Crossing Open Ground
10 best books like Crossing Open Ground (Barry Lopez): Down the River, The Lost Grizzlies: A Search for Survivors in the Colorado Wilderness, The Secret Knowledge of Water, Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness, Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River, The Land of Little Rain, Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul, The Founding Fish, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water
| Author | Edward Abbey |
| ISBN | 0452265630 |
"Be of good cheer," the war-horse Edward Abbey advises, "the military-industrial state will soon collapse." This sparkling book, which takes us up and down rivers and across mountains and deserts, is the perfect antidote to despair.
Along the way, Abbey makes time for Thoreau while he takes...
| Author | Rick Bass |
| ISBN | 0395717590 |
Do grizzly bears still wander the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, where they have long been considered extinct? If so, can they elude the naturalists determined to prove that these bears, smarter than all other bears, survive in the mountain wilderness? Rick Bass, along with veteran grizzly expert...
| Author | Craig Childs |
| ISBN | 0316610690 |
The "essence of the American desert," as the subtitle of Craig Childs's book has it, is water. A desert, by definition, lacks it, but when water does come, it comes in torrential, sometimes devastating abundance. Childs, a thirtysomething desert rat with a vast knowledge of the Southwest's remote...
| Author | Doug Peacock |
| ISBN | 0805045430 |
For nearly twenty years, alone and unarmed, author Doug Peacock traversed the rugged mountains of Montana and Wyoming tracking the magnificent grizzly. His thrilling narrative takes us into the bear's habitat, where we observe directly this majestic animal's behavior, from hunting strategies,...
| Author | Ellen Meloy |
| ISBN | 0816522936 |
More than a century after John Wesley Powell launched his boat on the Green River, Ellen Meloy spent eight years of seasonal floats through Utah's Desolation Canyon with her husband, a federal river manager. She came to know the history and natural history of this place well enough to call it home, and...
| Author | Mary Hunter Austin |
| ISBN | 0140249192 |
“Between the high Sierras south from Yosemite—east and south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert” is the territory that Mary Austin calls the Land of Little Rain. In this classic collection of meditations on the wonders...
| Author | Scott Weidensaul |
| ISBN | 0865476888 |
In 1953, birding guru Roger Tory Peterson and noted British naturalist James Fisher set out on what became a legendary journey-a one hundred day trek over 30,000 miles around North America. They traveled from Newfoundland to Florida, deep into the heart of Mexico, through the Southwest, the Pacific...
| Author | John McPhee |
| ISBN | 0374528837 |
John McPhee's twenty-sixth book is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume. Each spring, American shad-Alosa sapidissima-leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands and run heroic distances upriver to spawn. McPhee--a shad fisherman himself--recounts...
| Author | Barbara Hurd |
| ISBN | 0618215123 |
In these nine evocative essays, Barbara Hurd explores the seductive allure of bogs, swamps, and wetlands. Hurd's forays into the land of carnivorous plants, swamp gas, and bog men provide fertile ground for rich thoughts about mythology, literature, Eastern spirituality, and human longing. In...
| Author | Kathleen Dean Moore |
| ISBN | 0156004615 |
Why is this book not famous? I stumbled across it in a used bookstore, and anyway I am educated now.
"All along the McKenzie River Trail, there must be things we do not see, because they have no names. If we knew a word for the dark spaces between pebbles on the river bottom, if we had a name for the nests...
| Author | Terry Tempest Williams |
| ISBN | 0679752560 |
Williams often writes about things I care quite a bit about: Utah's natural beauty and/or quirky culture; environmental activism; birds; mythology; traveling; Edward Abbey; water & hiking & animals in the wild. She writes about the trails I walk on, the mountains I climb, the rivers I traverse....
| Author | Wendell Berry |
| ISBN | 1887178287 |
This short book of essays helped give me some focus on how to see the world and approach my living in it. I relay needed the “pick me up” it gave me after getting so worn down every day by the evidence of the inconvenient truth of the mess we’re in and worn down by the ineffective polarization sowed by...
| Author | Diane Ackerman |
| ISBN | 0393338754 |
"It's easy to live in the moment when you're immersed in Ackerman's glorious prose."—Washington Post
In an eye-opening sequence of personal meditations through the cycle of seasons, one of our most celebrated storyteller-poet-naturalists awakens us to the world at dawn. Diane Ackerman...
