CLICK HERE to download the first 40 pages of Midnight Wilderness * Presents the original foreword by Margaret E. Murie * Features a new afterword by the author, providing context for the Refuge today * Includes a new map and an updated bibliography Originally published more than twenty years ago, Midnight Wilderness is a passionate and vivid account of one of Alaska's greatest natural treasures, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Author Debbie Miller draws on her years of exploring this unique, magical, and expansive territory, weaving chilling adventure, personal anecdote, wildlife observation, and Native American life into a beautiful and compelling memoir of place. Proceeds from sales of this book will benefit the Alaska Wilderness League in its ongoing efforts to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Open Midnight weaves two parallel stories about the great wilderness—Brooke Williams’s year alone with his dog ground truthing wilderness maps of southern Utah, and that of his great-great-great-grandfather, who in 1863 made his way with a group of Mormons from England across the wilderness almost to Utah, dying a week short. The book is also about two levels of history—personal, as represented by William Williams, and collective, as represented by Charles Darwin, who lived in Shrewsbury, England, at about the same time as Williams. As Brooke Williams begins researching the story of his oldest known ancestor, he realizes that he has few facts. He wonders if a handful of dates can tell the story of a life, writing, “If those points were stars in the sky, we would connect them to make a constellation, which is what I’ve made with his life by creating the parts missing from his story.” Thus William Williams becomes a kind of spiritual guide, a shamanlike consciousness that accompanies the author on his wilderness and life journeys, and that appears at pivotal points when the author is required to choose a certain course. The mysterious presence of his ancestor inspires the author to create imagined scenes in which Williams meets Darwin in Shrewsbury, sowing something central in the DNA that eventually passes to Brooke Williams, whose life has been devoted to nature and wilderness. Brooke Williams’s inventive and vivid prose pushes boundaries and investigates new ways toward knowledge and experience, inviting readers to think unconventionally about how we experience reality, spirituality, and the wild. The author draws on Jungian psychology to relate how our consciousness of the wild is culturally embedded in our psyche, and how a deep connection to the wild can promote emotional and psychological well-being. Williams's narrative goes beyond a call for conservation, but in the vein of writers like Joanna Macy, Bill Plotkin, David Abram, the author argues passionately for the importance of wildness is to the human soul. Reading Williams's inspired prose provides a measure of hope for protecting the beautiful places that we all need to thrive. Open Midnight is grounded in the present by Williams’s descriptions of the Utah lands he explores. He beautifully evokes the feeling of being solitary in the wild, at home in the deepest sense, in the presence of the sublime. In doing so, he conveys what Gary Snyder calls “a practice of the wild” more completely than any other work. Williams also relates an insider’s view of negotiations about wilderness protection. As an advocate working for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, he represents a minority in meetings designed to open wilderness lands to roads and hunting. He portrays the mindset of the majority of Utah’s citizens, who argue passionately for their rights to use their lands however they wish. The phrase “open midnight,” as Williams sees it, evokes the time between dusk and dawn, between where we’ve been and where we’re going, and the unconscious where all possibilities are hidden.
Journeys to the Edge of the Map A young upstate New York woman begins the adventure of a lifetime as she moves away from her safe and conventional path. Mary Albanese is unable to resist the excitement and challenge of becoming a geological explorer in Alaska, where she maps remote wilderness areas and journeys to the depths of her own heart. Midnight Sun, Arctic Moon is a memoir full of accentric characters with human failings. Its landscape reveals the courage and sacrifice of the author's "family" of visionary explorers who mapped the wild state. The author persists in the face of hardships and tragedy, surviving dangers most people will never face even in their worst nightmares. Book jacket.
Backpacker brings the outdoors straight to the reader's doorstep, inspiring and enabling them to go more places and enjoy nature more often. The authority on active adventure, Backpacker is the world's first GPS-enabled magazine, and the only magazine whose editors personally test the hiking trails, camping gear, and survival tips they publish. Backpacker's Editors' Choice Awards, an industry honor recognizing design, feature and product innovation, has become the gold standard against which all other outdoor-industry awards are measured.
Isolating himself in a remote part of the Yukon territory in order to forget his past, Call Hawkins finds himself unable to ignore New York City girl Charity Sinclair, who is being targeted by a vengeful killer.
A powerful new memoir about growing up with a hard father in a hard land Atz Kilcher learned many vital skills while helping his parents carve a homestead out of the Alaskan wilderness: how to work hard, think on his feet, make do, invent, and use what was on hand to accomplish whatever task was in front of him. He also learned how to lie in order to please his often volatile father and put himself in harm’s way to protect his mother and younger, weaker members of the family. Much later in life, as Atz began to reflect on his upbringing, seek to understand his father, and heal his emotional scars, he discovered that the work of pioneering the frontier of the soul is an infinitely more difficult task than any of the back-breaking chores he performed on his family’s homestead. Learning to use new tools—honesty, vulnerability, forgiveness, acceptance—and building upon the good helped him heal and learn to embrace the value of resilience. This revised perspective has enabled him to tell an enhanced and more positive version of the legacy his father created and has him doing the most rewarding work of his life: mapping his own inner wilderness while drawing closer to his adult children, the next stewards of the land he helped his father carve out of the Alaskan frontier.
When Christa's cousin Sarah comes for a visit, she seems to do everything better than Christa, until they go hiking and Christa's father is knocked unconscious in a fall.
'The wolf Meshiska gave birth to five cubs on the night before full moon. Outside the den a storm was lashing the spruce trees. The sky and the land had become part of each other: a scatterwind night swirling with fragments of black and white. Snow became darkness and darkness snow, and any creature lost between the two found a rock or a tree and lay down beside it, to wait until the world had formed again.' Into this bleak landscape, Athaba is born, a young wolf destined for great adventure. Exiled from his pack for breaking its rigid codes of behaviour and showing too much imagination, Athaba becomes a 'raven wolf', a lonely scavenger living on scraps and his wits. Survival in the icy wastes is hard and dangerous without the comfort and protection of the pack. Injured, and stranded far from home, Athaba is forced to strike up an uneasy alliance with his natural enemy: a man. Together, but ever wary of each other, the wolf and the solitary hunter start their long walk home across the wilderness. It soon becomes clear that the man must learn to be a wolf if he is to survive in the wolf's world. And Athaba has to use all his imagination to learn new skills and strategies to fend for himself and his new pack member: for he discovers that men are frail, and often very ignorant!
This is the story of one man's attempt to find refuge from his demons in nature, and his ultimate surrender to it. "Good Morning Midnight" is an existential adventure story-thrillingly reported, brilliantly composed, provocative, and incisive.
The world-famous Grand Canyon is only one of Arizona's spectacular natural features. Arizona encompasses over 90 wilderness areas, more than 15 national parks and monuments, and the largest national forest in the country. Expansive mesas, high peaks, and snaking canyons create a dynamic landscape and reflect a rich geologic and human history. Backpacking Arizona is the only guide devoted to overnight trips in the state. You'll discover the maze of side canyons and hidden grottos in the Grand Canyon's untrammeled backcountry, historic pioneer trails on the Mogollon Rim, the little-traveled Blue Range, and the legendary Superstition Mountains in the Sonoran Desert.
