Letters to her sister about the author's travel in Colorado, autumn and early winter 1873.

Winner of the Canadian Rockies Award at the 2005 Banff Mountain Book Festival, this comprehensive climber's guide and history of the 54 11,000-foot peaks in the Canadian Rockies celebrates in words and images these breathtaking summits and the wilderness settings over which they tower. This book uniquely captures and distills the lively and frequently forgotten accounts of the pioneering climbers and their various routes. Each entry provides a vivid description of the peak, an extensive history of the early ascents of it and a detailed description of moderate to intermediate routes, including access and approach information. Now extensively updated, the text is liberally illustrated with route and climbing photos, both contemporary and historical, and includes detailed area maps.

Whitewater of the Southern Rockies covers 400 runs in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Wyoming. This is the most comprehensive catalog of class I-V+ kayaking and rafting sections ever compiled. Three hundred full-page color photos, a user-friendly design, succinct river descriptions, and precise beta-boxes make this the whitewater guidebook of choice. At once a rediculously well researched and layed-out guide and a coffee table style book complete with the most stunning collection of whitewater photography ever compiled into book form, this is a must have for anyone living in the West and serious about whitewater kayaking and rafting. Each section is complete with maps, detailed information about the runs and access to them, as well as logistics, and complete with color photos and pertinent beta regarding flow rates and seasons.

In the bestselling tradition of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk, Karen Auvinen, an award-winning poet, ventures into the wilderness to seek answers to life’s big questions with “candor [and] admirable courage” (Christian Science Monitor). Determined to live an independent life on her own terms, Karen Auvinen flees to a primitive cabin in the Rockies to live in solitude as a writer and to embrace all the beauty and brutality nature has to offer. When a fire incinerates every word she has ever written and all of her possessions—except for her beloved dog Elvis, her truck, and a few singed artifacts—Karen embarks on a heroic journey to reconcile her desire to be alone with her need for community. In the evocative spirit of works by Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, and Terry Tempest Williams, Karen’s “beautiful, contemplative…breathtaking [debut] memoir honors the wildness of the Rockies” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “Rough Beauty offers a glimpse into a life that’s pared down to its essentials, open to unexpected, even profound, change” (Brevity Magazine), and Karen’s pursuit of solace and salvation through shedding trivial ties and living in close harmony with nature, along with her account of finding community and even love, is sure to resonate with all of us who long for meaning and deeper connection. An “outstanding…beautiful story of resilience” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), Rough Beauty is a luminous, lyric exploration, “a narrative that reads like a captivating novel...a voice not found often enough in literature—a woman who eschews the prescribed role outlined for her by her family and discovers her own path” (Christian Science Monitor) to embrace the unpredictability and grace of living intimately with the forces of nature.

"We seemed to have reached that horizon, and the limit of all endurance, to sit with folded hands and listen calmly to the stories of the hills we so longed to see, the hills which had lured and beckoned us for years before this long list of men had ever set foot in the country." - Mary T.S. Schäffer Mary T.S. Schäffer was an avid explorer and one of the first non-Native women to venture into the heart of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, where few women - or men - had gone before. First published in 1911, Old Indian Trails of the Canadian Rockies is Schäffer's story of her adventures in the traditionally male-dominated world of climbing and exploration. It also sheds light on Native and non-Native relations at the early part of the 20th century. Full of daring adventure and romantic depictions of camp life, set against the grand backdrop of Canada's mountain landscapes, the book introduces readers to various characters from the annals of Canadian mountaineering history, including Arthur Philemon Coleman, Billy Warren, Sid Unwin, Bill Peyto and Jimmy Simpson. Old Indian Trails of the Canadian Rockies is certain to entertain and enlighten 21st-century readers, historians, hikers and climbers.

This reprint makes available again Frank Waters' dramatic and colorful 1937 biography of Winfield Scott Stratton, the man who struck it rich at the foot of Pike's Peak and turned Cripple Creek into the greatest gold camp on earth. More than regional history, Midas of the Rockies is a story so fabulously impossible and yet so painfully true that it commends itself to the whole of America, the only earth, the only people who could have created it.

Winner of the 2020 Reading the West Advocacy Award Winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction "This is a book for all of us, right now." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect. In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief… to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”