Mountain Time

Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment is an essay collection that explores the inner and outer natures of remarkable human and nonhuman beings. It is a book about paying attention—with the mind and with the heart. The essays confront the ethical and personal challenges Renata Golden faced in a harsh and isolated environment and examine the power of nature to influence her understanding of the human spirit. The lessons she learned on the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico jolted her out of her customary way of seeing the world—which is the transformative power of a thin place, where the borders between the sublime and the profane melt away. The essays call attention to the animals that are often shunned—pack rats, rattlesnakes, ants, prairie dogs, and other desert dwellers that some consider better dead than alive. Many of the animals in these essays are at risk of extinction. The essays honor these animals for the role they play in the wild world and for their unique abilities, such as cooperative societies and complex language skills. By recognizing the animals’ value, Golden gives readers reasons to be moved to save them, if it’s not too late.

Scientist, teacher, author, and champion of the natural world, Dr. Kenneth S. Norris reveals the insights gained over a lifetime devoted to learning and teaching about the natural world and human nature, and the global environmental crisis we've helped to bring upon ourselves.

Schullery's heartfelt reflections on his relationship to the wildness of Yellowstone Park.

At fifty-something, environmental reporter Mitch Rozier has grown estranged from Seattle's coffee shop and cyber culture. His newspaper is going under, and his relationship with Lexa McCaskill is stalled at "just living together." Then, he is summoned by his sly, exasperating father, Lyle, back to the family land, which Lyle plans to sell in the latest of his get-rich schemes before dying. Lexa follows, accompanied by her sister Mariah, and the stage is set for long-overdue confrontations -- between lovers, sisters, and father and son. Mountain Time is distinguished by humor and a wry insight into the power of family feuds to mark individuals and endure. Set against the glorious backdrop of Montana mountain country, it is a dazzling novel of love, family, and the contemporary West.

“For me as for so many others, the American West was the place of a new beginning. Its vastness, its beauty, and the courage of the people shaped in its image gave me the courage to come to terms with my life and my self. This book is a tribute to those people and that land—a book about how my hopes and dreams became reality, a book that has my heart in it.” Mountain Time is a wonderful hybrid: part memoir, part personal essay, and part documentary of the places and people of the West that have inspired Jane Candia Coleman’s award-winning stories. It has something for everyone—nature, history, a poetic evocation of the land—while running through it all is the story of a woman’s gradual awakening to new possibilities, and to the realization of her strength.

A psychological romance of two people who return to their childhood home to understand and recover from their neuroses.

Mitch Rozier is a middle-aged environmental reporter in Seattle, estranged from the cyber-culture that surrounds him. A summons from his dying father, who has one last scheme up his sleeve, takes Mitch back to the family land and to the unanswered questions at the heart of the long-standing rift between them.

In national bestseller The Mountain, world-renowned climber and bestselling author Ed Viesturs and cowriter David Roberts paint a vivid portrait of obsession, dedication, and human achievement in a true love letter to the world’s highest peak. In The Mountain, veteran world-class climber and bestselling author Ed Viesturs—the only American to have climbed all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks—trains his sights on Mount Everest in richly detailed accounts of expeditions that are by turns personal, harrowing, deadly, and inspiring. The highest mountain on earth, Everest remains the ultimate goal for serious high-altitude climbers. Viesturs has gone on eleven expeditions to Everest, spending more than two years of his life on the mountain and reaching the summit seven times. No climber today is better poised to survey Everest’s various ascents—both personal and historic. Viesturs sheds light on the fate of Mallory and Irvine, whose 1924 disappearance just 800 feet from the summit remains one of mountaineering’s greatest mysteries, as well as the multiply tragic last days of Rob Hall and Scott Fischer in 1996, the stuff of which Into Thin Air was made. Informed by the experience of one who has truly been there, The Mountain affords a rare glimpse into that place on earth where Heraclitus’s maxim—“Character is destiny”—is proved time and again.