Family legacies are hell to outrun, especially when violence is entwined in the ancestral DNA. This month a new batch of novels offer modern twists on the ancient themes of family, duty, revenge, and justice. The most anticipated is Peter Heller’s (Knopf, $25), the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing editor’s follow-up to his bestselling The Dog Stars. Jim Stegner, the title character, is a forty-something artist struggling to remake his life in the Colorado backcountry following the death of his teenage daughter.

Trouble finds him in the person of Dellwood Siminoe, a hunter who’s mean as a sack of razors. Conflict ensues, and Stegner soon finds himself with the added burdens of both the law and Siminoe’s vengeful kin, who have a habit of showing up drunk, angry, and armed at Stegner’s favorite fishing holes. The Painter isn’t the postapocalyptic revelation that The Dog Stars was, but Heller creates in Stegner a more flawed, reflective, and fully realized protagonist than the pining loner at the center of his first novel.

A son’s duty to his father forms the backbone of Louis Bayard’s novel (Holt, $27), a fictional play on Theodore Roosevelt’s 1914 expedition down Brazil’s River of Doubt. This isn’t a full record of that journey (for that, see Candice Millard’s classic The River of Doubt) but a fanciful what-if that imagines T.R. and his son Kermit captured by the Cinta Larga, a real-life tribe that shadowed the expedition as it floated the river.

Bayard, bestselling author of historical thrillers like The School of Night and The Pale Blue Eye, hangs the novel on Kermit’s battle to become something more than his father’s valet, an elusive goal for a son who lacks Teddy’s tallyho bluster. “Of all the Roosevelt children,” Bayard writes, “he was the least likely to force himself on the world’s attention.” Beast tends to run a little too J.J. Abrams–ish for my taste, what with all the strange killings in the jungle. “We are in a strange land, Kermit,” says the old man. “Should we not be braced for strange outcomes?” But Bayard offers his readers a fun ride right to the end.

There’s no escaping family, duty, or violence when you’re a member of the Kings clan of Loosewood Island, the lobstering dynasty at the center of Alexi Zentner’s gripping second novel, (Norton, $27). The Kings have been pulling bugs out of the water around Loosewood since the 1720s, and they’ve always policed the grounds on their own. When young tweakers from the next town over start poaching their prey, Cordelia and her father, local big man Woody, must battle for Loosewood and their livelihood.

The struggle continues even as the family business comes under fire, with Cordelia rising as Woody’s power declines. By laying Shakespearean themes over the culturally rich New England lobster grounds, Zentner, a former newspaperman and climber, produces a deeply satisfying novel that reveals what is required by and given to those who inherit a family’s legacy.

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THE INTERIOR SECRETARY recognized the jacket and boots I wore to her office. Four months earlier she’d been selling them.

“They let you in here wearing that?” Sally Jewell said, giving the once-over to my North Face soft shell and Zamberlan hiking boots.

, the former REI chief executive who is now in charge of one-fifth of the U.S. landmass, 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate, 1.7 billion acres of offshore territory, 401 national parks, 561 national wildlife refuges, 476 bureau of reclamation dams, 2,055 endangered or threatened species, and the maintenance of good relations with 566 American Indian tribes, smiled and led me into her working quarters.

“Holy shit,” I couldn’t help but blurt out.

The office of the Secretary of the Interior has long been one of the most formidable redoubts in the federal government. In scope the corner suite rivals the state of Montana—if Big Sky Country were carpeted in royal blue.

“I know,” Jewell said. “I’m still getting used to the size of it.”

The same could be said of Jewell’s new job, which the sinewy, silver-haired, 57-year-old executive took over in early April. In the 164-year history of the Interior Department, no incoming secretary has faced such a steep learning curve. Last December, she had nothing more pressing on her mind than the holiday sales figures at Recreational Equipment Incorporated, the outdoor-gear cooperative she’d run for the past eight years. Then came a phone call from President Barack Obama, who offered an upgrade she couldn’t refuse.

“This is the one job I would have left REI for,” she told me. “I’m not sure there’s another one out there.”

If the offer was a surprise to Jewell, it was equally unexpected to members of the capital’s chattering class, none of whom had Jewell on the list of likely successors to , Obama’s first-term Interior boss. With zero political experience and an eclectic three-phase career (petroleum engineer, banker, outdoor retailer), Jewell gave everyone something to love—and to worry about. The American Petroleum Institute liked her oil-field experience. The Natural Resources saw (it hoped) a nominee with “the heart of an environmentalist and the know-how of a business woman.”

For the outdoor industry, her appointment brought long-sought recognition of recreation’s place on public lands. Here was a cabinet secretary whose adventure rĂ©sumĂ© rivaled her executive CV. She’s climbed Antarctica’s Vinson Massif, and she summited Mount Rainier the first of seven times at age 16. “This is a paradigm change, not just for our industry but for America,” says Black Diamond CEO Peter Metcalf, who once shared a rope with Jewell on Liberty Bell, a classic climb in the North Cascades. “Secretary of the interior is traditionally a job given with a nod to industries like oil and gas or ranching. Today, much of the GNP on public lands comes from non-extractive industries like recreation, tourism, and ecological services.” Now, Metcalf says, “politics have finally caught up with reality.”

“You’ve got somebody who fundamentally gets the fact that there’s a huge economic stream” flowing from protected wildlands, says Adam Cramer, who heads the outdoor alliance, an industry group that lobbies for recreation and conservation. “Oil, gas, timber, and grazing aren’t the only ways to make money from the federal estate.”

President Obama agrees. “She knows the link between conservation and good jobs,” he said in announcing Jewell’s nomination. “She knows that there’s no contradiction between being good stewards of the land and our economic progress—that, in fact, those two things need to go hand in hand.”

In a nod to her passion for the outdoors, , “For Sally, the toughest part of this job will probably be sitting behind a desk.”

Hardly. The toughest part may be keeping Interior relevant at a time when the biggest environmental battles are being fought on the turf of rival agencies. Jewell has plenty on her plate, to be sure. In the next three years, her department will set new rules for fracking on federal land, oversee the first offshore Atlantic wind installations, decide whether to list hundreds of proposed endangered species, double the number of renewable-energy projects on public land, regulate offshore Alaskan oil exploration, and defend the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) against the ever present threat of oil and gas exploration. But the signature green campaigns of Obama’s second term are being waged by the Environmental Protection agency, where carbon regulation will be shaped, and, of all places, the state Department, which will help decide the fate of the .

Oh, and there’s one other thing on her to-do list. Interior secretaries traditionally bear the burden of establishing a president’s environmental legacy. , the secretary under both Kennedy and Johnson, created the Canyon Lands and North Cascades National Parks and the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, and he oversaw passage of the . Walter Hickel, Richard Nixon’s Interior head, saved the Everglades when developers wanted to turn it into the world’s largest airport. Under Bill Clinton, gave the department a transfusion of environmental values and created the , which helps safeguard 27 million acres of BLM land. Even , George W. Bush’s second-term secretary, managed to create the world’s largest marine protected area, the .

So far, Obama’s legacy is muddled at best. If he left office tomorrow, he’d be known for his ramp-up of renewable energy, for being not as bad as W., and for not much else. When I first spoke with Jewell, she was still emerging from senate confirmation mode: smile and speak only in vague platitudes. “I’m finding my way with a lot of help from the people here at Interior,” she told me. “My primary focus has been on listening. Listening to what’s been done before me, listening to the mistakes that others have made. Listening to the president and his agenda, and considering the role that Interior can play.” It wasn’t a bad early strategy: ears open, mouth shut. But before long, Jewell would have to stop listening and start acting. Because she faces one of the biggest challenges in Washington: creating an environmental legacy for a president who seems indifferent about having one.

When Obama took office in early 2009, environmentalists’ hopes were over the moon. The ruinous record of his predecessor was best summed up by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who predicted that “George W. Bush will go down as the worst environmental president in U.S. history.” Much of the damage had taken place in and through the Department of the Interior, which, under , had become a den of corruption.

Bush’s appointees made oil and gas leasing their top priority, demoting conservation-minded managers, harassing scientists, cutting secret deals, partying with drilling executives, and encouraging greasy lobbyists like , who on casino deals, to roam the halls of Interior headquarters at 18th and C. In 2006, Inspector General Earl Devaney, charged with making sure Interior officials followed the law, summed up the situation under Norton: “simply stated, short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior.”

In 2007, Steven Griles, Norton’s right-hand man, was for obstructing the investigation into the Abramoff scandal. Abramoff himself pleaded guilty to conspiracy, mail fraud, and tax evasion. Norton was later investigated but never charged over unrelated conflict-of-interest questions raised about leases won by the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, for whom she went to work upon leaving Interior.

To rehab the department, Obama chose Ken Salazar, a Colorado rancher and an old friend from the Senate. The day Salazar was sworn in, White house chief of staff Rahm Emanuel walked up to Tom Strickland, Salazar’s deputy secretary, poked him in the chest, and said, “Clean up that mess.”

Salazar took out the trash. He immediately withdrew 77 oil and gas leases in Utah’s red-rock country—more than 100,000 acres—auctioned off in the final days of the Bush administration (and made famous by eco-activist , who was imprisoned for false bidding) and revised leasing rules to prevent another Utah debacle. He issued a . He also moved quickly to appoint conservation-minded directors of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Park Service. Fish and Wildlife began moving dozens of stalled endangered-species listings through the evaluation process.

Job one for Salazar, though, was renewable energy. Solar and wind projects had been back-burnered by Bush’s BLM officials; for eight years, not a single solar project had been approved. Declaring Interior “the real department of energy,” Salazar replaced Bush’s “drill, baby, drill” policy with a shine-and-spin initiative. He fast-tracked 35 —capable of generating 10,500 megawatts, enough to power 1.6 million U.S. homes—and approved offshore wind turbines along the Atlantic coast. When conservationists raised alarms about flyways turning into bird blenders and solar projects destroying desert tortoise habitat, Salazar responded with a siting process, called smart from the start, that identified appropriate zones for future renewables development.

That didn’t slow down oil and gas production. In Obama’s first three years, his all-of-the-above energy strategy produced did in his final three years. The BLM approved about 4,000 drilling permits per year—down from the record number issued under Bush, but twice the permitting rate of the 1990s. Oil and gas data are notoriously susceptible to political skewing, but to get a real sense, look to the number of leases challenged by grassroots groups like the . SUWA went bonkers during the Bush years, protesting hundreds of leases in fragile habitat. In 2009, 47 percent of all leases sold were challenged in federal court by environmental groups. By 2012, that number had fallen to 18 percent.

Like Obama, Salazar was just moderate enough to infuriate conservative critics and disappoint environmental allies. When Fish and Wildlife listed the polar bear as endangered in 2008, prohibiting the government from using the Endangered Species Act to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions, the very cause of the bear’s decline. Salazar froze Kempthorne’s order—but ultimately allowed the controversial clause to stand. After breaking up the inept in the wake of BP’s Deepwater horizon spill, he let Shell conduct oil exploration in Alaska’s rough and risky Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

Overall, environmental advocates seemed to give Obama passing grades: a B minus or a solid C. “I had high hopes for this administration,” says Jamierappaport Clark, executive director of and the head of Fish and Wildlife under Bruce Babbitt during President Clinton’s second term. “From an imperiled-wildlife and conservation stand-point, the first term has been disappointing. It’s hard to look back and see anything bold, aggressive, or earth-shattering.”

“Interior needs a visionary, not a mechanic,” SUWA legislative director Richard Peterson-Cremer wrote when Salazar stepped down. “The Obama administration has a real opportunity to change its course on public lands. The question is not whether it has time enough and space—it does—but whether it has will enough and steel.”

“I’VE BEEN TOLD that coming up to speed in this job is like drinking from a fire hose,” Jewell told a gathering of Interior Department employees in Portland, Oregon, in June. “Actually, I’ve found that it’s more like a water main.”

The line drew chuckles from the friendly, if skeptical, DOI bureaucrats. They’d seen secretaries come and go. Many of the department’s 70,000 employees were hired during the Babbitt years, and a few are old enough to remember the 22-month term of , the Reagan appointee who still holds the crown as the most environmentally destructive interior secretary in history. Billed as a meet-the-boss session, Jewell’s day in Portland was a chance for her to shake hands and make friends in the field offices. Unlike Salazar, who arrived with dozens of allies in the senate and installed his own “Colorado mafia” of well-seasoned appointees, Jewell had to build a network from scratch, working rooms like the Portland federal-building auditorium. There, 150 staffers spread themselves in agency-specific clusters: Bureau of Indian Affairs officials over here, Fish and Wildlife biologists over there, BLM folks in the back. “Anybody from the Park service?” Jewell asked. “No? Well, I guess it is the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. They’re kind of busy.”‹a natural informality attends to her. Give Jewell a lectern and she’ll avoid it. Offer the choice between a hike and a backroom one-on-one, she’ll lace up her boots. She connects with personal stories, not policy. And so, in Portland, she spoke about her life.

Born in England, she moved to Seattle at age three when her father, Peter Roffey, took a fellowship in anesthesiology at the University of Washington Medical School. Eager to fit in, Roffey became REI member #17249 and bought his first tent from alpinist . Young Sally Roffey spent weekends hiking in the Cascades and sailing the family’s eight-foot dinghy on Puget Sound. “We used to camp everywhere we went,” she recalled.

At the University of Washington, she studied mechanical engineering and met her future husband, Warren Jewell, a fellow engineering student. After graduation, the pair took jobs with Mobil Oil in the roughneck fields of southern Oklahoma. She enjoyed the work, but it was the oil business in the seventies, and the glass ceiling hung low. “I wanted to work on offshore oil rigs, but Mobil wouldn’t allow any women on their rigs, except in Norway,” she told Interior employees in Portland. “I figured that was a long way to go for work.”

Then she heard that banks were hiring engineers to help evaluate oil and gas investments. She and Warren wanted to move back to the Pacific Northwest, so she talked her way into a job with Seattle-based rainier bank. The oil boom was showing signs of shakiness, but two rival Seattle institutions, Rainier and Seattle First National bank (Seafirst), continued to lay heavy bets. Jewell steered Rainier away from a number of bad investments, and when oil went bust in the mid-1980s, Seafirst collapsed. Jewell became known as the .

There are certain kinds of people who hire on as interns and, within a few years, end up running the place. Jewell’s rise was like that. By the late 1980s, she was overseeing Rainier’s entire loan portfolio, and when she left in 1992 to join West One Bank, a smaller regional operation, she was CEO of its Washington subsidiary within a year. Meanwhile, she was raising two children, Peter and Anne, both now grown and living in Seattle. her style wasn’t aggressive or brash; rather, say colleagues, she comes across as sensible and polite. “Sally is able to judge situations in a very sophisticated way,” says Seattle attorney William Gates Sr., who is the father of the Microsoft founder and served with Jewell on the UW board of regents. “She’s a person who very often has the right answer for the question under discussion.”

REI recruited Jewell to its board in 1996, attracted by her combination of backcountry experience and banking savvy. By 2005, she was CEO. REI was a foundering ship at the time, burdened by too much debt and knocked on its heels by an ill-advised foray into Japan. Jewell closed the overseas outlet, paid down the debt (the co-op now has none), and embarked on a slow national expansion, opening a handful of well-chosen, self-financed stores every year, including a 39,000-square-foot Manhattan base camp in 2011. Last year the company’s website and 127 stores reported revenue of $1.9 billion, making it the biggest consumer cooperative in the nation.

Meanwhile, Jewell pushed a triple-bottom-line ethos that emphasized environmental ethics and employee relations as much as profit and loss. That’s Jewell’s strong suit: getting the best out of people, but in a low-key way. “She was always asking questions, soliciting points of view,” says Camelbak chief executive Sally McCoy, who worked with Jewell on the industry-supported wildlands group Conservation alliance.

One of Jewell’s favorite books is , Gordon MacKenzie’s guide to fostering creativity within a corporate bureaucracy. It’s an idea she’s pushing at Interior. “Did you know the engineers at hoover Dam are buying spare parts on eBay because nobody makes them anymore?” she asked her staffers. “If there’s something you’re doing as part of your job that makes no sense, tell me about it. Raise a holler. One of the things I told everyone at REI was: We’ve got to stop doing things that don’t make sense and concentrate on the things that do.”‹Let me help you do your job better: that’s the message going out to the field from Madame secretary. “I’m a businessperson,” Jewell told her troops. “I’ve got 30 years in business and two months in the federal government.” a lot of people do outstanding work at Interior, she said. “I want you to know I’ve got your back.” she let that hang for a moment, leaving unsaid the second half of the sentence: and I’m hoping you’ll have mine.

To do what exactly wasn’t yet clear.

ON MOST WEEKDAY mornings, Sally Jewell walks to work under the haunting eyes of her predecessors. Along the hall outside her office hang large oil paintings of Salazar, Norton, Watt, and the rest, and in the lobby there’s a bust of Udall, widely acknowledged as the greatest interior secretary of the modern era.

In case Jewell doesn’t feel the weight, every once in a while a former secretary will pop up with some unsolicited advice.

Hello, Bruce Babbitt! ‹In a bit of exquisite timing, Babbitt, the most influential secretary since Udall, issued a challenge to Obama 24 hours before the president nominated Jewell. “So far, under President Obama, industry has been winning the race,” he said during a speech at the National Press Club. “Over the past four years, the [oil and gas] industry has leased more than 6 million acres, compared with only 2.6 million acres permanently protected. In the Obama era, land conservation is again falling behind.”

Babbitt called for a one-for-one scheme that would protect an acre of public land for every acre put up for lease.

It’s an idea worth considering, but it also relies on a bygone metric. Environmentalism has expanded beyond its traditional protect-the-land-and-water paradigm. These days, the movement has become as much about energy and carbon, and that expanded focus has sent policy beyond the neat boundaries of Interior. The State Department is doing the environmental analysis for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline (because the pipe, which would deliver Canadian tar-sands oil to Gulf Coast refineries, crosses an international border), which effectively gives Obama the sole up-or-down vote. Interior has criticized state’s characterization of the pipeline’s wildlife impact as “inaccurate,” and in June the president said he’ll OK Keystone only “if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”

“Significantly”—that’s a word that allows a lot of room to operate.

Obama said this while announcing his climate-change initiative, a series of moves that bypass Congress and deal with global warming through executive orders. Interior plays a part—the president called for a redoubling of renewable-energy development on federal land—but most of the action will continue to happen at the EPA, which ran point on carbon under first-term administrator Lisa Jackson. The centerpiece of Obama’s climate initiative is an EPA-led clampdown on carbon pollution from power plants, which accounts for more than a third of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. It remains to be seen whether Obama has the will to follow through; the president backed Jackson on a number of clean-air initiatives, but in 2011 he caved on tougher smog standards after big polluters screamed job loss—as they’re already doing on the power-plant rule.

As if to underscore the centrality of the EPA—not Interior—to the president’s environmental agenda, senate republicans let Jewell’s nomination proceed while blocking Obama’s second-term EPA nominee, Gina McCarthy, for before confirming her in early July. a tough-talking Bostonian who ran Jackson’s clean-air team, McCarthy wasted little time in declaring that “we will act” to cut carbon pollution. She followed up on that pledge in September, when the EPA proposed new rules capping carbon emissions from new coal and natural-gas power plants. Similar caps for existing plants—where the real battle will come—are expected in 2014.

Jewell and McCarthy may end up playing good cop, bad cop for Obama on climate change—Jewell the gentle reconciler in a fleece jacket, McCarthy the brassy brawler straight out of The Departed. It’s a good match, because the EPA will surely draw more fire than Interior. Reducing emissions hits polluters in the wallet; expanding renewables offers the promise of profit. And Jewell’s confirmation led no one to believe that she’d pull back on oil and gas development. “We will continue to pursue the president’s all-of-the-above energy strategy,” she said at her senate hearing, and she hammered the point for months thereafter.

Inevitably, Jewell’s charm offensive has to give way to tough policy decisions if she wants to be something more than a caretaker. She’s not going to be the second coming of Udall—nobody will. What saint stew wanted, he got, thanks to a compliant Congress, an open checkbook, and a president preoccupied with Vietnam. Since Jewell took office, she’s confronted an insanely hostile Congress, a government shutdown that closed the parks, and a boss whose environmental commitment seems to come and go.

Is there still room for greatness at Interior? Bruce Babbitt thinks so. “Sally Jewell has the background, she has the national constituency, and she has the president’s confidence,” he told me over the phone from his office in Washington. Babbitt, now semi-retired, ticked off those qualities as if they were tools in a Jobox—here’s your hammer, there’s your tape and nails, get to work. “She has a fantastic opportunity to address a number of important issues.”

SO WHAT WOULD a Jewell legacy look like? “I don’t think about my own legacy,” she told me back in June. “I do think about a legacy for President Obama.” Exactly what that might be remained an open question.‹ The answers began to come 111 days into her term, when the secretary pivoted from listening to leading. At a speech given at DOI headquarters and webcast to field offices nationwide, she laid out the top priorities. The more traditional goals included ramping up renewable-energy production, repairing the Native American education system, and addressing looming water catastrophes like the massively overburdened Colorado River. Jewell told staffers her agenda wasn’t “radically different than what you’ve been doing. Maybe a little tweaking, a little change.”

On climate, she showed that she can be bold. “I hope there are no climate-change deniers in the Department of the Interior,” she said to her team. “If you don’t believe in it, come out into the resources. Come out to Alaska, which is melting. Go in to the sierra,” which is losing its snowpack. It was a strong, clear message that raised howls among fringe denialists but provided cover to the scientists and biologists in Interior’s ranks.

We could use more of that straight-up fact facing, the courage to point at a cow pie and call it bullshit. Specifically, Jewell has a rare opportunity when it comes to oil and gas regulations. Interior’s proposed rules for fracking on federal land are a joke, modeled on a template put out several years ago by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative bill mill backed in part by billionaire brothers . Jewell commands both the respect of the drilling guys—she knows how to frack a well herself—and the support of environmentalists; she’s in a unique position to give the regulations real teeth.

Ditto the rules for siting oil and gas leases on fragile lands. An early test will come in Utah, where the BLM has proposed , a recreationally important and biologically rich region often mentioned for monument designation. The leases, scheduled for auction in November, pin Jewell between her oil experience and her conservationist leanings. When I asked her about the skepticism with which outdoor enthusiasts usually greet drilling, she struck a decidedly non-Babbittian tone. “I think it’s important for people to step back and look at their own lifestyle and acknowledge that it’s difficult if not impossible to not be a user of fossil fuels,” Jewell told me. “Most outdoor recreationists drive to a destination. Some walk softer than others, but we all have an impact. It’s important to understand that and not vilify the industries that we rely upon.”

Other issues are also going to intersect oil and gas. She’s unlikely to halt the full delisting of the gray wolf, but her leadership could either cause or avert a legal train wreck over the possible listing of the greater sage grouse, a bird whose habitat of existing and potential oil fields could make it the spotted owl of the Intermountain West.

Much of the action during Jewell’s term will happen in Alaska: the ANWR stalemate will likely continue, and Obama shows no signs of slowing Shell’s push into the Chukchi Sea. But Jewell has real power when it comes to Bristol Bay, breeding ground for the world’s most productive salmon runs. It’s an airport-or-Everglades issue. One of two global conglomerates planning a gold mine there pulled out of the project this fall. Jewell and Obama could build on that momentum by creating a wildlife refuge or national monument on federal land. It wouldn’t stop the mine (which is on state land), but it would throw up roadblocks. “If you’re going to allow offshore leasing in Alaska, there ought to be offsetting designations of protected areas,” Babbitt says. “Using the to protect Bristol Bay is a great opportunity.”

Those are the traditional big gets for Jewell’s term. But the question remains: What does she want her legacy to be?

THE KEY to Sally Jewell is that there’s no grand ideology at work. She’s neither neocon nor neolib. She doesn’t align herself with the or the . Policy is driven by the personal and the pragmatic. She’s got to get on the ground and see what’s going on, paddle Rhode Island’s Blackstone River, as she did in May; handle an invasive boa in the Everglades (April); or circle Washington’s Squaxin Island, as she does every New Year’s Day in her kayak. She’s worked on the Alaska pipeline; she knows the benefits oil companies can bring, and she knows the environmental harm they can wreak. Most of all, she knows what outdoor exposure did for her as a girl, so she wants to spread the gospel of adventure among the next generation.

That commitment was on display on an early June morning in D.C., when the secretary of the interior went fishing with some kids on the Anacostia River.

“How many of you have ever been fishing?” Jewell asked. A few hands went up. “How many have ever been out on the river?” Fewer hands. Their parents and grandparents didn’t use the river because, back in the day, the Anacostia was a veritable sewer. Now that it’s clean—er, cleaner—the kids don’t use it because it’s not connected to a screen.

Once the kids were herded onto a tour boat, Jewell encouraged the youngsters to bait hooks, cast carefully, reel in, and see what they’d caught. She did her best work one-on-one, talking with young girls about the outdoors, and life, and siblings, and school, and whatever. Away from the microphones, the old silver-haired white lady actually forged a connection with a couple of young African-American girls. They spoke in low voices, with long, natural silences. As they baited a hook, one girl asked, “Doesn’t that hurt the worm?”

Jewell paused before answering. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I suppose it does.”

It wasn’t a politician’s answer. The words seemed to startle Jewell even as they came out of her mouth. But they also earned the respect of the girl, who considered the information, then continued spearing the nightcrawler.

If there is anywhere that Jewell wants to have a lasting impact, it’s here, with the next generation. “This is one heck of a platform,” she told me in her office, “to help people understand about our planet, about our public lands, about the role they play in caring for our resources.”

Indeed, when she laid out her goals for the department in July, the last two were these: “celebrating and enhancing America’s great outdoors” and luring the millennial generation into the wilds.

That first part refers to the America’s great outdoors Initiative, a fuzzy, feel-good effort created during Obama’s first term. The idea was to connect an increasingly urban, plugged-in citizenry with its public land and waterways—but nobody on Salazar’s team figured out how to give it purpose and clarity. As Jewell receives it, America’s great outdoors can become whatever she wants it to be.

She can use it to lure more Hispanics and African-Americans into the parks, to expand the constituency of the outdoors. And she can use it to get kids to unplug. , journalist Richard Louv’s exploration of kids’ increasing disconnection from the natural world, is a touchstone book for Jewell, and she’s determined to use her bully pulpit to fight the syndrome Louv calls nature-deficit disorder.

This is where Jewell’s true passion lies, and she’s already made it a top priority. There are easy fixes she can make: she can direct park and refuge managers to reconceptualize their most accessible areas to attract underserved communities. She can empower young Park Service rangers and reach the millennials where they live, on social media. But she has an opportunity to go even bigger, to create a signature program under her watch. To do that, she could revamp Interior’s partnership with the , which provides high school and college students paid, hands-on internships in parks and wilderness areas. SCA is one of America’s greatest programs, but it’s largely unknown outside of outdoor culture. It could become a public-service option as famous as teach for America or a brand as strong as outward bound. Franklin Roosevelt had the Civilian Conservation Corps; a supersized SCA could be Obama’s next-gen public-works project. With a one-month stint in SCA, you’ll hook a kid on the outdoors for life.

Youth and climate change: those could be the overriding themes of a great Jewell administration—and the foundation of Obama’s environmental legacy.

“We need warriors for that battle on climate change,” Jewell told me when I caught up with her again in July, at a youth summit in Seattle. The secretary seemed clear and confident in her message. “If I don’t get these young people engaged, they’re not going to care about and support the outdoors. I only have three and a half years. So I gotta get going.”

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It’s the spring of 1924, and English playboy Lord Percival Bromley has disappeared in the Himalayas. The climbing world assumes he’s perished in an avalanche. Lady Bromley, his mother, believing otherwise, summons three mountaineers to her estate. “If my Percy is alive,” she says, “I want you to bring him home to me.” So begins prolific sci-fi master Dan Simmons’s brick-thick adventure thriller (Little, Brown, $28). Bromley’s an invented character, as are the three sent after him: decorated World War I veteran Richard Deacon, crafty Chamonix guide Jean-Claude Clairoux, and young Harvard grad Jake Perry. Soon enough the trio is battling Nazis disguised as yetis, but the surprise here is how well Simmons knows his climbing history. The team’s gear is supplied by George Finch, the inventor of the down jacket and oxygen kit. And Deacon’s Great War scars (body and soul) were all too common. The Abominable keeps the action roaring through the team’s grueling ascent and Nazi showdown while paying out enough crampon-and-ax accuracy to keep skeptical climbing geeks satisfied.

After two bestselling memoirs ( and ), Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a sweeping tale of fortune, adventure, and the quinine trade. (Viking, $29) follows 19th-century scientist Alma Whittaker, whose extraordinary life unspools like a Jane Austen novel as she struggles to be taken seriously as a botanist and find a partner worthy of her love. Gilbert’s blockbuster memoir success has overshadowed her mastery of fiction (). But here she claims her rightful spot as one of the 21st century’s best American writers.

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The fall book season opens with ambitious works by two heavyweights, Bob Shacochis and Scott Anderson, writing on empire and the making of the modern world. It’s been two decades since Shacochis’s last novel, , and the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing editor’s new offering, , doesn’t disappoint. Woman is a masterful novel with the power to shake the bones of Graham Greene. The title character is Dottie Chambers, a.k.a. Jackie Scott, a.k.a. Renee Gardner, an American secret agent with a penchant for self-reinvention and a keen interest in Haitian voodoo. Her violent death in Haiti entwines human-rights lawyer Tom Harrington and Delta Force operative Eville Burnette in a mystery that grows to encompass Croatia, Kenya, Pakistan, the Cali Cartel, and the geopolitical run-up to 9/11.

Harrington’s a classic Shacochis character—an ex-journo turned war-criminal hunter working the dark seams of Port-au-Prince—but the book belongs to Burnette, a Montana boy caught up in intrigue far beyond his pay grade. “We’re not interested in winning hearts and minds,” a Delta leader tells him. “For our guys, hearts and minds are targets. We shoot hearts and minds.” Burnette finds himself recruited into a defense undersecretary’s network of operatives running dark ops with (and against) Pakistani colonels, Mexican drug lords, and Saudis trying to foment jihad. This is no mere thriller, though; Woman is a book of deep beauty thanks to Shacochis’s hard-earned observations on war, justice, and U.S. naivetĂ©. Americans, Shacochis writes, never took faraway, struggling nations seriously “until their faces were rubbed in the awfulness they sometimes made when they were seized by the exalted passion to remake the world.”

Like Shacochis, Anderson is concerned with the origins of our modern mess. A veteran war correspondent with extensive experience in the Middle East, he traces the genesis of the region’s fractious present back to T. E. Lawrence and the big bang of World War I.

In , Anderson chronicles the intersecting paths of Lawrence, the charismatic British Army officer, and three others whose Great War espionage, influence, and skullduggery cracked the Ottoman Empire apart. Anderson leaves no clandestine pact or subtle double cross unmentioned. The other main players—an American oilman turned spy, a Jewish agronomist with Zionist designs on Palestine, and a German agent trying to incite anti-British sentiment among Muslims—are compelling, but they can’t compete with the brilliant Lawrence, who adapted to Arab culture and crossed deserts only Bedouin could survive.

Everything you remember from the film Lawrence of Arabia is here, including his role in the daring 1916 Arab raid on Ottoman Empire forces in Aqaba and his failed dream of estab-lishing an Arab state. Anderson’s final chapter brilliantly stitches together the ways in which all the machinations of the Great War led to the troubles of the past century—“a catalog of war, religious strife, and brutal dictatorships.” Anderson, like Shacochis, reminds us that today’s small conflicts and porous borders will surely blow up into tomorrow’s larger war. We just don’t know when.

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It’s time to build your summer stack: that squatty tower made up of equal parts brain candy, literati buzz, and guilty pleasure. This year’s juiciest offerings feature an African aid-work hustler, a monster in backcountry Alaska, a drifter in Hawaii, a Spaniard obsessed with murder and cheese, and a trio of river rats who risk jail and damnation to become legends of the Grand Canyon.

Start with , by șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing editor Kevin Fedarko (read an excerpt here). In the spring of 1983, snowmelt and rainstorms threatened to blow out Glen Canyon Dam, the concrete plug that harnesses the Colorado River above the Grand Canyon. To ease the pressure, dam engineers sent a raging pulse of water through the Canyon. A trio of grizzled river guides responded like Laird Hamilton to a buoy report: Launch time! Fedarko, a Colorado River boatman himself, crafts a dramatic tale of courage and hubris that encompasses the sweeping history of the Canyon.

An eminence grise of travel writing, Edward Hoagland reminds us that he is also a nimble novelist in . Children follows the transient life of Hickey, an American freelance aid worker who moves food and medicine through battle zones and bandit alleys, offering a vivid window into the continent’s hot spots. About an outlaw militia’s airstrip in the Congo, Hoagland writes, “There are no police or consular officials or coroners: just vultures to do the autopsy and record the fingerprints and dentistry. You’d be recycled into wings.”

For a comic break, turn to , Jack Handey’s adventure novel set in a bizarro slice of paradise, where the narrator goes to escape his creditors. Handey’s burlesque works best in small doses, so take one bite at a time.

Having redefined the road-trip memoir in , Michael Paterniti travels into new territory with . In his quest to find the mejor queso del mundo, Paterniti discovers a Spanish cheesemaker caught up in a clash between the old and new worlds. Wealthy First World foodies beat a path to the poor cheese-maker’s door—destroying him in the process. “When you put something alive in your mouth,” the old master tells Paterniti, “it makes you more alive.” But the arrival of global commerce can suck the life right out of that perfect moment.

Best for last: for those awaiting the next Jon Krakauer–esque classic, look to an Alaskan writer named Tom Kizzia. spins the spellbinding tale of the Papa Pilgrim family, a homespun clan that charmed the Alaskan locals with their old-timey government-hating ways—right up until the day the eldest daughter exposed Papa as an abusive patriarch who terrorized his family. It’s a gripping nonfiction thriller told with masterful clarity, and I’m betting it will be the sleeper hit of the summer. Put it at the top of your stack.

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When science writer Jon Mooallem took a hard look at his daughter’s world, he noticed that his four-year-old brushed her teeth with a whale-shaped toothbrush and her hair with a fish-shaped comb. Kids, he realized, live in a world of idealized animals. The adult world, of course, is more complex. In (Penguin Press, $28), Mooallem examines the disconnect between our arcadian animal love and the shameful ways we treat real critters. In Churchill, Manitoba, he witnesses climate change’s effect on polar bears—and sees the absurdity of media-driven conservation when he finds himself trapped with a gang of scientists in a tundra buggy chasing Martha Stewart, who’s there shooting a segment.

At a California wildlife refuge that serves as the only remaining habitat of the Lange’s metalmark butterfly, a naturalist rips out invasive weeds and tells Mooallem, “This place will never run on its own.” This is the hard truth of 21st-century environmentalism: humans are now godlike garden tenders. “If we choose to help [polar bears] survive,” Mooallem writes, “it will require a kind of narrow, hands-on management—like getting out there and feeding them.” Among a lot of environmentalists, those are fighting words. All respect to Mooallem for having the guts to say them.

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IT’S HARD TO THINK of three more influential masters of holistic environmentalism than Michael Pollan, William McDonough, and Michael Braungart. Their classic books (Pollan) and (McDonough and Braungart) changed the way we think about food and consumer products—and did it by inviting readers to consider greater possibilities instead of browbeating them into limitations. This month finds all three offering long-awaited follow-ups.

In Cradle to Cradle, McDonough and Braungart—an architect and a chemist, respectively—introduced a manufacturing paradigm of continuous product reuse. No more planned obsolescence! Shutter the landfills! The ideas were ambitious, but some did find their way into the real world—every U.S. Postal Service Express and Priority Mail envelope is now cradle-to-cradle certified.

In (North Point Press, $28), the pair propose another shift: moving from harm reduction to benefit creation. Where most see pollution, the authors see design opportunities. Why not recover valuable phosphate from human waste? “Stop thinking sewage,” they write, “and start thinking nutrient management.” Turbines too ugly? Use Amtrak’s 14,000 miles of rail easements, the authors suggest, as solar-power corridors. ±«±èłŠČⳊ±ô±đ’s prose is like a long TED Talk studded with corporate keynote-isms, but the authors have a knack for combining big ideas with commonsense practicality, which leaves readers feeling excited about the future.

In (Penguin Press, $28), Pollan is aiming to spark another revolution. When asked what an ordinary person can do to reform the overindustrialized, calorie-stuffed American food system, Pollan gives a one-word answer: cook. That means a return to scratch home cooking, a pleasurable, ordinary act that we’ve outsourced to corporations in the name of convenience and cost savings. We live in an age of the “cooking paradox,” Pollan writes: the less we do it, the fatter we get. Pollan revives the lost art by learning how to do it well, working his way through four elements: fire (barbecuing with a pit master), water (pot cooking), air (baking), and soil (fermenting with the microbes of the earth).

As in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan is never less than delightful, full of curiosity, insight, and good humor. This is a book to be read, savored, and smudged with spatterings of olive oil, wine, butter, and the sulfuric streaks of chopped onion.

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Jared Diamond’s classic , about why some societies and not others gained wealth and power, is a book that many thinking Americans display but fewer have actually read. That often leads to erroneous-allusion syndrome—the justification of half-baked theories with the phrase “…as Diamond pointed out in Guns, Germs and Steel.” Just ask Mitt Romney, who bungled a Diamond talking point about natural resources back in July and earned a rebuke from the author. To save you similar embarrassment, Bruce Barcott synopsizes key lessons from Diamond’s new book, , which identifies old-time practices that can still benefit us.

WE SHOULD: Exercise, eat slowly, talk with friends—these features of tribal life kept people healthy and happy.

WE SHOULDN’T: Romanticize tribal culture, which wasn’t always groovy. Ritual widow strangling, once practiced by the Kaulong of New Guinea, did not, thankfully, survive the tribe’s transition to modernity.

WE SHOULD: Raise multilingual children. This “brings long-term benefits to their thinking, as well as enriching their lives.”

WE SHOULDN’T: Enforce mandatory retirement. In oral cultures, older people are “society’s encyclopedias and libraries.” They remember things like where to find food when times get tough. Or why we passed the in the first place.

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On December 10, Yosemite National Park began demolishing 91 tent cabins in , a rustic encampment of 408 canvas-sided cabins jammed into a pine-and-cedar glade near the sloping shoulders of Half Dome. It was here that an outbreak of hantavirus began last summer, infecting at least 10 people and killing three.

But on Sunday, June 10, 2012, the campground seemed idyllic. That weekend held all the promise of early summer. The Curry Village swimming pool was open. The smell of hot dogs and nachos curled out of the snack bar. The sun bounced off the face of Glacier Point. Kids in “Go Climb a Rock” T-shirts shouted and chased each other on bikes.

Sometime that day, a 49-year-old woman from the Los Angeles area arrived at Curry Village’s front desk, a plain wood-floor office that’s often cacophonous with the sound of staffers checking guests in and out. A clerk handed her a key to one of the 91 “signature tent cabins” that opened three years ago—the “new 900s” as they were collectively known. Unlike the older cabins, which are sided with single-ply vinyl-coated canvas, the signature cabins boasted double-wall plywood construction and propane heaters, making them warmer and quieter than the older units.

Off she went, this Southern California lady, to enjoy her Yosemite vacation. We’ll call her Visitor One.

About the same time, another guest checked into Curry Village. He was a 36-year-old man from Alameda County, California, which encompasses Berkeley, Oakland, and the East Bay region. He was given the key to a cabin close to Visitor One’s. He dropped off his things and went about his business. We’ll call him Visitor Two.

We don’t know exactly how Visitors One and Two spent their four days in the park. Medical confidentiality laws forbid public-health officials from releasing their names, and they and their families have chosen to keep their stories private. Maybe they hiked to the top of Half Dome or enjoyed the giant sequoias of the Mariposa Grove. By the following Wednesday, June 13, both visitors had checked out of their Curry Village tent cabins and left the park.

Around Yosemite the summer unfolded quietly. The search-and-rescue team went out on minor events: an ankle fracture on the Panorama Trail, a fallen hiker on the Half Dome cable route. Rangers kept a wary eye on the Cascade Fire, a lightning-sparked wilderness blaze that smoldered through a red fir forest.

Then, in late June, Visitor One fell ill. She might have felt like she had the flu: chills, muscle aches, fever, headache, dizziness, fatigue. The flu goes away after a few days. This didn’t. We do know that, back home, she went to see her doctor. When presented with Visitor One’s symptoms, most physicians would have dismissed it as the flu or, at worse, low-level pneumonia. Her doctor didn’t. They talked about what she might have picked up and where. She mentioned her Yosemite trip. The doctor took the unusual step of calling Charles Mosher, a public-health officer for Mariposa County, which encompasses Yosemite, and asking if there were any known hantavirus cases in the area. “Based on her history and symptoms, [hantavirus] was a definite possibility,” Mosher recalled, so he and Visitor One’s doctor agreed that starting treatment for the virus while awaiting lab confirmation was the prudent way to go. 

That was, given the circumstance, about the worst thing Visitor One could hear.

Hantavirus is a strange little zoonotic beast. Zoonosis is the movement of a pathogen from an animal to a human. David Quammen describes it in his recent book, , as “a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the 21st century.” Some of the most disturbing viruses to emerge in the past 30 years have been zoonotic: Ebola, Hendra virus, HIV, SARS, West Nile. Even as we wipe out more species, humans are coming into closer contact with other animals and inviting their viruses into our world, into our blood.

Hantavirus hit the American radar in 1993. That spring, a healthy young Navajo man and his fiancĂ©e died suddenly in the Four Corners area, where the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet. Both had suffered acute respiratory failure, which means that they couldn’t breathe. An Indian Health Service doctor, going over death records, discovered five similarly healthy young people who’d all died under similar circumstances. Over the next few weeks, more patients turned up with the same symptoms. Because many victims were Navajo or came from the reservation region, the media initially dubbed it the Navajo flu.

According to Mark Smolinski, an epidemiologist who studies emerging pandemics for the , a San Francisco non-profit founded by former eBay executive Jeff Skoll, symptoms included “a simple cold, a sudden fever—then trouble breathing and an immediate downhill course.” Back in 1993, Smolinski worked on the Four Corners mystery as a young public-health official. He and his colleagues, he remembers, found a chalkboard and listed “every known possible disease, toxin, chemical, or occupational exposure.”

Finally, virologists at the (CDC), working with tissue samples from the victims, discovered a genetic link to hantaviruses, a family of European viruses previously unknown in North America. The European virus caused kidney failure, but the Four Corners victims died of lung failure. What emerged in the Southwest that spring was a new strain of hantavirus endemic to North America. Scientists called the strain Sin Nombre, Spanish for nameless. Thirty percent of deer mice trapped in the Four Corners area were found to be carrying the Sin Nombre strain.

Mice infected with hantavirus shed the living virus in their urine, feces, and saliva. It takes just the right combination of timing, drying, and aerosolization for humans to become infected. A mouse pees or poops, the excrement dries onto dust particles, then those particles get swept up into the air. Human infection most commonly happens in confined spaces like houses, cabins, or storage areas, but it’s got to happen within 48 hours of the mouse shedding the virus—researchers have, so far, seen hantavirus survive for only two days outside a host.

Once a human inhales the virus, it can take up to five weeks to incubate. Then the victim comes down with flu-like symptoms that can linger for days. The symptoms might actually lessen for a bit. Then, all of a sudden, things take a turn for the worse. Much worse.

“It felt like the flu for about a week, and then one night I got horribly sick,” says Ethan Lindsey, a 34-year-old public-radio producer, who contracted hantavirus during a visit to Montana from his home in Bend, Oregon, in 2009. A month later, he ran a Fourth of July 5K. Felt great. Four days after that, he came down with what felt like the flu. “I was drained, bone weary, coughing,” he says. He went to the doctor, who couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t swine flu, maybe just a mild case of pneumonia. Lindsey went home and rested, but continued to decline. “I felt horribly sick,” he says. “About midnight, my fiancĂ©e drove me to the hospital,” the St. Charles Medical Center in Bend. “I almost fainted on the way there.”

The turn from flu to respiratory failure happens so fast that one hantavirus survivor group on Facebook advises people who suspect they’ve been infected to designate a friend to monitor them around the clock. If things go south, a victim may be too sick to reach the hospital alone.

If the disease reaches that point—and it’s unclear what percentage of those infected with hantavirus actually do—it’s bad. Breathing begins to fail. Some victims describe the feeling of a band tightening around their chest or of being smothered with a pillow. “They put me on oxygen because it was becoming hard to breathe,” says Lindsey. “I remember the doctor telling me, ‘Listen, your oxygen saturation is at 60 percent and dropping fast. Once it hits 40 percent, major organs are going to fail and you’re going to die. We think we need to put you into a medically induced coma.’”

They put Lindsey under for nine days. Doctors hooked him up to a high-frequency oscillating ventilator because his lungs were filling with fluid. At one point his fever ran so high that nurses put his unconscious body in an ice bath.

Lindsey’s doctors still didn’t know it was hantavirus. “It’s so rare, why would they test me for that, right?” he says. The hantavirus test takes four to seven days. It’s extremely nuanced and difficult to interpret. There are a lot of false positives.

Even if they’d known, there wasn’t much more to be done. There is no known cure. The best that doctors can do is hook up a patient to a ventilator and let the body fight the virus on its own. The fortunate, like Lindsey, recover. But many are not fortunate. 

“We had a 75 percent mortality rate in those Four Corners cases,” says Smolinski. “We wanted to know: Did this just pop up, or did something change? And were there some ecological pressures that caused it to evolve to the point where we started to recognize it?”

There were two answers. A study of autopsies in the Southwest indicated that there had been fatal cases of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, or HPS (as the disease associated with the Sin Nombre strain came to be called), dating back to the 1950s. At that time, doctors had attributed the deaths to respiratory distress, cause unknown. In fact, CDC investigators found that traditional Navajo medicine recognized a similar disease—and associated its occurrence with mice.

Today, researchers believe that hantavirus coevolved with North American rodents. Deer mice are the virus’ main host, though variations appear in white-footed mice, cotton rats, and rice rats as well. The rodents are considered reservoirs, which means that they harbor the virus without being affected by it.

To Smolinski’s second question, there were indeed ecological pressures. An unusually wet winter led to a bumper crop of nuts on the region’s piñon pines that spring. Flush with food, mice populations exploded. The virus hadn’t mutated. There were simply more mice about, which meant more chances for people to come in contact with the virus.

The 1993 outbreak ultimately claimed 27 lives—a mortality rate of 56 percent. That’s shockingly high. The Ebola virus, top of the scary charts, has a mortality rate of 30 to 90 percent. But there was one piece of good news: hantavirus didn’t transmit person-to-person. It moved from mouse to human, but humans seemed to be dead-end vessels. Infected patients weren’t contagious.

The hanta scare died down after 1993. But the virus didn’t go away. About 30 people come down with hantavirus in the U.S. every year. The mortality rate remains high: 37 percent of patients diagnosed with hantavirus die. It shows up all over the place, but predominantly in the West. New Mexico: 91 cases since 1993. Colorado: 78. Montana: 35. California: 48.

In most cases, the carriers of the virus turned out to be deer mice. Which is a challenge. You can’t wipe out the disease by killing all the deer mice. (The deer mouse, Peromyscus maniculatus, prefers rural fields, forests, and outbuildings; it has nothing to do with deer, despite its name. The mice you trap in your basement are more likely house mice, Mus musculus, which aren’t known carriers.) For North American carnivores, deer mice are like nature’s wheat. They’re the food staple for birds, cats, reptiles, and canines. They grow like a crop during spring and summer, and with a certain percentage of them grows the hanta.

Visitor one was lucky. Her body fought off the virus, and she recovered. Tests eventually confirmed that it was, as Charles Mosher suspected, hantavirus.

At that point—mid-July—there was no cause for alarm at the park. Aside from the original 1993 outbreak, medical experts believed hantavirus almost never occurred in clusters. Though she visited Yosemite, Visitor One could have caught it anywhere on her visit to the eastern Sierra.

“When we saw that first case, we assumed it was isolated—like all were, to that point,” says Danielle Buttke, a veterinary epidemiologist who works for the . Wildlife diseases are Buttke’s specialty. She deals with tick-borne relapsing fever at Grand Canyon National Park, rabid beavers at Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, and West Nile virus in mosquitoes at Fire Island National Seashore. 

Buttke got a call about Visitor One from the  in July. A CDPH official told her a case of hantavirus had been reported in a California resident who’d visited Yosemite in June. Health officials couldn’t be certain that she’d contracted it in Yosemite. 

Then Visitor Two came down with the flu. He wasn’t so lucky. The 36-year-old Alameda County man checked himself into the hospital on July 30. On July 31, he was dead.

A quick check of lodging records revealed that Visitor One and Visitor Two had one commonality: both stayed in the signature tent cabins, the new 900s.

Alarm bells rang. Buttke met a state public-health team, including Mariposa County public-health officer Charles Mosher, in Curry Village. Their weapon of choice: pencils.

“As we go through those dwellings, we’re trying to identify any gaps a quarter-inch or larger,” Buttke says. That’s all a mouse needs to squeeze into a cabin. “If you can stick a pencil through a gap, it needs to be addressed.”

During their inspections, the team discovered something interesting. “When you pulled back that canvas, you could see there were mice living in the void space between the walls,” Buttke says. “They were nesting in the insulation.”

Suddenly, the picture became clearer. One of the outbreak’s big mysteries—why did the hanta victims come only from the new 900s and not the older tent cabins?—found a possible solution.

Hantavirus isn’t a long-lived bacterium like anthrax, which can remain viable in dormant spores for decades. “Typically it survives only a couple days,” said Charles Chiu, an infectious-disease physician at the University of California at San Francisco. Chiu, one of the nation’s leading virus researchers, heads UCSF’s . He spent part of his summer analyzing the Yosemite hantavirus strain. (It turned out to be very similar but not identical to the Sin Nombre strain.)

For a human to be infected by such a short-lived virus, you need an ongoing infestation.

In Curry Village, deer mice might have occasionally scurried across the floor of the older soft-sided tents. But in the hard-sided 900s they lived in the walls, continually shedding virus.

Then there’s the food. If you walk around Curry Village, you can’t swing a cat without hitting “Mother Curry’s Camp Etiquette,” signs listing the camp rules. Yosemite has a well-known bear problem, and food is strictly prohibited inside the canvas cabins, so hungry bears won’t rip through the walls. Guests store food in outdoor bear-proof boxes instead.

But the new 900s had different rules. “Hard-sided cabins may store food inside cabins,” proclaimed the Etiquette. “Keep food out of sight, and doors and windows latched.”

How to attract mice: 1) Offer cozy nests; 2) Provide food.

“We found evidence of food in the cabins, evidence of mice eating food dropped on the floor,” Buttke says.

Mouse populations are extremely dynamic. Conception to birth: 21 days. They can reproduce six weeks after birth. Given a safe nesting ground and a bountiful food supply, a mouse population can explode. Here’s where things really get interesting. When a hanta-infected male starts fighting for territory, he bites and scratches his competitors, which spreads the virus mouse to mouse. In field and forest, predators such as foxes, coyotes, and owls rein in a mouse’s urge for territorial expansion. Leave the nest to fight, and you risk getting eaten. In predator-free Curry Village, not so much. So while 14 percent of California’s mouse population may carry hanta, the infection rate within a double-walled cabin could be much higher.

In early August, the park shut down the 91 signature tent cabins. Cleaning crews gave every cabin a sanitizing deep clean. Maintenance workers sealed gaps and tightened up the vinyl-coated canvas draped over the double-plywood walls. They hammered fresh one-by-fours around the base of each of the new 900s. No way any mouse was squeezing through that. When CDPH officials inspected and cleared the fortified cabins, the park reopened the 900 series to visitors.

But with that long incubation period, people kept getting sick.

On August 12, Visitor Three died. He was a 45-year-old man from Pennsylvania, and we don’t know much about him except for the fact that he stayed in a signature tent cabin prior to the end of July.

“With the third case, we realized this was extremely unusual,” Buttke said. “Something was definitely not right.”

On August 16, Yosemite and CDPH officials publicly acknowledged the hantavirus cases for the first time. The news exploded. Set a killer virus in a globally famous setting like Yosemite and you’ve got a story that, well, goes viral.

That wasn’t all bad. Curry Village suffered a rash of cancellations and Yosemite’s visitation numbers dipped, but park officials wanted to alert the 1,700 guests who’d overnighted in the 900s that summer to be aware of the situation. If they felt themselves coming down with the flu, the Park Service advised them to get tested for hantavirus. A handful of early-summer guests turned up positive.

One of the most disconcerting aspects of Yosemite’s hanta outbreak, in retrospect, was the period between the reopening of the sanitized 900s in early August and the public acknowledgment of the outbreak on August 16. During that window, visitors were checked into signature tent cabins without being informed about the outbreak. Al and Pamela Oligino from Laguna Beach, California, met their son’s family at Yosemite on August 13. They stayed three nights in cabins 966 and 954. “One day, three official-looking guys came by and started inspecting the empty cabin next to us,” Oligino says. “We found out a few days later through the press that there’d been this hantavirus outbreak, which was very alarming. They knew weeks before, yet they didn’t tell us we were at risk.” At one point, Pamela Oligino says, a Curry Village staff member loaned her a broom to sweep out their cabin. Sweeping can send the virus into the air and potentially into the lungs. “Obviously, one employee missed the training session,” she said.

Tom Medema, Yosemite’s chief of interpretation, says park officials relied on state public-health inspectors for guidance on closings, openings, and public alerts. “We’re not disease experts in the way they are,” he says. The belief was that the extra precautions taken to rid the cabins of mice, along with redoubled cleaning efforts, had reduced the risk of infection to near-zero. And, in fact, nobody who stayed in the new 900s after the end of July contracted the virus.

Eventually, though the mice found their way back in. The inspectors that Al Oligino noticed continued to check the cabins for rodent signs. In late August, they found them. Check and mate. On August 28, Yosemite officials permanently closed all 91 signature tent cabins. On December 10, park maintenance crews began removing the entire double-wall 900 series. They’ll be replaced by tent cabins built in the traditional single-wall style. “Our hope is that they’ll be online before next summer,” said Medema.

The irony is that the new 900s were opened in 2009 to keep visitors out of harm’s way. In October 2008, a section of rock cleaved away from Glacier Point’s 3,200-foot granite wall. A load equal to about 500 dump trucks thundered down and crushed an unoccupied cabin. In response, park officials condemned more than 200 cabins in Glacier Point’s drop zone. The new 900s went up, away from the falling rock. Nobody, it was thought, should die because they were assigned an unlucky cabin.

Looking back on it, the Yosemite hantavirus outbreak appears to be a case study in modern virus hunting and the psychology of disease. What gave the story legs was its combination of the well-known and the unknown: iconic brand name meets mysterious peril.

The effects of the story were something to see. I visited Yosemite in mid-September, and I can tell you I had to tamp down my own anxiety to do so. I considered bringing my kids along to see El Capitan but ultimately decided against it. No sense possibly exposing them. On the way to Yosemite, I stopped at Home Depot and bought a respirator mask. Just in case.

When I arrived at Curry Village on a sunny autumn day, I counted only a handful of lodgers. At the bike rental stand, I tested a fat-tire cruiser and asked the counter guy if business had slowed. He glanced at a barn full of unrented two-wheelers. “Not by choice, unfortunately,” he said. “Gotta love the media.”

I wandered around for a while, maskless. The place was quiet. A breeze moved through the trees. I poked my head inside one of the soft-sided 500s. In the 900 area, I noticed that park employees were living in tent cabins next to the notorious signature cabins, separated only by a wooden fence. Which threw me. Why would they be safe when cabins 20 feet away were too risky to enter? I couldn’t decide if I was a fool for poking my nose into a potential virus chamber or an overreacting hypochondriac.

I wasn’t the only one with qualms. Susan Smartt is the CEO of , which runs outdoor-education programs in the West. Every year more than 30,000 schoolkids and teachers enjoy NatureBridge programs at Yosemite, Washington’s Olympic National Park, California’s Channel Islands, and the Santa Monica Mountains.

The hantavirus outbreak forced Smartt to think hard about risk. NatureBridge students often stay in the signature tent cabins during the school year. Shortly after the outbreak was announced, NatureBridge suspended its Yosemite program. “The health and well-being of our students have to come first,” Smartt says. “Our programs come second—or we won’t have programs.”

Smartt was in a tough spot, though. NatureBridge exists to connect kids with the great outdoors, especially urban kids with little experience in nature. They come from the inner cities of Oakland and San Francisco and from as far away as Texas and Japan. “Some have never seen snow,” she says. Those kids—and their parents—may already feel trepidation about heading into the woods. Add a killer virus into the mix and you’ve got a tough sell.

Smartt kept in close contact with Yosemite officials. When they felt that the outbreak had been contained, Smartt started thinking about bringing the kids back—but not to Curry Village. She worked with Delaware North, the park’s lodging concessionaire, to find space in the Cedar Lodge and the Wawona Hotel. “I’m on the phone this week firming up our reservations,” she said in early October. 

The good news: NatureBridge resumed operations on October 14. The bad news: 62 school groups had their Yosemite visits canceled. “There were some schools where the school board said: We can’t do it this year. It just feels too risky,” Smartt says.

That’s a shame. For some kids, this might have been their only chance to experience the outdoors. And what an experience! Yosemite. It’s like being introduced to church in the Sistine Chapel. But I couldn’t blame those school boards. After all, I kept my own kids home.

I left Curry Village and wandered upvalley toward El Capitan. The strange psychology of disease worked my brain. Yosemite’s three hantavirus deaths freaked out a lot of people. Yet during that same summer, more than 5,000 cases of West Nile virus broke out across the United States. It was the nation’s worst West Nile outbreak ever; by late November, 247 people would die. The mayor of Dallas authorized aerial spraying of insecticide. But most people didn’t cancel vacation plans.

Hanta outbreaks are consistently rare—about 30 isolated cases a year. Lyme disease, after rising to nearly 30,000 annual cases in 2009, has held steady at 22,000 to 24,000 cases over the past few years, the vast majority of them in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and Upper Great Lakes regions. West Nile, by contrast, has gone on a tear. Since its first appearance in New York 13 years ago (62 cases), it’s gone nationwide. The CDC reports that this year’s 5,245 cases—which it called an epidemic—were spread over 48 states. Only Alaska and Hawaii were immune.  

While we’re talking about relative risk, consider this: last summer the Merced River, which runs through the Yosemite Valley, claimed four drowning victims. All four drowned within hiking distance of Curry Village. Most people never heard about those fatalities.

Mark Schaller, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, has studied the human psychological response to disease. I asked him about the very different reactions to hantavirus, West Nile, and the river deaths. “The emotions aroused by the perception of threat don’t always correlate with a rational assessment of the risk,” he said. “We’re often responding to the more ancient part of our brain, and historically, infectious diseases have been a huge threat.”

“Think of a charging bear or a roaring river,” he says. “Those are big physical threats that can kill us or our children. But I can see the bear, I can whack it with a stick, I can avoid the threat. Same with the river. Sure, I could drown, but I can see the damn river!”

The psychological power of disease, by contrast, lies partly in its invisibility. “These viruses could be lurking anywhere,” Schaller says. “Our usual sensory apparatuses—eyes, ears, nose—can’t detect them. I can’t punch that germ in the nose and make it run away. Because of that, diseases are especially freakish.”

I think it also has to do with the calculus of each disease. Mosquitoes pick up West Nile from birds and transfer it to humans. With an annual average of 3,500 cases nationally, it’s unusual but not rare. And 80 percent of people infected with West Nile have no symptoms at all. Twenty percent will develop flu-like symptoms. Fewer than one percent will suffer life-threatening encephalitis or meningitis—and those folks are more likely to be elderly, immune compromised, or very young. So, West Nile: wildly more prevalent than hantavirus, but exponentially more survivable.

Hanta, on the other hand, is extremely rare. In 2012 there was about one hantavirus case for every 175 West Nile cases in the U.S. But somehow that rarity doesn’t lessen the scariness. In fact, it does the opposite. The flu has killed multitudes more people than the Ebola virus. And yet.

The mortality rate doesn’t help matters. Thirty-seven percent is an eye-opener. The mind can dismiss West Nile victims as frail and elderly. Not gonna happen to me. Hanta, from its very first case, has mowed down the young and the hale.

Finally, there’s a sense that Hanta is not playing fair. It’s a virus waging asymmetrical warfare. By infecting victims in Yosemite’s tent cabins, it attacked in one of America’s most sacred secular spaces. Our parks are the home of wholesomeness; those tent cabins are chapels of health and vigor. A haunted house is one thing. A haunted church scares us shitless.

On my way to El Cap I stopped in at Camp Four, the legendary climber’s hangout. September is the traditional start of climbing season in the valley. Hantavirus didn’t seem to scare any of them away. “Camp 4 is FULL,” said a sign at the ranger’s station.

I spoke with three young guys who’d just come off the rock. Russell Facente, Justin Loyka, and J.D. Merritt planned to be in Yosemite for most of September. They talked about hanta and about taking care with tents and food. But the virus didn’t seem to phase them.

“I’m from the Southwest,” Facente told me. “So I’m pretty familiar with hantavirus. I understand it’s around. But you take precautions. Keep an eye out for mouse droppings.”

Familiarity. In this case it doesn’t breed contempt. It breeds calm. It breeds rationality.

I continued on to the foot of El Capitan and I touched its granite and was sorry my kids weren’t there. Next time they will be.

Contributing editor Bruce Barcott is the author of .

The post The Story Behind the Hantavirus Outbreak at Yosemite appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

After hooking a generation of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű readers with his Natural Acts column, David Quammen turned evolution and extinction into page-turning plot points in . His new book, , tracks the increasingly common jump that killer viruses like HIV, SARS, West Nile, and Ebola make from wild animals to humans. It’s a bruiser of a book, big and shocking and gripping as hell. Dodo turned island biogeography into mainstream fare. Spillover may do the same for a slew of new concepts: reservoir hosts, amplifier species, superspreaders, and wild flavor. Bruce Barcott spoke with Quammen as the Montana-based writer prepared for a trip to India.

I’ve heard that this book began 12 years ago when you were trekking with biologist Michael Fay on his Central African transect. True?
Yes. We were walking through a stretch of forest in Gabon, and a couple of the guys on his crew were from a village that suffered an Ebola outbreak years earlier. Thirty-one people had gotten sick, and 21 had died. It was a horrendous thing. One of the guys told me that when the disease hit their village, he and his friend had seen a pile of 13 dead gorillas in the nearby forest. That was the starting point for me, that riveting image. I knew from the scientific literature that humans as well as gorillas and chimps are susceptible to Ebola. That linkage—dead people, dead gorillas, Ebola raging—led me to start asking about where the virus would abide when it’s not killing off these populations. I wanted to know: What’s the virus’s reservoir host?

A reservoir host is…? 
A virus needs a host to survive. But if a virus is as hot as Ebola, which kills off a high percentage of humans, gorillas, and chimps, those species can’t be the virus’ permanent home, otherwise it would come to a dead end pretty quickly. The virus has to live somewhere between outbreaks. So it survives in a reservoir host, a species of plant or animal that harbors it quietly and asymptomatically until it spills over into another species. We know the concept, but with Ebola scientists don’t yet know what the species is.

Some viruses don’t move directly from reservoir host to human. What’s the intermediate step?
Sometimes a virus comes out of a reservoir host in small doses, not enough to infect humans. But if it spills over into an intermediate animal, the virus can replicate abundantly, and then that animal may shed huge amounts of the virus. It’s known as an amplifier.

Ebola is popularly regarded as the scariest of this new generation of viruses. But the one that really spooked professionals in your book was SARS, which spread from China to the U.S. and 28 other countries in 2003.
Ebola is very lethal, but it requires direct contact. Its spread can be stopped by supplying health care providers with things like latex gloves, so they’re not contracting the virus through cracks or cuts in their skin. Whereas SARS is transmissible by a sneeze, a cough, or a breath. 

And it had a superspreader.
Superspreaders are Typhoid Marys who shed more virus than the average person, and they’re in sensitive areas like hospitals, hotels, and airplanes. In 2003, SARS had a superspreader. A doctor caught it from a patient and then traveled to Hong Kong. The doctor stayed in a hotel room near the elevator, and his body’s extreme reaction to the virus, combined with that location, grossly multiplied its spread. A grandmother across the corridor caught it. The next day she boarded a plane to Toronto.

You found that Chinese markets are particularly efficient transmission pathways. Walk me through the “wild flavor” phenomenon.
There’s a relatively recent vogue among affluent Chinese for eating wild animals. This isn’t a matter of subsistence or hunger for protein among desperate villagers. This is a lifestyle thing, a fashion. People like the notion that they’re tasting vigor. But it has epidemiological consequences. These animals are being brought into what are known as wet markets, where live wild animals are sold for meat. Wild animals have the opportunity to spill their pathogens to one another and, ultimately, to humans. A pathogen endemic to a bat can get into a wild cat like a palm civet. In the wild, they might not come into close proximity, but in the wet market they do.

The 2011 movie set off a minor mania for hand washing. Did researching this book affect your behavior in a similar way?
It’s true that hand washing is the most effective simple way to control passage of these things. But the research hasn’t made me paranoid. The more I’ve learned about these diseases, the more my irrational fears disappeared.

Completely?
They’ve been replaced by rational fears. Spillover is a reminder that we humans don’t exist apart from nature. We can’t just eliminate all the reservoir hosts—even if we knew what they were. We’re always linked to these ecological networks. I say in the book that there is no “natural world.” That’s an artificial phrase. There’s only the world. And we’re a part of it, along with the bats, chimps, and viruses. 

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