Essayist Ellen Meloy’s posthumous collection is profound, outspoken and hilarious.
Michael Engelhard
Posted inJanuary 21, 2019: What Killed Washington's Carbon Tax?
The plight of the ‘snow oxen’
A biologist draws on his fieldwork to consider the world of muskoxen during climate change.
Posted inNovember 12, 2018: Old Wests, and new
The contradictions of iconic lands
The photos inside two new volumes show the grandeur and vulnerability of landscapes like the Grand Canyon and Bears Ears National Monument.
Posted inArticles
How to name a rose
A recent book provides a road map to finding literature in nature.
Posted inDecember 12, 2016: How the Park Service is Failing Women
Showcasing Alaska’s Inupiat culture through gaming
Few Inupiat youth are fluent in their native language, but a new game’s popularity could keep the culture alive.
Posted inJune 13, 2016: Water to Dust
The lost in canyon country
A new book recounts the many mysterious disappearances in the Western desert.
Posted inSeptember 14, 2015: Close Ties in Big Landscapes
Notes from the road to bestsellerdom
An author’s promotional book tour includes incontinent owls and posh but uncomfortable luncheons.
Posted inJune 22, 2015: Dust to Dust
A border crossing gone wrong
Review of ‘The Jaguar’s Children’ by John Vaillant.
Posted inFebruary 16, 2015: Chainsaw Diplomacy
Shooting life’s rapids
Review of ‘If Not For This’ by Pete Fromm.
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
Lay of the land
How to Read the American West: A Field GuideWilliam Wyckoff384 pages, paperback: $44.95.University of Washington Press, 2014. Too hefty to be carried in a hip pocket or even a daypack, William Wyckoff’s How To Read The American West is a field guide unlike any other, with a focus on patterns, variations and the distribution of […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Backpacking with monster skeeters
An Alaska encounter with the fiercest of the 176 mosquito species that roam the U.S.
Posted inFebruary 17, 2014: The Gila $olution
Tracking America’s ice-age pioneers
In the Shadow of the Sabertooth: A Renegade Naturalist Considers Global Warming, the First Americans and the Terrible Beasts of the PleistoceneDouglas Peacock200 pages, paperback: $15.AK Press/ Counterpunch, 2013. Doug Peacock, author of Grizzly Years and Walking It Off, once walked point as a polar bear guard on an Arctic expedition, armed with only a […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2013: Ecosystems 101
Redrock storyscapes
Escalante. Monticello. Manti-La Sal. Sheiks Flat. Kigalia. Tavaputs. Moroni Slopes. Spoken like mantras, these place names conjure the Utah canyon country’s bastard heritage – Spanish, Navajo, Ute, Anglo and Mormon. Today, they entice dreamers with their visionary topographies. But in earlier days it was the absence of names that drew people eager to fill in […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Marginalia: an essay
On a trek across the Arctic, a writer’s map becomes a record of the journey.
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
Tools ‘R’ Us
Dirt Work: An Education in the WoodsChristine Byl256 pages, hardcover: $24.95.Beacon Press, 2013. Tired of school, broke and eager for a change, Christine Byl took to the woods with a National Park Service trail crew. Through 16 summers of manual labor in Alaska and Montana — maintaining, repairing, designing and building bridges, ditches and trails […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Parched lives in a parched land: A review of the Ordinary Truth
The Ordinary TruthJana Richman375 pages, softcover: $16.95.Torrey House Press, 2012. Traditionally, springs and wells are centers of life around which people gather and sometimes form communities. In Utah author Jana Richman’s second novel, The Ordinary Truth, metropolitan claims to desert waters unsettle a small town and pit one family’s members against each other. Shifting between […]
Posted inAugust 6, 2012: Of Birds and Men
We cannot drill our way out of this mess: A review of Arctic Voices
Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point Subhankar Banerjee, editor. 560 pages, hardcover: $35.95. Seven Stories Press, 2012. In 2001, on the U.S. Senate floor, one of Alaska’s pro-development politicians held up a blank white piece of posterboard. “This is a picture of ANWR (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) as it exists for about nine […]
Posted inMarch 5, 2012: The Zombies of Teton County
Interior Landscapes: A review of The City Beneath the Snow
The City Beneath the Snow: StoriesMarjorie Kowalski Cole276 pages, hardcover: $ 22.95.University of Alaska Press, 2012. With her Bellwether Prize-winning novel Correcting the Landscape — a tale of journalism and urban development — Marjorie Kowalski Cole put Fairbanks, Alaska, on the literary map. Her posthumously published story collection The City Beneath the Snow again brings […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Jeff Rice collects nature’s noises
Some people collect butterflies. Others amass dolls or antique cars. Armed with a microphone and recorder, Jeff Rice chases the West’s natural sounds — from the hooting of owls to the buzzing of Great Basin rattlesnakes. A relative newcomer to nature field recording, Rice worked in audio production for about 15 years. As a radio […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Collateral damage
When the Killing’s DoneT.C. Boyle384 pages, hardcover: $ 26.95.Viking, 2011. One of the West’s most prolific and trenchant novelists returns to a theme he previously explored in Tooth and Claw and A Friend of the Earth: our interactions with nature and their repercussions. T.C. Boyle’s characters often root for the environment. The tension and narrative […]