{"id":2653336,"date":"2023-11-20T07:03:42","date_gmt":"2023-11-20T14:03:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/?p=2653336"},"modified":"2023-12-14T14:02:30","modified_gmt":"2023-12-14T21:02:30","slug":"outdoor-adventure-books-every-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/culture\/books-media\/outdoor-adventure-books-every-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Favorite Outdoor ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Books for Every State"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s almost nothing better than cracking open a book right where the action takes place\u2014reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild<\/em><\/a> on the Pacific Crest Trail or Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm <\/em><\/a>beside the Atlantic seas that claimed the fishing boat Andrea Gail<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Whether you’re rolling on a road trip or hunkered down under your tent\u2019s rain fly, you need a worthy paperback companion. In compiling this list, we weren’t looking for another batch of Classics with a capital C, though our selections do include a few. Instead, we canvassed our editors, contributors, and readers with a simpler question: What book would you stuff in your backpack if you were headed to Maine? Or California? Or Missouri or South Carolina or even Washington, D.C.? And because we couldn\u2019t help ourselves, we also slipped in bonus picks for a few states.<\/p>\n

The resulting collection is wide, immersive, and above all readable. We hope it takes you places, whether out in the wild or burrowed happily in your favorite chair.<\/p>\n

Alabama: The Last Slave Ship<\/em>, by Ben Raines (2022)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Simon & Schuster)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1860, 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was abolished, the schooner Clotilda<\/em> stole into Alabama\u2019s Mobile Bay carrying 110 kidnapped West Africans from Benin. Those enslaved people would go on, after Emancipation, to found a community known as Africatown, and their stories would be told in various chronicles, including Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s Barracoon<\/em><\/a>. But Clotilda<\/em> itself disappeared. Then, in April 2018, using old maps and journals, charter captain Ben Raines found the wreck under the murk of the Mobile River delta. His story weaves together his own obsession with finding the ship and the stories of the people it carried. \u201cClotilda<\/em> was a ghost that haunted three communities\u2014the descendants of those transported into slavery in her hold, the descendants of their fellow Africans who sold them, and the descendants of their American enslavers,\u201d Raines writes. \u201cThe only way for that ghost to begin to be expelled was for the ship to be revealed.\u201d \u2014Elizabeth Hightower Allen<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Alaska: The Sun Is a Compass: My 4,000-Mile Journey into the Alaskan Wilds<\/em>, by Caroline Van Hemert (2019)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Little, Brown Spark)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Over the last century, icons like John Muir, John McPhee, and Jon Krakauer have all written about Alaska\u2019s beauty, its severity, and its seductive isolation. But the book that sticks with me most is more recent: Caroline Van Hemert\u2019s 2019 memoir, The Sun Is a Compass<\/em>, about a months-long, 4,000-mile adventure<\/a> taken by Van Hemert and her husband. They start in coastal Washington, row the Inside Passage to the Alaska panhandle, then strap on skis and traverse the Coast Range. They canoe, pack-raft, and hike across the Yukon and through the Brooks Range before emerging on Alaska\u2019s Arctic coast. It is an impressive adventure, but what I love most about the book is its quiet message. Van Hemert is a scientist who lost touch with how her work used to bring her into sync with nature. Her journey has a purpose that any of us can relate to: reconnecting to the ways the wild world ebbs and flows around us. \u2014Eva Holland<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Bonus Read: <\/strong>Pilgrim\u2019s Wilderness<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, by Tom Kizzia (2013)<\/strong>, an account of the many abuses by modern-day homesteader Papa Pilgrim in what its publisher bills as \u201cInto the Wild<\/em> meets Helter Skelter<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arizona: The Emerald Mile<\/em>, by Kevin Fedarko (2013)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Scribner Book Company)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The stack of literature about the Grand Canyon is as deep and varied as the rock layers themselves, but we\u2019re picking the work with the most cubic thrills per second: The Emerald Mile<\/em>. It\u2019s the account of the famed 1983 \u201cspeed run\u201d<\/a> through the Grand Canyon, in which three river guides slipped a wooden dory into the raging floodwaters of the Colorado River by moonlight during a record-breaking high-water year. It was a wild ride\u2014227 miles in just 36 hours\u2014but just as wild was the effort by Bureau of Reclamation hydrologists to keep Lake Powell from breaching the Glen Canyon Dam amid the mayhem of the largest helicopter rescue the canyon had ever seen. Come for the adrenaline, stay for the history of the canyon, both natural and man-made. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Bonus Read: <\/strong>The Devil\u2019s Highway<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2005)<\/strong>, the harrowing saga of 26 men attempting to cross the most desolate stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, by Luis Alberto Urrea.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Arkansas: The Grail Bird<\/em>, by Tim Gallagher (2005)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The cypress swamps of Arkansas erupted in a blaze of glory in 2004, when the Lord God Bird\u2014 a.k.a. the ivory-billed woodpecker\u2014was sighted in the state\u2019s Cache River Wildlife Refuge after being presumed extinct for decades. But was that feathered ghost really the ivory-billed? Gallagher, the editor of Living Bird<\/em> magazine and one of the birders who\u2019d seen the bird, set out to find proof that the woodpecker still existed. If so, he wrote, \u201cit would be the most hopeful event imaginable: we would have one final chance to get it right, to save this bird and the bottomland swamp forests it needs to survive.\u201d Sure enough, in 2022, 17 years after The Grail Bird <\/em>was published, field researchers claimed multiple new sightings of the Lord God Bird, this time in Louisiana. Bird species may be declining around the world, but in this book, hope is indeed the thing with feathers. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

California: The Last Season<\/em>, by Eric Blehm (2006)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Harper Perennial)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We know you\u2019re packing Wild<\/em>, by Cheryl Strayed. But also consider The Last Season<\/em>, which explores the Sierra Nevada through the life and writings of Randy Morgenson, a Yosemite-born park ranger who spent 27 and a half summers in the backcountry of Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. In July 1996, the 64-year-old loaded up his pack for a routine patrol through terrain he knew better than anyone. Then he disappeared<\/a>, spurring one of the largest search-and-rescue operations in national park history. Blehm\u2019s engrossing prose brings to life Morgenson’s dedication to the beauty and isolation of California\u2019s landscapes\u2014and the mystery of how they ultimately swallowed him whole. \u2014Maren Larsen<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Bonus Read: <\/strong>California Against the Sea<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2023), <\/strong>Los Angeles Times<\/em> reporter Rosanna Xia\u2019s thoughtful look at how communities are coping with rising sea levels.<\/p>\n

Colorado: Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country<\/em>, by Pam Houston (2019)<\/h2>\n
\"Deep
(Photo: Courtesy W. W. Norton & Company)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What would you do if you sold your first book and had a whopping $21,000 in your pocket? If you were Pam Houston, you\u2019d take the money from your surprise 1992 bestseller Cowboys Are My Weakness<\/em> and drive around the West looking for a home. And you\u2019d find it, in a 120-acre ranch surrounded by the 12,000-foot peaks of the San Juans, outside the town of Creede. Populated with a rotating cast of beloved horses, donkeys, Icelandic sheep, and Irish wolfhounds, the ranch is her refuge through frozen winters, glorious summers, and a wildfire that almost wipes the whole place out. As for the hope part? It\u2019s how Houston sees our obligation to the land itself. \u201cAs we hurtle toward the cliff, foot heavy on the throttle, to write a poem about the loveliness of a newly leafed aspen grove or a hot August wind sweeping across prairie grass,\u201d she writes, feels like the height of naivete. \u201cBut then again, maybe not. Maybe this is the best time there has ever been to write unironic odes to nature.\u201d \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Bonus Read: <\/strong>Powder Days<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2021)<\/strong>, Heather Hansman\u2019s love song to the increasingly difficult lifestyle of the modern ski bum.<\/p>\n

Connecticut: A Place of My Own<\/em>, by Michael Pollan (1997)<\/h2>\n
\"Connecticut:
(Photo: Courtesy Little, Brown Spark)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before Michael Pollan became our chief explainer of food<\/a> and psychedelics<\/a>, before \u201cshe sheds\u201d started popping up across America, and before we all started working from home, the decidedly non-handy Pollan set out to construct a tiny writing cabin in his Connecticut backyard. \u201cI wanted not only a room of my own,\u201d he writes, \u201cbut a room of my own making. I wanted to build this place myself.\u201d Two and a half years of weekends later, under the gruff tutelage of a local carpenter, he had a small shingled hut with a tiny porch and a picture window at the edge of the woods, \u201ca place as much one\u2019s own as a second skin.\u201d He also had the material for this beautiful examination of home and office, work and solitude, privacy and creativity\u2014a book, critic Janet Malcolm wrote at the time, \u201cwith the brilliant plainness of a piece of Shaker furniture.\u201d \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Delaware: West of Rehoboth<\/em>, by Alexs D. Pate (2001)<\/h2>\n
\"West
(Photo: Courtesy Harper Perennial)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sometimes adventure is not something that you undertake willingly but is thrust upon you by a change in circumstance or geography. Such is the case in Alexs D. Pate\u2019s heartfelt coming-of-age novel, West of Rehoboth<\/em>. The protagonist is a chubby, bookish boy named Edward, whose parents send him to spend the summer of 1962 with his Aunt Edna in West Rehoboth, the Black, working-class side of the well-known Delaware beach resort. While his mom waits tables, Edward explores the woods and creeks and fishes for crabs in the canal that divided the Black side of Rehoboth from the white side, and visits the small scrap of segregated beach allotted to Black folks. Everything about Delaware is terra incognita to him. The plot is explosive, but just as interesting is Pate\u2019s portrayal of an unseen, under-represented side of a place that seems so peaceful and familiar. \u2014Bill Gifford<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Florida: The Orchid Thief<\/em>, by Susan Orlean (1998)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Ballantine Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After reading The Orchid Thief<\/em>, you might find yourself with a new flower obsession, googling images of sexy little blooms and itching to get knee-deep in some gnarly swamp water. Susan Orlean experienced such a spiral while reporting this classic nonfiction book.<\/em> She follows Florida man (in every sense) John Laroche\u2019s extreme, sometimes illegal pursuits of rare orchids and explores other fanatics throughout history; bizarre orchid biology; and Florida\u2019s particular natural and Indigenous history. Orlean isn\u2019t a Floridian herself, so she offers a helpfully perplexed perspective on the state\u2019s enticing weirdness. \u201cThe wild part of Florida is really wild. The tame part is really tame. Both, though, are always in flux,\u201d she writes. Orlean comes to appreciate what any Floridian knows about one of the country\u2019s most misunderstood states. Much like the strange beauty of an extraterrestrial-looking orchid, the qualities that make Florida unique are the same things that make us unable to look away. \u2014Erin Berger<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Georgia: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood<\/em>, by Janisse Ray (1999)<\/h2>\n
\"Ecology
(Photo: Courtesy Milkweed Editions)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Part memoir, part natural history, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood<\/em> earned Ray the sobriquet The Rachel Carson of the South. The book chronicles her childhood growing up in a junkyard alongside Highway 1\u2014\u201dnot a bad place to grow up,\u201d she writes, \u201cweird enough to stoke any child\u2019s curiosity, a playground of endless possibility.\u201d Much of that possibility lay behind the piles of cars and radiators in \u201ca singing forest of tall and widely spaced pines,\u201d the longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the entire South. When Ray wrote this book, only 1 percent of those old-growth longleaf forests remained. It took her a while to embrace her origins, but now, she writes, \u201dWhat I come from has made me who I am.\u201d \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Bonus Read: <\/strong>Outcasts United<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2009)<\/strong>, Warren St. John\u2019s bestselling story of how a refugee kids\u2019 soccer team united tiny Clarkston, Georgia.<\/p>\n

Hawaii: Aloha Rodeo<\/em>, by David Wolman and Julian Smith (2019)<\/h2>\n
\"Aloha
(Photo: Courtesy Mariner Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1908, three paniolos from the Big Island pulled off a huge upset at Wyoming\u2019s Frontier Days rodeo, winning the steer-roping competition to the dismay of the mainland cowboys. While the event is central to this book\u2019s narrative, the backstory is what\u2019s most captivating; Hawaiians have been herding longhorn up and down the rough slopes of the state\u2019s volcanoes since the early 1800s, decades after cattle were first dropped into the waters off the western town of Captain Cook and forced to splash their way ashore amid the sharks. Spanish vaqueros who came from California taught locals their skills, introducing the islanders to working with horses to help them manage what quickly became a massive bovine population that would change not only the landscape but island culture and politics. That heritage lives on during the annual Panaewa Stampede Rodeo in Hilo. \u2014Tasha Zemke<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Bonus Read:<\/strong> The Wave<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2010)<\/strong>, Susan Casey\u2019s immersive exploration of the \u201cmonsters of the deep\u201d and the surfers who chase them.<\/p>\n

Idaho: Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter in the Wilderness<\/em> by Pete Fromm (1993)<\/h2>\n
\"Indian
(Photo: Courtesy Picador USA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1978, Pete Fromm was a 20-year-old student at the University of Montana in Missoula. That year, he stumbled into a job overwintering in a wall tent in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness guarding millions of tiny salmon eggs that Idaho Fish and Game had placed in the local hatchery. Fromm decided he wanted to be a mountain man, but he couldn’t have been more uneducated in the ways of wilderness survival. He goes into the backcountry a naive quasi\u2013frat boy and comes out closer to Grizzly Adams. Which is to say, almost entirely on his own, he learns to hunt (everything from grouse to moose), cook (from the barest cache of dry goods), get from point A to point B (mostly on snowshoes), and appreciate the predators, prey, and chorus of hunters that break up his sometimes unbearable isolation. Read this book if you liked Into the Wild<\/em> but wanted a triumphant ending. \u2014Tracy Ross<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Illinois: Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak<\/em>, by Black Hawk (1833)<\/h2>\n
\"Life
(Photo: Courtesy Penguin Group)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This 19th-century Sauk war captain is best known for the 1832 conflict that bears his name, in which Sauk soldiers fought with the British to repel American settlers from parts of present-day Illinois and Wisconsin. But he also dictated his autobiography to an interpreter, an adventurous story for an adventurous life. Black Hawk fought his first battle while barely a teenager, clubbing an Osage enemy to death and then presenting the scalp to his father. \u201cHe said nothing,\u201d Black Hawk recalls, \u201cbut looked pleased.\u201d This book bristles with violence\u2014the death of his father at the hands of Cherokee fighters, the death of his adopted son by a few murderous whites. But it also contains wonderful descriptions of the cornfields tended by Sauk women, the Rock River with its abundance of fish, the land that houses \u201cthe graves of our friends.\u201d After losing the Black Hawk War, the Sauk had to leave all of it, something Black Hawk laments again and again: \u201cWhy did the Great Spirit ever send the whites to this island, to drive us from our homes?\u201d \u2014Craig Fehrman<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Indiana: Rural Free: A Farmwife\u2019s Almanac of Country Living<\/em>, by Rachel Peden (1961)<\/h2>\n
\"Rural
(Photo: Courtesy Quarry Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rachel Peden was a farmer and local newspaper columnist before Knopf published her first book, Rural Free<\/em>, in 1961. The book became a media sensation (as did its author), and reading it now you can see why. Rural Free<\/em>\u2019s chapters follow the months, starting with September, and in them Peden describes her family, their farm, and the natural world that envelops them. \u201cNights,\u201d she writes, \u201care marked by a steady humming spread on the air like a thick blanket.\u201d Peden makes sure her readers can hear the different parts of that humming, the crickets and the katydids and \u201cthe rare cello of a big bullfrog at the pond back of the barn.\u201d Her writing remains funny, observant, unhurried, and most of all local, committed to the smells and sights and sounds of her home state. \u2014C.F.<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Iowa: Wildland Sentinel: Field Notes from an Iowa Conservation Officer, <\/em>by Erika Billerbeck (2020)<\/h2>\n
\"Wildland
(Photo: Courtesy University of Iowa Press)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If you\u2019re curious about what wilderness looks like in a state that\u2019s 97 percent privately owned, try this fresh memoir by a rookie law enforcement ranger. \u201cI am an Iowa native,\u201d Billerbeck writes. \u201cBut as a newly badged officer, standing in the bed of my pickup for a better view, \u2026 I found myself wondering if I would be able to find the natural resources I was sworn to safeguard.\u201d Her work includes everything from arresting drunken boaters to chasing down wayward skunks. \u201cI once read a memoir by a game warden who seemingly emerged from the womb with a badge on his chest and a gun on his hip,\u201d she writes. \u201cMy story is much less heroic.\u201d Still, there may be no better way to get to know Iowa\u2019s wild spaces than riding shotgun in Billerbeck\u2019s truck. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Bonus Read<\/strong>: A Thousand Acres<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (1991)<\/strong>, novelist Jane Smiley\u2019s prizewinning reimagination of King Lear<\/em> on a 20th-century farm.<\/p>\n

Kansas: Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie<\/em>, by Richard Manning (1997)<\/h2>\n
\"Grassland:
(Photo: Courtesy Penguin Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Many travelers speed through the grassy expanses of the Great Plains, but in doing so they miss a landscape both beautiful and powerful. In Grassland<\/em>, Richard Manning explores the history of these vast landscapes, their rich biology, the myriad misguided efforts to tame them, and the growing understanding of our need to adapt our lives to the grasslands rather than try to get them to adapt to our agendas. Grassland<\/em> will compel and haunt you with its appreciation of the unique character and experience of the plains. \u201cThe solitude of the prairie is like no other,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe feeling of being hidden and alone in a grassland as open as the sea.\u201d \u2014Jonathan Beverly<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Kentucky: Appalachian Elegy<\/em>, by bell hooks (2012)<\/h2>\n
\"Appalachian
(Photo: Courtesy University Press of Kentucky)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a state that rightfully claims Wendell Berry as its bard and eco-conscience, another writer has harvested poetry just as connected to the land. Writer and feminist bell hooks started her journey in the isolated foothills of Appalachia; while her path took her to Stanford University and New York, she returned to teach at Berea College in eastern Kentucky, where she lived until her death in 2021. The poems here give voice to generations of Black people who took refuge in rural mountain pockets and made them their own. \u201cTo be from the backwoods was to be part of the wild,\u201d hooks writes in the book\u2019s introduction. \u201cWhere we lived, black folks were as much a part of the wild, living in a natural way on the earth, as white folks. All backwoods folks were poor by material standards; they knew how to make do. They were not wanting to tame the wild, in themselves or in nature.\u201d \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Louisiana: The Tin Roof Blowdown<\/em>, by James Lee Burke (2007)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Simon & Schuster)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hurricane Katrina did more than expose the social fractures of low-lying New Orleans and the ineptitude of the federal disaster response. The 2005 storm and its aftermath also inspired some of the best nonfiction of the 21st century. Our pick is fictional, but no less true: James Lee Burke brings back beloved Iberia Parish detective Dave Robicheaux in The Tin Roof Blowdown, <\/em>which The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> called \u201cthe definitive crime novel about Hurricane Katrina.\u201d Robicheaux finds himself neck-deep in corrupt muck populated by looters, trapped church parishioners, and a missing priest. Read those nonfiction books for their masterful journalistic accounts; read this for the human tide that flows underneath. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Bonus Read: <\/strong>The Great Deluge<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2006), <\/strong>the must-read account of the disaster by historian\u2014and Katrina evacuee\u2014Douglas Brinkley.<\/p>\n

Maine: The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit<\/em>, by Michael Finkel (2017)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Knopf)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ever since Henry David Thoreau struck off for the Maine Woods in 1864, we have turned to this wilderness to both find and lose ourselves. At 20, Christopher Knight made an arguably childish decision to get lost in these storied woods in the spring of 1986. Then he decided to stay that way for 27 years, not by surviving off the land but by raiding nearby vacation cabins. He was a modern-day robber-hermit who never took more than he needed and almost always locked up after he was done \u201cshopping.\u201d With spare, precise prose, Finkel lays a case that Knight, who had only two conversations during his time in the woods, is a uniquely Maine phenomenon, combining a sincere need to be left alone with the local live-and-let-live sensibility that allowed for such an existence. \u201cHe does not care if people fail to understand what he did in the woods, \u201c writes Finkel. \u201cHe didn\u2019t do it for us to understand. He wasn\u2019t trying to prove a point. There was no point.\u201d Knight was, in his own words, \u201ccompletely free.\u201d \u2014W. Hodding Carter<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Maryland: Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay<\/em>, by William W. Warner (1976)<\/h2>\n
\"Beautiful
(Photo: Courtesy Back Bay Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Latin name for the Chesapeake blue crab, Callinectes sapidus<\/em>, translates literally as \u201csavory beautiful swimmer.\u201d And this ode to Maryland\u2019s Eastern Shore and its watermen is worthy of that name. Warner spent a year out with crabbers, and no piece of eelgrass or ritual of crab courtship escapes his notice. That\u2019s because he treats the lives of these crustaceans, and the crabbers who follow them, with the utmost fascination and delight. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Beautiful Swimmers<\/em> is indispensable reading about the Chesapeake Bay. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Massachusetts: Upstream<\/em>, by Mary Oliver (2016)<\/h2>\n
\"Upstream,
(Photo: Courtesy Penguin Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In her final book, Upstream,<\/em> Mary Oliver muses with her classic quiet elegance on the transcendentalists before her and winds their stories with her own moments of awe in nature. Set in her cabin on Cape Cod, she talks about her small discoveries\u2014a wounded gull, being unable to find the right words to describe a sunflower, a fox out on a frozen pond. Oliver reminds us to take that extra deep breath, to slow our step and be present in nature, which I would argue is the best adventure of all. \u2014Kyra Kennedy<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Bonus Read: <\/strong>North Woods<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2023),<\/em><\/strong> a fictional chronicle of one piece of western Massachusetts land and its inhabitants over the centuries, by Daniel Mason.<\/p>\n

Michigan: Rivers of Sand: Fly Fishing Michigan & the Great Lakes Region<\/em>, by Josh Greenberg (2014)<\/h2>\n
\"Rivers
(Photo: Courtesy Lyons Press)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If you hear the words Michigan<\/em> and trout<\/em>, you\u2019ll probably think of Ernest Hemingway\u2019s The Nick Adams Stories<\/em><\/a>. But for my money, the best writing about fishing in Michigan is found in a guidebook: Rivers of Sand<\/em>, by Josh Greenberg, who owns and runs Gates Au Sable Lodge on the famed Holy Waters of the Au Sable. Sure, it\u2019s helped me catch more fish. But it\u2019s also taught me how to be a better angler, which is a different thing. In an early chapter about fishing small creeks in the state, Greenberg stumbles onto a 20-inch monster cruising in a pool. Before even trying to catch the thing, he writes, \u201cThis trout, on this mysterious little Michigan stream, in the day, in the sunlight, was priceless in the way only nature can be priceless.\u201d That\u2019s the way I want to think about fishing: as a pursuit rather than an activity, a journey rather than a destination. And Greenberg is exactly the guy I want to guide me. \u2014Jonah Ogles<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Minnesota: A Year in the Wilderness: Bearing Witness in the Boundary Waters<\/em>, by Dave and Amy Freeman (2017)<\/h2>\n
\"A
(Photo: Courtesy Milkweed Editions)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1956, Sigurd F. Olson published The Singing Wilderness<\/em><\/a>, a compilation of lyrical essays celebrating four seasons in northern Minnesota\u2019s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and the adjacent Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario. The book was the gold standard of north-woods nature writing for more than half a century. In 2017, married couple Dave and Amy Freeman furthered that tradition, bringing a unique perspective to the Boundary Waters\u2019 beautiful solitude through an entire year of sleeping, eating, paddling, portaging, dogsledding, and camping within the confines of the one-million-acre wilderness. More important, they set out to accomplish a specific mission\u2014to raise awareness of the threats that proposed sulfide-ore copper mines<\/a> pose to the region. \u201cThe year taught us to slow down,\u201d Amy writes. \u201cWe were able to notice all these tiny miracles happening all around us that we would have missed if we were focused on racking up the miles.\u201d \u2014Stephanie Pearson<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Bonus Reads: <\/strong>The Indigenous histories by Ojibwe Red Lake brothers David and Anton Treuer, including Anton\u2019s Warrior Nation<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2015) <\/strong>and David\u2019s Heartbeat of Wounded Knee<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2019).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mississippi: Salvage the Bones<\/em>, by Jesmyn Ward (2011)<\/h2>\n
\"Salvage
(Photo: Courtesy Bloomsbury USA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Jesmyn Ward\u2019s seminal novel about a family loving and fighting its way through life in southern Mississippi in the days before Hurricane Katrina, nature weaves its way into, out of, over, and through her characters as a living, breathing being. The inescapable red dirt is at once a parasite invading their very pores and a friend comforting and enveloping. It\u2019s in every step Esch, the pregnant adolescent\u00a0protagonist, takes and in every breath she breathes. Nature is a mother striding alongside Esch and her brothers as they dart into and through danger\u2014sometimes holding their hands, sometimes swatting them: \u201call I can hear is the pine trees shushing each other, the oak trees bristling, the magnolia leaves hard and wide so that they sound like paper plates clattering when the wind hits them,\u201d writes Ward. In Salvage the Bones<\/em>, her lyrical talent dissolves the separation between humans and nature. \u2014W.H.C.<\/p>\n

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Missouri: Mississippi Solo<\/em>, by Eddy L. Harris (1988)<\/h2>\n
\"Mississippi
(Photo: Courtesy St. Martins Press-3PL)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ever since Mark Twain worked as a steamboat pilot in the 1850s, the Mississippi River has sparked boyhood dreams. Eddy Harris certainly had them; growing up in St. Louis, he\u2019d always wanted to travel the river from source to sea. In other ways, he wasn\u2019t the usual river bard. He didn\u2019t know how to paddle, for one; and he\u2019s Black. Still, in 1985, at age 30, he launched a canoe in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, bound for New Orleans, a journey, he writes, from \u201cwhere there ain\u2019t no black folks to where they still don\u2019t like us much.\u201d Harris dodges barges, wild dogs, and locals with shotguns, but mostly encounters kindness and generosity. Twenty-five years later, he repeated the adventure in a trip he joked about as \u201cold black man meets old man river.\u201d This more recent trip was an \u201canti-fear\u201d journey, he said, to show Black Americans that nature belongs to them as much as anyone. The resulting 2017 documentary, River to the Heart<\/em>, is a big-hearted bookend to one of the best travelogues ever written about America\u2019s heartland. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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Montana: Fools Crow<\/em>, by James Welch (1986)<\/h2>\n
\"Fools
(Photo: Courtesy Penguin Group)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There are plenty of great books about Montana, including Norman Maclean\u2019s beloved A River Runs Through It <\/em>and Young Men and Fire<\/em>. But consider the lesser known classic Fools Crow<\/em>, a 1986 novel by Blackfoot and A\u2019aninin (Gros Ventre) author James Welch. Set in the 1870s, a young man called White Man\u2019s Dog comes of age in a time when his culture and people are under siege. His homeland is fecund and beautiful: mountains and plains populated with ample wildlife and threaded by generous rivers. But white settlers are overtaking Blackfoot lands, the U.S. government is launching bloody military campaigns, and smallpox encroaches. In this book, Welch offers a window into a different Montana, before massive national parks, wealthy ski-resort towns, and white ranchers came to define the area. \u2014Abigail Barronian<\/p>\n

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Bonus Read: <\/strong>American Wolf<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2017)<\/strong>, Nate Blakeslee\u2019s compelling, affecting biography of legendary Yellowstone alpha female O-Six.<\/p>\n

Nebraska: Zoo Nebraska<\/em>, by Carson Vaughan (2019)<\/h2>\n
\"Zoo
(Photo: Courtesy Little a)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This stranger-than-fiction tale unspools the story of Dick Haskin and his crazy dream of running a primate research center in his tiny hometown of Royal, Nebraska. It\u2019s got everything: unexpected twists, small-town intrigue, and, of course, violent chimpanzees on the loose. Guilty watchers of Tiger King<\/em> know how easy it would be to play it all for lurid comedy. But Vaughan sees something deeper. Haskin had been planning to go to Rwanda to study under primatologist Dian Fossey when poachers murdered her. Instead, he acquired Reuben, a young male chimp, and bought a trailer home on the edge of town to keep his research dream alive. With a detective\u2019s eye for detail and an unerring ear for dialogue, Vaughan reveals Haskin\u2019s undoing for what it really is: a strange, ineffable, and heartbreaking emblem of what it means to live in\u2014and feel circumscribed by\u2014the narrow bounds of a dying town. \u2014Ted Genoways<\/p>\n

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Bonus Read: <\/strong>Ted Genoways\u2019s own book, This Blessed Earth<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, about the modern complexities of working a traditional American family farm (2017)<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Nevada: Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West<\/em>, by Rebecca Solnit (2000)<\/h2>\n
(Photo: Courtesy University of California Press)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rebecca Solnit\u2019s second book explores what she has dubbed the \u201chidden wars of the American West,\u201d including the violent expulsion of the Ahwahnechee tribe from California’s Yosemite Valley in 1851 and the nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site beginning a hundred years later. Those tests exposed \u201cdownwinders\u201d in the Great Basin to the fallout from hundreds of nuclear explosions over a two-year period. Nevada, with its wide-open desertscapes, colorful skies, and remote peaks, cannot be understood without an honest look at how the land and people fell victim to the nation\u2019s quest for global military supremacy. But Solnit\u2019s capacious writing brings both the ravages and the beauty of Nevada to life. The book, a combination of criticism, reportage, and historical research, helps the reader place these events in the longer history and myth-making of the American West, and raises questions about how we relate to both wild and developed landscapes. \u2014A.B.<\/p>\n

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New Hampshire: A Walk in the Woods<\/em>, by Bill Bryson (1998)<\/h2>\n
\"A
(Photo: Courtesy Crown Publishing Group)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A Walk in the Woods<\/em> is to the Appalachian Trail what Wild<\/em> is to the Pacific Crest Trail\u2014a book-turned-movie that sent hordes of hikers in its bootprints\u2014only a whole lot funnier. While Bryson began his hike in Georgia and ended up walking only about 40 percent of the route, the Granite State is what inspired the whole idea. Freshly settled in Dartmouth after years living in England, Bryson happened upon a path leading into the forest. Oh gee, it\u2019s the AT!<\/em> But readers\u2019 groans will turn quickly to snorts during a Monty Python<\/em>-esque set piece at the Dartmouth Co-op with a gear-splaining sales clerk: \u201cHe would say things to me like: \u2018Now this has a 70-denier high-density abrasion-resistant fly with a ripstop weave. On the other hand, and I\u2019ll be frank with you here\u2019\u2014and he would lean to me and reduce his voice to a low, candid tone as if disclosing that it had once been arrested in a public toilet with a sailor\u2014\u2018the seams are lap felled rather than bias taped and the vestibule is a little cramped.\u2019\u201d This scene alone is worth the price of admission, and thankfully it\u2019s just the beginning. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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New Jersey: The Meadowlands: Wilderness ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs at the Edge of a City<\/em>, by Robert Sullivan (1998)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Anchor Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

John McPhee\u2019s The Pine Barrens<\/em>, a magisterial account of that million-acre tract of forest in southern New Jersey, might seem the logical pick here, but I would suggest that Sullivan\u2019s unexpected foray into \u201cthe world\u2019s greatest industrial swamp\u201d more compellingly captures the always fraught human-nature nexus in the Garden State. Living in the Pacific Northwest, with snowcapped mountains at his disposal, Manhattan native Sullivan decides to come home to explore\u2014on foot, on car, on kayak\u2014a landscape that haunted his boyhood. Where, as Sullivan notes, the first settlers would have found animal life \u201ccomparable to the number of cars on the Turnpike on a Friday night before a holiday,\u201d its marshy recesses became a sordid Superfund symbol for environmental degradation (with the disposal of everything from PCBs to, reputedly, any number of mobsters)\u00a0and a gritty, forlorn backdrop to Springsteen, The<\/em> Sopranos, <\/em>and the rest of the Jersey mythos.\u00a0 \u201cThere are real hills in the Meadowlands,\u201d Sullivan writes, in one of my favorite sentences, \u201cand there are garbage hills.\u201d Today, the ever evolving Meadowlands, after decades of cleanup efforts, has become a favored habitat for birds, with nearly 300 species recorded. Not bad for the swamps of Jersey. \u2014Tom Vanderbilt<\/p>\n

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New Mexico: Bless Me, Ultima<\/em>, by Rudolfo Anaya (1972)<\/h2>\n
\"Bless
(Photo: Courtesy Grand Central Publishing)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Land of Enchantment is so rich in literary tradition\u2014Indigenous, Hispanic, and Anglo\u2014that we had a hard time choosing (and we don\u2019t say that just because many of ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø<\/em>\u2019s editors live in Santa Fe). Anaya weaves many of those threads together in the story of Antonio, a Chicano boy in 1950s Santa Rosa navigating a universe of Spanish Catholicism, Indigenous tradition, and ambient magic. The title character, the curandera,<\/em> or healer, Ultima, is \u201ca repository of Spanish, Mexican, and Native American teachings,\u201d Anaya wrote in a new introduction in 1999. \u201cWith her guidance Antonio begins to understand that the river, the open plain, and all of nature is imbued with spirit. Everything is alive; God is everywhere.\u201d By now a beloved coming-of-age classic, Bless Me, Ultima<\/em> has been banned and even burned for what was seen as antireligious messaging. But its hold on readers has endured. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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Bonus Read: <\/strong>Shutter<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2022)<\/strong>, Navajo author Ramona Emerson\u2019s chilling debut about a Din\u00e9 crime scene photographer who can\u2019t escape the ghosts of the victims whose deaths she documents.<\/p>\n

New York: My Side of the Mountain<\/em>, by Jean Craighead George (1959)<\/h2>\n
\"My
(Photo: Courtesy Puffin Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was already a semi-feral child in the New York suburbs by the time I read this classic 1959 novel about 12-year-old Sam Gribley, who runs away from his family in New York City to live off the land in the Catskills with a falcon, a weasel, and other wild friends for company. It\u2019s meant to be read by kids about the age of its protagonist and has had an outsize impact on generations of civilization-cramped children, serving as a gateway drug to a lifelong addiction to the natural world. The book is full of lessons in grit, resourcefulness, and self-sufficiency, from trapping animals to making acorn pancakes. But it is the direct language that connects most with its young readers, allowing them to imagine a life lived closer to nature\u2019s rhythms. \u201cSpring is terribly exciting when you\u2019re living right in it,\u201d Sam observes. A Washington Post<\/em> reporter before turning to books, George often said she was channeling through Sam her own childhood memories, including a desire to escape the confines of society. \u2014Tim Sohn<\/p>\n

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North Carolina: The Last American Man<\/em>, by Elizabeth Gilbert (2002)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Riverhead Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Eight years before Eat, Pray, Love<\/em> made her a celebrity,<\/em> Elizabeth Gilbert wrote this classic about the kind of self-reliant frontiersman we don\u2019t tend to see anymore. \u201cBy the time Eustace Conway was 6 years old,\u201d she writes, \u201che could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree. By the time he was 10, he could kill a running squirrel at fifty feet with a bow and arrow. When he turned 12, he went into the forest alone and empty-handed for a week.\u201d The first time Gilbert met him, he turned up in New York in a handmade buckskin suit. Some of Conway\u2019s comments haven\u2019t aged well; he told Gilbert he wanted a woman to bear him many children and read out diary excerpts detailing his ardent lovemaking. But dang, this man is tough, a character right out of The History Channel\u2019s Mountain Men<\/em>. And indeed, Eustace Conway has a recurring role on the show. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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Bonus Read: <\/strong>On Trails<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2016)<\/strong>, Robert Moor\u2019s examination of how we find our way, from ant trails to Cherokee footpaths.<\/p>\n

North Dakota: The Night Watchman<\/em>, by Louise Erdrich (2020)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Harper Perennial)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

North Dakota is Erdrich country, and there\u2019s no better place to start than this Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning novel, <\/em>the closest to her own life. A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Erdrich based the plot on her maternal grandfather, Patrick Gorneau, the chief of the tribe\u2019s advisory council and a night watchman at the local jewel-bearing plant, where tiny slivers were shaved off rubies and diamonds for watch and airplane parts. In 1954\u2014true story\u2014the U.S. government announced that the Turtle Mountain Band would cease to exist, part of its midcentury policy of \u201ctermination.\u201d But after Gorneau testified before Congress, the tribe won a reprieve. As Erdrich writes in the novel\u2019s addendum, \u201cIf you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.\u201d \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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Bonus Read: <\/strong>Yellow Bird<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2020)<\/strong>, by Sierra Crane Murdoch\u2014an unflinching true-crime account of Arikara woman Lissa Yellow Bird\u2019s redemptive quest to find out who killed an oil worker on tribal land.<\/p>\n

Ohio: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes<\/em>, by Dan Egan (2017)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy W. W. Norton & Company)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

People don\u2019t picture water when they picture Ohio. But there\u2019s a lot of it there to explore, starting with the 94,000 square miles\u2019 worth that make up the Great Lakes. As Dan Egan reveals in his masterful The Death and Life of the Great Lakes<\/em>, these troubled waters strike many as an environmental success story\u2014or at least as a huge improvement over the lakes\u2019 industrialized low point, most famously evoked by Cleveland and its Cuyahoga River fire in 1969. Today, Egan notes, the Cuyahoga \u201cdraws more fishing lines than punch lines.\u201d But underneath the sparkling blue surface, new ecological threats lurk. Take Toledo, where residents drained local swamps and created rich farmland but also toxic algae blooms that threaten Lake Erie and the area\u2019s water supply. Egan tells a riveting, dispiriting story of canoes and lake trout and 20-foot waves\u2014but, most of all, of humanity and its unintended consequences. \u2014C.F.<\/p>\n

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Oklahoma: The Way to Rainy Mountain<\/em>, by N. Scott Momaday (1969)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy University of New Mexico Press)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kiowa author Momaday covers several states in his work\u2014he spent most of his life in Arizona and New Mexico\u2014but none so elementally as his birth state of Oklahoma. Part history, part memoir, and part folklore, The Way to Rainy Mountain<\/em> explores his own identity as he follows the tribe\u2019s migrations from Montana across the Great Plains and its ultimate forced relocation to a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. There, at the foot of Rainy Mountain, he visits his grandmother\u2019s grave. \u201cTo look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion,\u201d he writes. \u201cYour imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.\u201d \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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Oregon: Astoria<\/em>: Astor and Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier<\/em>, by Peter Stark (2014)<\/h2>\n
\"Astoria:
(Photo: Courtesy Ecco Press)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Peter Stark\u2019s Astoria: Astor and Jefferson\u2019s Lost Pacific Empire<\/em> tells the story of John Jacob Astor\u2019s plan to monopolize the global fur trade in 1810. It all hinged on establishing a trading post at the mouth of the Columbia River\u2014present-day Astoria. Astor sent two expeditions: one by sea and the other overland, on a route established two years earlier by Lewis and Clark. Astor was a poor judge of leaders, and both parties were almost comically doomed from the beginning\u2014which is precisely what makes this book such a good read. With so much infighting, paranoia, double-crossing, madness, and starvation, there\u2019s plenty of action to fuel Stark\u2019s dueling narratives. \u201cAmericans love heroes and winners,\u201d writes Stark, explaining why the remarkable story has been lost to history. \u201cIn Astoria, there are few clear-cut winners and no unblemished heroes.\u201d \u2014Chris Keyes<\/p>\n

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Pennsylvania: Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America<\/em>, by Eliza Griswold (2018)<\/h2>\n
\"Amity
(Photo: Courtesy Picador USA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThis is the story of those Americans,\u201d Eliza Griswold writes, \u201cwho\u2019ve wrestled with the price their communities have long paid so the rest of us can plug in our phones.\u201d It\u2019s the story of fracking, the story of the fouled water and dying farm animals that lie underneath our domestic energy policy. And it\u2019s the story of two towns of rural conservatives who find themselves sickened by the fracking boom, including a single mother who takes her fight against Range Resources all the way to the Supreme Court. Griswold is a poet and global correspondent who has seen firsthand how \u201csome of the poorest people in the world live on some of the most resource-rich land.\u201d Amity and Prosperity<\/em>, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is a beautiful cry for environmental justice. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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Rhode Island: Spartina<\/em>, by John Casey (1989)<\/h2>\n
\"Spartina,
(Photo: Courtesy Vintage)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The New York Times <\/em>called this \u201cpossibly the best American novel about going fishing since The Old Man and the Sea<\/em>, maybe even Moby-Dick.<\/em>\u201d Dick Pierce, a commercial fisherman, is barely supporting his family pulling lobster and quahogs out the salt marshes near Narragansett Bay. That hasn\u2019t stopped him from sinking thousands into a half-built 50-foot boat in his yard, his ticket to big-time fishing and a money pit that is the abiding passion of his life. Spartina<\/em>, named after the marsh grass that thrives in the area\u2019s salty black soil, does finally make it into the water\u2026and straight into a hurricane that sparks a reckoning in Pierce\u2019s life back on shore. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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South Carolina: The Home Place<\/em>: Memoirs of a Colored Man\u2019s Love Affair with Nature<\/em>, by J. Drew Lanham (2017)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Milkweed Editions)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In October 2022, Drew Lanham was awarded a MacArthur \u201cgenius grant,\u201d proof that the secret is out on one of the South\u2019s most valuable writers and conservationists. Growing up in rural Edgefield County like generations of Lanhams before him, he surprises wild turkey and foxes on the same land where his ancestors worked as slaves. \u201cIn me,\u201d he writes, \u201cthere is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. I am, in the deepest sense, colored.\u201d He wrestles with that history, as well as being that \u201crare bird,\u201d a Black birder in a white conservation world. A professor at Clemson University, Lanham writes that his home county still has a mixed and powerful draw. \u201cDouble standards are as common as ragweed and persistent as kudzu across the region,\u201d he writes. \u201cBut Edgefield was still my refuge, primarily because it was and is a sanctuary for creatures that aren\u2019t subject to the prejudice of men.\u201d \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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South Dakota: Buffalo for the Broken Heart<\/em>, by Dan O\u2019Brien (2001)<\/h2>\n
\"Buffalo
(Photo: Courtesy Random House Trade)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Some years after buying the Broken Heart Ranch in South Dakota, author, environmentalist, and rancher O\u2019Brien stumbled on a radical notion in the wake of years of poor grazing conditions that decimated his cattle herd: bison. The natural inhabitants of the Great Plains are these woolly giants, not his overbred Angus cattle, which were destroying the land through their intense grazing habits. So he set off to transform his cattle ranch into a working bison preserve, which he subsequently chronicles in this impassioned memoir about the emotional struggles, backbreaking work, and redemptive exhilaration of seeing the effort through. O\u2019Brien is an award-winning novelist, so his prose shines, and he also understands the High Plains better than most. Today, O\u2019Brien has an even larger, 9,000-acre ranch\u2014along with grazing leases on another 24,000 acres\u2014and through bison ranching he has increased biodiversity on the land, helped capture vast amounts of carbon dioxide through the protection of native grasslands, and produced some of the healthiest red meat on the planet. \u2014Ryan Krogh<\/p>\n

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Tennessee: The Forest Unseen: A Year\u2019s Watch in Nature<\/em>, by David George Haskell (2012)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Penguin Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tennessee\u2019s Cumberland Plateau is home to uncounted bluffs, gorges, waterfalls, swimming holes\u2014and the University of the South, a.k.a. Sewanee, a small bastion of literary all-stars, including biologist David George Haskell. In The Forest Unseen, <\/em>the naturalist charts the comings and goings in a single square meter of old-growth forest over the course of a year. This is boring only in the way that Zen is boring. Yes, you sit, but it can be transformative. And indeed, Haskell\u2019s inspiration is the Tibetan mandala, in which, he writes, \u201cthe whole universe is seen through a circle of sand.\u201d In this particular galaxy, warblers, shrews, and salamanders (\u201cthe sharks of the leaf litter\u201d) move as giant predators while plants deploy their own strategies to survive. \u201cThe mandala is a mulloskan Serengeti,\u201d Haskell writes. \u201cHerds of coiled grazers move across the open savannah of lichens and mosses.\u201d He watches as a snail \u201cheads toward El Capitan, or a smallish rock, depending on how you see the world\u2026.Gravity blinks and the animal flows impossibly upward.\u201d A tiny little Alex Honnold muscling its way up a sheer rock face. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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Bonus Read: <\/strong>Flight Behavior<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2012)<\/strong>, Barbara Kingsolver\u2019s readable bestseller about climate, butterflies, and a small Appalachian farm.<\/p>\n

Texas: Goodbye to a River<\/em>, by John Graves (1959)<\/h2>\n
\"Goodbye
(Photo: Courtesy Vintage)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The writer John Graves lost the sight in one eye to an enemy grenade during World War II, taught English at universities in the U.S., and lived abroad in Europe and Mexico. Then, in 1957, he returned home to care for his dying father. In November of that year, he took what he thought would be a final canoe trip down the Brazos River, which was slated for several dams that would drown the riversides he\u2019d explored since childhood. Graves\u2019s account of that trip turned into Goodbye to a River<\/em>, which weaves the narrative of the voyage with a natural and cultural history of the stream. The book was nominated for a National Book Award, and it helped stop most of the proposed dam projects. Although limited at times by the macho voice that prevailed in that era of Texas letters, Goodbye to a River<\/em> is ultimately a book about trying to know yourself better by adventuring alone into the remote reaches of the place you come from. As Graves puts it: \u201cOne river, seen right, may well be all rivers that flow to the sea.\u201d \u2014Will Bostwick<\/p>\n

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Bonus Read: <\/strong>A Snake Falls to Earth<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2021)<\/strong>, Darcie Little Badger\u2019s National Book Award\u2013nominated YA novel about a Lipan Apache girl fighting for the environment with the help of some friends in the spirit world.<\/p>\n

Utah: Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place<\/em>, by Terry Tempest Williams (1991)<\/h2>\n
\"Refuge:
(Photo: Courtesy Vintage)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The deserts of Utah are unlike anywhere else, beautiful and harsh, full of the feeling that everything you admire could kill you. Terry Tempest Williams\u2019s book-length essay, Refuge<\/em>, holds that contrast, too. Williams is a fifth-generation Utahn, and in the mid-eighties, when her mother and other women in her family were dying of breast cancer (because, she suspects, they were exposed to atomic bomb tests the government staged in the southwestern deserts), and her favorite place, the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, was flooding from mismanagement of water in the desert, she dove into the question of how to live in and love a place deeply altered by humans. Refuge<\/em>, like the landscape in which it\u2019s based, is both gorgeous and harrowing. Williams makes that edge of disaster feel very close. But she also leans into the beauty of living in a harsh, human-changed landscape, a stance that feels highly relevant in Utah today. \u2014Heather Hansman<\/p>\n

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Vermont: Long Distance: Testing the Limits of Body and Spirit in a Year of Living Strenuously<\/em>, by Bill McKibben (2000)<\/h2>\n
\"Long
(Photo: Courtesy Rodale Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Most of us know his climate work, but Bill McKibben is also an avid cross-country ski racer. At age 37, the spindly writer embarks upon what he calls \u201ca process of jockification.\u201d A self-described wimp in childhood, he devotes a year of rigorous training to transform himself from an avid amateur endurance skier into a competitive cross-country racer. \u201cPartly it was pure selfishness,\u201d he writes. \u201cAfter a decade as an environmental writer and activist, I needed a break from failing to save the world. But mostly it was curiosity that drove me. By year’s end I hoped I’d have more sense of what life lived through the body felt like.\u201d Along the way, however, he is faced with the failings of the body when his father is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. One of the most personal of McKibben\u2019s 18 books, Long Distance<\/em> reveals the all-too-human athlete behind the climate warrior. \u201cI came seeking sweat,\u201d he writes, \u201cand only found enlightenment.\u201d \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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Bonus Read: <\/strong>Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (2005)<\/strong>, by Laura Waterman, about the author\u2019s husband\u2019s choice to leave the homestead and end his life by freezing on Mount Lafayette in 2000.<\/p>\n

Virginia: Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island<\/em>, by Earl Swift (2018)<\/h2>\n
\"Chesapeake
(Photo: Courtesy Mariner Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Think of this and Beautiful Swimmers<\/em>, our Maryland choice, as a matched pair. Tangier Island, a speck in the Chesapeake Bay, is home to fewer than 500 people, a tight-knit community that has been anchored there since before the Revolutionary War. But the island has lost two thirds of its landmass since 1850, and thanks to climate change, the famed crabbing outpost is in danger of being overwhelmed by the waves. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø <\/em>contributor Swift chronicles the fishermen and -women over several decades, as the sea literally takes their forebears from their graves. \u201cI consider the [head]stones for a long moment,\u201d he writes, \u201cwondering whether the people bearing those names ever imagined that the bay would one day claim all but these scant traces of their existence\u2014that it would plunder their homes, their entire village, then come for what remained of them.\u201d \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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Bonus Read: <\/strong>The Vaster Wilds<\/strong><\/a> (2023)<\/strong>, Lauren Groff\u2019s raw survival novel of a young servant girl\u2019s flight from a colony into the wilderness in the 1600s.<\/p>\n

Washington: The Boys in the Boat<\/em>, by Daniel James Brown (2013)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Penguin Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Turn to this for a fun, engagingly written story about the University of Washington men\u2019s crew team in Depression-era Seattle, Washington. The climax is the boys\u2019 gold-medal race in the pre\u2013World War II Third Reich (not a spoiler; it\u2019s based on real events), but below the plot of races and training are descriptions of the Emerald City and its broader region that still ring true. Granted, an enterprising lad can\u2019t pay his way through the University of Washington (as protagonist Joe Rantz does) by working at logging camps on the Olympic Peninsula over the summer anymore. But quiet mornings on Lake Washington before practice evoke the same feeling that walking along the Montlake Cut does today: that the city isn\u2019t so much surrounded by a beautiful natural environment as interwoven with it. \u2014Miyo McGinn<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Bonus Read: <\/strong>The beautiful memoir by fly-fisherman and Patagonia ambassador Dylan Tomine, Closer to the Ground<\/strong><\/a> (2012)<\/strong>, of a year of foraging with his young family on an island in the Salish Sea.<\/p>\n

Washington, D.C.: Spring in Washington<\/em>, by Louis J. Halle (1947)<\/h2>\n
\"Spring
(Photo: Courtesy Johns Hopkins University Press)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My hometown is better known for producing self-serving memoirs than great tales of adventure. The exception is this wondrous narrative, penned by a disgruntled federal bureaucrat. Bored with his job, Louis Halle became an explorer of the urban wilderness, sallying forth on his bicycle through the woods of Rock Creek Park and along the tidal fringes of the Potomac, counting mergansers and osprey in its hidden marshes before circling back toward his desk at the State Department. Spring in Washington <\/em>chronicles the changes he observed over the first six months of 1945, which also happened to be the final chapter of World War II. The war goes unmentioned, but the metaphor of renewal and rebirth hangs on every page as he watches the natural world reawaken around him. Halle has been compared to Thoreau, but he was not turning his back on society; Spring in Washington<\/em> is about learning how to see what is right under our noses. \u201cI must get out of my cell, out of doors, out into the open world where I can see again,\u201d he writes. \u2014B.G.<\/p>\n

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West Virginia: The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, <\/em>by Emma Copley Eisenberg (2020)<\/h2>\n
\"The
(Photo: Courtesy Hachette Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the summer of 1980, two young women hitchhiking to the annual Rainbow Gathering were found murdered in a forest clearing in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Part true crime, part memoir, The Third Rainbow Girl<\/em> delves into West Virginia\u2019s proudly hardscrabble mountain communities, into questions of misogyny and sexuality, and into what made the victims, and so many others in these mountains, want to drop out. The title refers both to a woman who decided not to accompany her friends to the festival and to Eisenberg herself, who has spent years visiting or living in Pocahontas County. \u201cThere is a deep awareness here of what the rest of America thinks a life should look like\u2014the newest model, the fanciest vacation, the highest paying job with the best retirement plan\u2014and, among many, a rejection of that life.\u201d \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

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Wisconsin: Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America<\/em>, by Brian Benson (2014)<\/h2>\n
\"Going
(Photo: Courtesy Plume Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I picked up this memoir in the wobbly time after college graduation, when I, like Benson\u2019s narrative self, was scrounging ideas for how to scaffold my hazy future. I liked his plan: to bike across America with a new partner, pedaling west from his hometown in northern Wisconsin. It didn\u2019t take many pages for me to fall into fantasy, fixating on how to experience the world they cycled through. Because I had never been to Wisconsin before\u2014nor, somehow, read much about it\u2014my first reaction to the lush detail was skepticism. How had I missed that you could \u201cread a book on a bed of pine duff\u201d or eat blueberries beside a lake \u201cnestled in a carpet of coniferous bog\u201d? Though Going Somewhere<\/em> unspools across America, it\u2019s the first third of the book, in Benson\u2019s home state, that\u2019s lingered with me. I\u2019ve since dog-eared the pages as an ad hoc guide for my own hiking and cross-country ski adventures there. It\u2019s a joy to read about a place, but it\u2019s a thrill when the words compel you to put the book down, get out a map, and start planning a trip. \u2014Erica Berry<\/p>\n

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Wyoming: Close Range: Stories<\/em>, by Annie Proulx (1999)<\/h2>\n
\"Close
(Photo: Courtesy Scribner Book Company)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s appropriate that Annie Proulx should have the last word after her mic-drop short story about the love between two cowboys, Brokeback Mountain<\/em>, which appears in this collection. The master of short fiction lived in Wyoming for close to 20 years, on a ranch called Bird Cloud on the North Platte River. The hard men and women of her Wyoming stories\u2014three volumes in all\u2014scratch out a living, freeze to death, fall in love, and fight the state\u2019s scouring wind. That rough wind ultimately carried Proulx away as well. She sold Bird Cloud and returned to the New England of her childhood; now she lives in New Hampshire. \u2014E.H.A.<\/p>\n

Buy the Book<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Go beyond Abbey and McPhee with a great read for wherever your next journey takes you<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44696,"featured_media":2653366,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"uuid":"c16d9896898e1962f3c319551d871bd3","footnotes":""},"categories":[2575],"tags":[6772,3128,2624,3036],"byline":[1152,105],"ad_cat":[],"legacy-category":[],"class_list":["post-2653336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-media","tag-adventure-travel","tag-books","tag-nature","tag-united-states","byline-elizabeth-hightower-allen","byline-editors"],"acf":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"Our Favorite Outdoor ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Books for Every State","url":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/culture\/books-media\/outdoor-adventure-books-every-state\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/culture\/books-media\/outdoor-adventure-books-every-state\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/50-books-50-states_h-150x150.jpg","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/50-books-50-states_h.jpg"},"articleSection":"Books & Media","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"jversteegh"}],"creator":["jversteegh"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online","logo":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/favicon-194x194-1.png"},"keywords":["adventure travel","books","nature","united states"],"dateCreated":"2023-11-20T14:03:42Z","datePublished":"2023-11-20T14:03:42Z","dateModified":"2023-12-14T21:02:30Z"},"rendered":"