"What do we seek and what do we find when we visit parks and protected areas? How does it change a person, to spend years wandering around rugged, remote wilderness areas? What does it mean, to become so deeply attached to a beautiful, wild place that it becomes part of one's identity? And, conversely, why does it matter if a particular landscape doesn't speak to one's soul? In this combination memoir and scholarly analysis of the psychological and societal dimensions of "place-creation", author Tyra A. Olstad details her experiences working and living in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Denali National Park and Preserve, Adirondack State Park, and Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Along the way, she explores canyons, climbs mountains, watches clouds, rafts rivers, searches for fossils, protects rare and fragile vegetation, learns and shares local natural and cultural histories, questions perceptions of "wilderness", deepens appreciation for wildness, and reshapes understandings of self and self-in-place. Anyone who has ever felt appreciation for wild places and who wants to think more deeply about individual and societal relationships with American parks and protected areas will find humor, fear, provocation, wonder, awe, and, above all, inspiration in these words and images"--

Let history drop behind as we explore the sacred confines of a temple city built by a race that was here long before us; before our species was even a glimmer in the cosmic eye, and whose work is still evident, usable, and heuristic. Dominated by a mountain, sculpted as a pregnant women, with a lion at her feet and a rearing serpent behind, the site is still alive with eddies of spiritual energy. Between the colossal lady and lion is a saddle in the mountain beautified by mazes of stone, sparkling sand terraces, and the gardens of windswept splendor with the rock everywhere seeming to be incised with aesthetic, undecipherable hieroglyphics. The site is beautiful, bolstering, and enlivened; geometrically tuned to the cosmos, whose forces it appropriates to utilize in various ways. Join in as we uncover a few of the marvels of an authentically magical place with a psychedelic consciousness adapted to tuning into the ancient mysteries; giving a new dynamism to the on-going story if a truly sacred mountain.

This carefully crafted ebook: "STEEP TRAILS: California - Utah - Nevada - Washington - Oregon - The Grand Canyon” is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Editor's Introduction: "The papers brought together in this volume have, in a general way, been arranged in chronological sequence. They span a period of twenty-nine years of Muir's life, during which they appeared as letters and articles, for the most part in publications of limited and local circulation. Some of these papers were revised by the author during the later years of his life, and these revisions are a part of the form in which they now appear. The recital of his experiences during a stormy night on the summit of Mount Shasta will take rank among the most thrilling of his records of adventure. His observations on the dead towns of Nevada, and on the Indians gathering their harvest of pine nuts, recall a phase of Western life that has left few traces in American literature. Many, too, will read with pensive interest the author's glowing description of what was one time called the New Northwest.” John Muir (1838-1914) was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, have been read by millions. His activism helped to preserve the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park and other wilderness areas. The Sierra Club, which he founded, is a prominent American conservation organization.