I love a good page-turner, especially this time of year. Here is my round-up of outdoor related true stories that will keep you reading till the wee hours of the night.

 

Blind Descent by James M Tabor

This is a claustrophobia-inducing wild ride through the largest cave systems in the world. In 2004, two competing adventurer / scientists were searching for the deepest location in the world. They spent months in supercaves battling not only the psychological terrors of living two miles below the surface of the earth in pitch darkness, but also raging underground rivers, passages the width of a single body, and dead end after dead end. It is nothing short of amazing that anyone can explore and live in these conditions. I swear I held my breath through the whole book!

 

 

 

 

 

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

In 1925, a British explorer named Percy Fawcett went into the Amazon jungle looking for a lost civilization and never returned. Over the years, many others have went looking for Percy and his lost city but they came back with nothing, or in some cases, like Percy, didn’t return at all. David Grann goes on an adventure of his own to the area and reports the horrific conditions that these explorers endured in the harsh jungle, a place filled to the brim with poisonous animals and plants and where water permeates everything creating a breeding ground for disease and infection. The story, one of the greatest adventure mysteries of the twentieth century, was recently made into a movie.

 

 

 

 

 

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson

This one can be summed up in what sounds like the beginning of a joke: a flute-playing college student goes into the British Museum of Natural History and comes out with a million dollars worth of feathers. I would like to follow this with: chaos ensues, but sadly I can’t. It took the museum months to even realize that anything was missing. The museum is home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world. It includes feathers of the most rare birds in the world, including specimens collected by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. And why did he steal them? Well, because he was obsessed with the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Need I say more?

 

 

 

 

 

Pilgrim’s Wilderness by Tom Kizzia

If you are into stories about strange cultish families, then this one is for you. Papa Pilgrim moved his family of fifteen children to the town of McCarthy, Alaska at the edge of the Wrangell – St Elias National Park. The tiny town greeted the seemingly pious family until it was discovered that the so-called pilgrims left chaos in their wake. The family’s story is sometimes jaw-dropping and I often found myself reading passages out loud to my husband in disbelief. Other than its shock value, it also highlights the contrast of environmentalists and pioneers in these National Park towns that is fundamentally American.

 

 

 

 

 

The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant

There once stood a single golden spruce tree on an island off the coast of British Columbia. This tree was long beloved and honored by the indigenous people of the island until the day it was found chainsawed to death. The man who performed this terrible act was an obsessive logger turned activist. The deed was an act of defiance, of protest. But why did he feel he had to take it to this extreme? Vaillant explores the island, its history, and the history of the clash between environmentalist and logger, and the story of this fascinating man.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

Here is another story of an obsessive man, this time the obsession is with orchids and the setting: the swamps of Florida. The eccentric and self absorbed “orchid thief” was John Laroche who attempted to harvest endangered orchids in order to clone them. Orlean writes about her own journey meeting Laroche and interacting with him in true journalistic style. The book was famously made into the movie, Adaptation, an equally strange story about a screenwriter desperate to develop this book into a movie. It’s a strange adaptation with little resemblance to the actual story in the book. Stick to reading the book, which like others on this list, explores the gray lines between helping and hurting the things we love with the best (if not crazy) intentions.

 

 

 

You might also like:

• Pure Land
• Shell Games
• The Stranger in the Woods
• The Push