• The Spokane River (2018) edited by Paul Lindholdt: A newly-published collection of essays and poems on the environment—with reflections from 28 contributors—including Jess Walter, Tod Marshall, Sherman Alexie, Jerry White (Spokane Riverkeeper), Beatrice Lackaff (OTO writer), and many others.
• Dog Songs (2013) by Mary Oliver: A book of poems (and one essay) by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet will make you cry, in a good way.
• I Promise Not To Suffer: A Fool for Love Hikes the Pacific Crest Trail (2013) by Gail D. Storey: A funny memoir by a non-hiker who backpacked the PCT at age 56 with her husband, using their homemade ultralight gear.
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) and Teaching a Stone to Talk (1983): Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard: The Pulitzer-prize winning Pilgrim is a narrative expose while the other is comprised of narrative essays. Dillard, who lived in western Washington for a few years during the 1970s, is renowned for her reflections on her explorations of the natural world.
• We Live in Water (2013) by Jess Walter: This book of short fiction stories from Spokane’s NYT-best-selling author has been described as “darkly funny” and “sneakily sad”—which makes great escapist trailside reading.
• The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac (2015) by Sharma Shields: Set in the Inland Northwest, this “dark, fantastical” novel from Shields, another great Spokane writer, includes place names like Palouse, Rathdrum, and Lilac City, the pseudonym for Spokane. Chapters advance the plot through time and the multi-generational family characters, which makes it easy to bookmark and continue reading from place to place. //

[Feature photo by Amy McCaffree.]

The post Explore Nature with These Outdoor Themed Book Recommendations appeared first on Out There Venture.

Winter is a great season to take guilt-free indoor time for reading, and it’s not too soon to start planning camping trips and making site reservations. To kick off 2018, here are my top four parenting-related books that I recommend to families who want to do more and dare more in the great outdoors. These non-fiction books inspire and propel me towards new goals as a fellow adventurer with my children. They enable me to guide, teach, and nurture them while enjoying both simple and epic-level outdoor moments, whether in a national forest or our own backyard.

“Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” by Richard Louv

I first read this book a few years before I became a mom, and I regularly re-visit favorite chapters and excerpts to refresh my resolve to be an advocate for children’s rights to play outside in a healthy environment. Louv presents research-based arguments about what led to the decline in American children’s experiential knowledge of the natural world, including societal and parental restrictions and poor urban design. His pragmatic and bold solutions helped inspire the national No Child Left Inside movement.

“Balanced and Barefoot,” by Angela J. Hanscom

Hanscom is an occupational therapist who runs a thriving therapeutic outdoor program called Timbernook. Her book’s subtitle provides a clear synopsis: “How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children,” and it’s notable that Louv wrote the book’s foreword. If you know a child who has been labeled as ADD or ADHD, who fidgets in class, or who feels frustrated by limited outdoor recess time, then you need to read this book. Hanscom provides in-depth explanations about the physiological, emotional, social, and cognitive health benefits when children are provided ample, high-quality outdoor play and learning experiences, and she covers all developmental stages, from babies to teens.

“Let Them Be Eaten By Bears: A Fearless Guide to Taking Our Kids into the Great Outdoors,” by Peter Brown Hoffmeister

As a father and co-founder/director of the Integrated Outdoor Program at Eugene High School in Oregon, Hoffmeister shares pragmatic ideas and encouraging advice, using humor, personal anecdotes, and examples from his teaching and guiding experiences. His prose is helpful for all readers, whether experienced outdoorspeople or novices.

“I Love Dirt!: 52 Activities to Help You & Your Kids Discover the Wonders of Nature,” by Jennifer Ward.

This seasonally-organized guide shares easy-to-implement, hands-on activities that help adults engage with children from ages 4-8. Each activity, such as #44 (Fluffy Flakes), includes a brief description, answers to key questions to help kids understand the scientific or ecological concept (e.g., “How are snowflakes made?”), and indicates which goal the activity fulfills (e.g., “stimulates observation skills, curiosity, and appreciation of art and science”). Ward’s other book for parents and children ages 8-12 is called “Let’s Go Outside! Outdoor Activities and Projects to Get You and Your Kids Closer to Nature.”

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Amy S. McCaffree compiled last issue’s Local Holiday Gift Guide. During winter, she alpine skis, snowshoes, goes sledding, and plays street snow hockey with her children, ages 7 and 6.

The post 4 Books for Outdoor Families appeared first on Out There Venture.

Some have criticized Rowing the Atlantic for not being a true adventure story. After all Savage is not the first person to row the Atlantic. She is not even the first person to row it solo. But if being the first to do something is a requirement for writing an adventure story, there are only a half dozen true adventure stories about Mount Everest—one for the first ascent of each route, maybe one for the first solo ascent and one for the first without oxygen. I see Rowing the Atlantic as an adventure story on two levels. First is the rowing adventure; over 100 days alone, in a boat, rowing across an ocean must contain many adventurous moments. The second is the ongoing “adventure” Roz Savage experiences as she refocuses her life.
Savage lets her determination to succeed soften the drama of raging storms trying to tear her boat apart or the fact that one more minor mishap with the oars and her trip is over. Consequently, the book aptly dwells on the mundane task of rowing 12 hours a day only when something interesting happens as when she struggles to keep the bow into the waves during a storm, handling the tension posed by the ever present danger of rogue waves or when an oar splinters while she rows. She shows us just enough of the day to day routine of eating, sleeping, navigating and rowing to bring us on board her boat.

Woven throughout the book are flashbacks to the events leading up to the decision to participate in the 2005 edition of the Atlantic Rowing Race. Piece by piece, presented as though they are ponderings to wile away the hours spent at the oars, Savage reveals the twisted, sometimes painful, path from successful but dissatisfied management consultant to ocean adventurer.

In revealing her life story and the changes she has made, Savage shows us that we each can undergo a similar metamorphosis. Readers will contemplate the choices they have.made in their lives. Readers, hopefully, will contemplate alternatives to a consumptive lifestyle; some will be moved to change.

Rowing the Atlantic gives the reader a taste of the trials of long distance ocean rowing. She relates the oft told story of writing two obituaries, the one she was headed for on her business career path and the one she would like to have; the realization that the business path could not lead to the life she wanted, and demanded radical change.

Stan Miller

Fat Of The Land: Adventures Of A 21st Century Forager
Langdon Cook
Mountaineers Books/Skipstone, 2009, 240 pages

Huckleberries, sure. Dandelions, maybe. Stinging nettles, maybe not. Langdon Cook’s first-person narrative of his foraging adventures in Puget Sound, the Cascade Mountains and other locales in Washington State are more entertaining than persuasive and instructive. While his book is somewhat of a how-to process description, it is more like a confessional about his missteps during his experimental pursuits.

Whether it is the aforementioned plants, mushrooms, oysters, lingcod, squid, or razor clams, Cook turns each new quest for fresh, local and seasonal food into an all-encompassing affair. He documents his attempts to reconnect to the landscape and appreciate the earth’s abundance in fifteen chapters, organized according to the four seasons. Each chapter focuses on a specific food and concludes with a recipe, including Razor Clam Chowder, Shellfish Stew, Cream of Stinging Nettle Soup, Dungeness Crab Cakes, Butter Worshipper’s Huckleberry Cobbler, and Risotto Nero con Calamari.

What I found to be most interesting were the historical background and cultural details of his food pursuits: the diminishing lingcod and razor clam populations, the mushrooms most at risk of environmental toxins, and the multi-cultural crowd of late-night squid foragers on a Seattle pier.
One does not have to be foodie to enjoy this book, though this does seem to be closer to Cook’s ideal reader. As narrator, he conveys a hybrid persona—one part Michael Pollan, two parts Boy Scout. Cook’s scenes move between self-depreciating anecdotes and precise descriptions. Although there is occasional lyric prose—such as, “Seattle is a sad, wet place in the depths of winter….”—he is more often speaking as a self-contented urban dweller who, eventually, achieves his man-of-the-land goals. Each relentless quest to provide a fresh, locally sourced dinner further refines his identity as hunter-gatherer-provider for his wife and friends.

Overall, Cook proves how he learned to become a skilled and dedicated modern-day forager who takes advantage of the bounty in the Pacific Northwest.

Amy S. McCaffree

The post Book Reviews March 2010 appeared first on Out There Venture.

Seven time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong: doper. Deposed 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis: doper. The bulk of the professional peloton: dopers. Such is the impression readers will likely take from David Walsh’s From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at The Tour de France. Though based largely on circumstantial evidence, Walsh exposes a culture that all but forces pro cyclists to dope. As former Motorola rider Greg Swart says, “You couldn’t survive in the sport without [doping].”

Walsh, chief sportswriter for the London Sunday Times, paints a picture of systematic doping and related corruption within professional cycling that doesn’t allow riders to know how good they were or could have been. Clean riders train and race so hard to keep up with the dopers they destroy their bodies or dope as did Frankie Andreu, who was “tired of seeing others take advantage of me.”

From Lance to Landis shows how doping touches everyone in the sport, whether the soigneurs who care for riders or coaches such as Eddie Borysewicz. Before coaching Armstrong, Borysewicz coached the 1984 U.S. Olympic cyclists and helped eight riders with blood transfusions. Doping taints directeurs sportif such as Johan Bruyneel, formerly of Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service and Discovery Channel squads and now of Astana (a squad left out of the 2008 tour because of doping), who threatened a rider who spoke against doping, saying “we know who is with who.”

The taint falls on sponsors who want results and don’t look for what they don’t want to see. It falls on the International Cycling Union (UCI), which long saw the lack of positive tests as an indication the sport was clean; it wasn’t. Then there’s the often fawning press and all consumed fans. Walsh exposes cycling’s drug culture so the sport can regain credibility. Still, as of this writing, at least two riders in the 2008 Tour have been charged with blood doping. Cycling’s doping culture remains hard to kill.

Bradley Bleck

Working the Woods, Working the Sea
Edited by Finn Wilcox and Jerry Gorsline
Empty Bowl Press, 2008, 376 pages

Two kinds of readers will immediately find intelligence and solace in this anthology of poetry and prose—the older person who had an appetite for hard physical work in his or her youth and went to the mountains and the sea to find it, and the younger person today seeking to escape the institutionalization of primary experiences. As old as civilization is a hunger to abandon the meaningless abstractions of the educated mind and it takes an improbable mix of determination, contrarian virtues, attunement and a longing for simplicity to succeed. “Working the Woods, Working the Sea” is a collection of writing by intellectuals with honed manual skills, other humble characters still living precariously on remote back roads and several with global credentials. These writers adopted and nurtured a vernacular ringing with an astonishing authenticity of lives lived and places loved and the attitudes and information they offered western culture continue to resonate. The material is about the tail end of the west’s resource-based economies of logging and fishing and, through the rhythmic memories of muscles and camaraderie, the gifts of thousands of years’ old natural systems and human ancestors that preceded us. It also anticipated modern ecology, bioregional strategies and the more recent mainstream acknowledgement of sustainable practices, honoring the sacrament of physical labor and being stalwart in one’s commitment toward the kinship of life.

This is eloquent writing about planting trees in ruined forests, restoring devastated salmon streams and finding epiphanies—and sometimes anger and grief—in dangerous, necessary work. Some of these writers are still young and some are no longer living and all chose to clear difficult, often solitary paths to get to where they were going. There is a resilient tribe revealed in this book but like many natural treasures it dances on the edge of extinction. It is re-populated by those among us who choose a fate and a language among the daimons of a weathered and wondrous world.

Terry Lawhead

Everest: A Climb For Peace
A Lance Trumbull Film
EverestPeaceProject.org, 2008, 63 minutes

“Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength.” Those words ring true all over the world, yet translating them into a human endeavor has always proved difficult. During his philosophy classes at UC Berkeley, Lance Trumbull studied multiple worldviews with a distinct aim at reconciliation. Later on, after a trip to the Himalaya, he took the Dalai Lama’s quote to heart and hatched a plan to bring together as many worldviews as possible, build a mountaineering team, and shoot for the summit of Mount Everest.

Clearly not your average outdoor film, the Everest Peace Project was filmed on location in Nepal, Tibet, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and the United States. Nine ‘peace climbers’ from different faiths and cultures spend over two months working together towards a common goal during one of the most controversial mountaineering seasons in history. The results are anything but typical.

Narrated by Orlando Bloom, their story centers first on the Palestinian and Israeli climbers, and then unfolds to include, among others, a Christian from South Africa and an atheist from New Zealand. Not once does the film stray into muddled conversations or blame games, yet the climbers, including the Buddhist Sherpas, remain true to their faith. This creates a brilliant vessel for great dialogue, clever observations, and genuine selfless teamwork.

Typical of most mountaineering movies, particularly Everest films, the cinematographer does not get due credit. Brad Clement captured some tingling moments, spectacular views, and desperate, wind-blasted action, all while summitting and surviving on Mount Everest himself.

Sometimes the goal is a mountaintop while other times the goal is a journey, or perhaps even a process. Blend peace-first attitude with the human spirit, and you would be surprised with what happens. Peace climber Micha Yaniv summarizes, “It’s easy to be friends with people, and difficult to be friends with governments. (That’s why) it’s important to remember we’re all people.”

Jon Jonckers

The post Book Reviews: August 2008 appeared first on Out There Venture.