As summer gives way to fall, and fall to winter, we usually have more time to read, as there's less daylight outside.
A book that recently fell into my hands, courtesy of my wife, is Richard Bartlett's Great Surveys of the American West. This wonderful book, published in 1980, traces the paths that Ferdinand Hayden, Clarence King, and Major John Wesley Powell took in their grand and ambitious explorations of the West. Though it's been more than three decades since this book arrived, it's wonderful reading if you enjoy history and the national parks.
What's on your reading list these days?
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The Life and Times of John W. Clark of Nushagak, Alaska, 1846-1896, by John B. Branson, historian for Lake Clark National Park and Preserve. John Clark was one of the first Euroamerican residents of Alaska, arriving at St. Michael with the Western Union Telegraph Company Russo-American Expedition to build a worldwide telegraph line in 1866.
Guggenheim prizewinner and butterfly expert Robert Michael Pyle's title might be a turn-off to rational skeptics. Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing The Dark Divide is living up to the jacket blurb: "...a dramatic narrative exploration not only of the phenomenon of Bigfoot, but also of the nature of human belief, particularly the need to believe that something is out there beyond what we rationally know." I was in stitches laughing at his description of a Bigfoot convention where he suddenly realizes: "These guys don't want to find Bigfoot -- they want to be Bigfoot."