At the sound of the bell on the last day of kindergarten, B.J. Hollars and his six-year-old son, Henry, hop in the car to strike out on a 2,500-mile road trip retracing the Oregon Trail. Their mission: to rediscover America, and Americans, along the way

Candid and funny, and finally, wise, Almost Somewhere not only tells the whimsical coming-of-age story of a young woman ill-prepared for a month in the mountains but also reflects a distinctly feminine view of nature. This new edition includes an afterword by the author looking back on the ways both she and the John Muir Trail have changed over the past thirty years.

In Uphill Both Ways Andrea Lani walks us through the Southern Rockies, describing how the region has changed since the discovery of gold in 1859. At the same time, she delves into the history of her family, who immigrated to Leadville to work in the mines, and her own story of hiking the trail in her early twenties before returning two decades later, a depressed middle-aged mom in East Coast exile seeking happiness in a childhood landscape.

In Canoeing the Great Plains, Dobson recounts his journey on the Missouri, the country’s longest river. Dobson, a novice canoeist when he begins his trip, faces the Missouri at a time of dangerous flooding and must learn to trust himself to the powerful flows of the river and its stark and serenely beautiful countryside.

South of Somewhere begins and ends in American writer Robert Camuto’s maternal ancestral town of Vico Equense, Italy—a tiny paradise south of Naples on the Sorrento Peninsula. Camuto’s fine-grained storytelling in this series of portraits takes us beyond the usual objective views of viniculture into the elusive and magical world of Italian “South-ness.” 

Waterman is the first comprehensive biography of Duke Kahanamoku (1890–1968): swimmer, surfer, Olympic gold medalist, Hawaiian icon, waterman.

In Framing Nature Yolonda Youngs traces the idea of the Grand Canyon as an icon and the ways people came to know it through popular imagery and visual media. She analyzes and interprets more than fourteen hundred visual artifacts, including postcards, maps, magazine illustrations, and photographs of the Grand Canyon, supplemented with the words and ideas of writers, artists, explorers, and other media makers from 1869 to 2022.

In the summer of 1883 Belgian travel writer Jules Leclercq spent ten days on horseback in Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, exploring myriad natural wonders: astonishing geysers, majestic waterfalls, the vast lake, and the breathtaking canyon. This deft translation at long last makes available to English-speaking readers a masterpiece of western American travel writing that is a fascinating historical document in its own right.

Kayaking Alone is a narrative of man and nature, one-on-one, but also of man and nature writ large. Through Barenti’s journey, the ecology, history, and politics of Pacific salmon unfold in fascinating detail, and with this firsthand knowledge and experience the reader gains a new and personal sense of the nature that unites and divides us.