’s older guard, Wild Ones merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring a life into, a broken world.

    E. (Alexandria) Bartram--a spirited young woman with a love for botany--is invited to join a field study in Yellowstone National Park. The study's leader, a mild-mannered professor from Montana, assumes she is a man, and is less than pleased to discover the truth. Once the scientists overcome the shock of having a woman on their team, they forge ahead on a summer of adventure, forming an enlightening web of relationships as they move from Mammoth Hot Springs to a camp high in the backcountry. But as they make their way collecting amid Yellowstone's beauty the group is splintered by differing views on science, nature, and economics. In the tradition of A. S. Byatt's Angels and Insects and Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever, this delightful novel captures an ever-fascinating era and one woman's attempt to take charge of her life.

    Armed with maps and cheerful curiosity, he travels from the oil-drunk boomtown of Fort McMurray, Alberta (a.k.a. Fort McMoney), down to the empty North Dakota plains, where mountains of pipe lie in wait for the torrent of crude that could soon start to flow if, as expected, the White House approves the controversial plan to turn on the spigots that will deliver oil from Canada directly to the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way, Horwitz meets a cavalcade of characters, including ranchers who either love or loathe the idea of oil flowing beneath their land, “rig pigs” and “cement heads” who are eager to make a buck in the tar fields, and strippers and other local entrepreneurs who are ready to help them spend it. He drives miles of lonesome road in his quest to understand what this pipeline means to everyone involved—from Native Americans to environmentalists to industry bureaucrats. He sees firsthand not only how an oil spill can devastate acres of rich farmland but how a town can be saved by an influx of new jobs. Over homemade farm dinners and countless tavern beers, Horwitz realizes that there are no easy answers, no right or wrong, no heroes or villains. The questions surrounding America’s energy future go beyond pat declarations about independence from foreign oil or destruction of Mother Earth. They go, some believe, to the very meaning of freedom. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Tony Horwitz is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who spent a decade as a foreign correspondent, mainly covering wars and conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe for the “Wall Street Journal.” His books include the bestsellers “Confederates in the Attic,” “Blue Latitudes,” “Baghdad Without a Map,” and “A Voyage Long and Strange.” His most recent, “Midnight Rising,” was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and one of the year’s ten best books by Library Journal and won the 2012 William Henry Seward Award for excellence in Civil War biography. Horwitz has also written for “The New Yorker” and “Smithsonian” and has been a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. He lives with his wife, Geraldine Brooks, and their sons, Nathaniel and Bizu, on Martha’s Vineyard. PRAISE FOR TONY HORWITZ “Horwitz wears himself lightly, and is extraordinarily good at drawing out strangers. Cheerfully energetic, he goes where a less intrepid reporter would not.” —Roy Blount, Jr., The New York Times “Like travel writer Bill Bryson, Horwitz has a penchant for meeting colorful characters and getting himself into bizarre situations.” —The Christian Science Monitor “Horwitz has an ear for a good yarn and an instinct for the trail leading to an entertaining anecdote.” —The Washington Post “A trip with Horwitz is as good as it gets.” —The Charlotte Observer

    We think of Roosevelt as an original, yet in The Naturalist, Darrin Lunde shows how from his earliest days Roosevelt actively modeled himself in the proud tradition of museum naturalists—the men who pioneered a key branch of American biology through their desire to collect animal specimens and develop a taxonomy of the natural world. The influence these men would have on Roosevelt would shape not just his personality but his career, informing his work as a politician and statesman and ultimately affecting generations of Americans' relationship to this country's wilderness. Pulling from  Roosevelt's diaries and expedition journals, Lunde constructs a brilliantly researched, singularly insightful history that reveals the roots of Roosevelt’s enduring naturalist legacy through the group little-known men whose work and lives defined his own.

    Galvin describes the seasons, the weather, the wildlife, and the few people who do not possess but are themselves possessed by this terrain. In so doing he reveals an experience that is part of our heritage and mythology. For Lyle, Ray, Clara, and App, the struggle to survive on an independent family ranch is a series of blameless failures and unacclaimed successes that illuminate the Western character. The Meadow evokes a sense of place that can be achieved only by someone who knows it intimately.

    A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.

    His memoir of what he found, A Walk Across America, captured the hearts of millions of Americans.Now, Peter is a bit older, married with a family, and his journeys are different than they were. Perhaps he is looking for adventure, perhaps inspiration, perhaps new communities, perhaps unspoiled land. Certainly, he found all of this and more in Alaska, America's last wilderness.Looking for Alaska is Peter's account of eighteen months spent traveling over twenty thousand miles in tiny bush planes, on snow machines and snowshoes, in fishing boats and kayaks, on the Alaska Marine Highway and the Haul Road, searching for what defines Alaska. Hearing the amazing stories of many real Alaskans--from Barrow to Craig, Seward to Deering, and everywhere in between--Peter gets to know this place in the way that only he can. His resulting portrait is a rare and unforgettable depiction of a dangerous and beautiful land and all the people that call it home.He also took his wife and eight-year-old daughter with him, settling into a "home base" in Seward on the Kenai Peninsula, coming and going from there, and hosting the rest of their family for extended visits. The way his family lived, how they made Alaska their home and even participated in Peter's explorations, is as much a part of this story as Peter's own travels.All in all, Jenkins delivers a warm, funny, awe-inspiring, and memorable diary of discovery-both of this place that captures all of our imaginations, and of himself, all over again.

    She and her husband lived in a tiny community near the shores of Yellowstone Lake, deep in the park’s interior. The natural beauty was magnificent, but Ambler and her neighbors discovered that Yellowstone “had teeth.” It could be an unforgiving place where mistakes mattered.In this well-constructed narrative, Ambler reveals a hidden Yellowstone, a place where delight and danger are separated by the slimmest of margins: a degree of pitch on an avalanche slope, a few inches of a buffalo’s horn, a moment during a deadly wildfire. She also tells about:• The rangers and maintenance workers who handled everything from thundering avalanches to man-eating grizzly bears• The mothers who carried their babies inside their snowmobile suits and prayed their machines would not fail on the long ride home•The old-timers who forged communities despite the odds against them.With insight, love, and humor, Yellowstone Has Teeth paints a never-before-seen portrait of an iconic American landscape and the people who live there.

    The first track is the end of a string. At the far end, a being is moving; a mystery, dropping a hint about itself every so many feet, telling you more about itself until you can almost see it, even before you come to it. The mystery reveals itself slowly, track by track, giving its genealogy early to coax you in. Further on, it will tell you the intimate details of its life and work, until you know the maker of the track like a lifelong friend.In this powerful memoir, famous Pine Barrens tracker Tom Brown Jr. reveals how he acquired the skill that has saved dozens of lives--including his own. His story begins with the chance meeting between an ancient Apache and a New Jersey boy. It tells of an incredible apprenticeship in the Wild, learning all that is hidden from modern man. And it ends with a harrowing search in which far more than survival is at stake.