A weekly reading trail
Substantial, beautifully written work about walking, trails, wild places, contemplative travel—and occasional passages into folklore, fabulism, and ecological speculation.
From Chilean Patagonia to Alaskan nesting bogs, Galchen follows Hudsonian godwits on a nearly ten-thousand-mile migration. Field travel and vivid natural history mingle with Māori legend, old beliefs that birds flew to the moon, and the almost fabulist fact that godwits shrink and regrow organs for flight.
Seven decades among Pacific Northwest rivers become a wild, prayerful cosmology. Salmon carry ocean into mountains; water and soul begin to merge; dreams, scripture, ecology, and lived encounters suggest other worlds shimmering within this one.
A Lenape writer and former wilderness ranger hikes through Lenapehoking while reconsidering the urge to conquer, complete, and claim wild places. Walking becomes relationship and responsibility rather than achievement.
Hunt walks Lithuania’s shifting Curonian Spit, where dunes have swallowed villages. Ecological history meets pagan sacred groves, buried forests, wandering giants, and the legend of Neringa—the giantess said to have created the peninsula.
In this quietly uncanny eco-speculative story, ancient desert tortoises make weeks-long walks through a climate-altered Southwest while a patient, imperfect network of humans helps threatened species endure.
A walk into Germany’s Black Forest in search of the place behind its fairy-tale image—through misty trails, old farmsteads, protected forest, and spruce groves collapsing under climate change.
Walking anchors McAnulty between university life in Cambridge and his mountainous Northern Irish home. Barn owls, kingfishers, woods, and family walks become threads connecting place, memory, regulation, and belonging.
From a one-room cabin where the road vanishes into Washington’s northern Cascades, Scarano braids trails, wolves, partnership, and the unstable idea of wilderness into a lyrical reckoning.
Beginning on a Santa Cruz Mountains trail, Odell explores “soft eyes”—walking with relaxed, panoramic awareness—and deep listening as ways of becoming more fully present to redwoods, birds, and the more-than-human world.