Bøker av Michael Engelhard

In the footsteps of Desert Solitaire, these essays by an award-winningwriter and student of cultures sift decades of experience backpacking andboating for a stance that questions the mainstream. More than meretales of bravado, they offer glimpses into the heart of the places explored, with the Grand Canyon as their center of gravity. Vivid, finely crafted, shotthrough with humor, self-effacing while deeply opinionated, No Walk inthe Park shows what it means to meet nature on nature's terms. Read it athome in an armchair, or at a river camp, or stuff it into your pack beforeyou go wandering.Join this author on a night hike to the great chasm's bottom; trek forty days inhis company below one rim, or snowshoe along the other; visit a Hopi mesafor a ceremony; marvel at hidden rock art; sip epic solitude; tag threatenedfish; and float next to Glen Canyon's slickrock or Niagara-size fleeting falls.

"Full of humor and humility about the human condition. This is Alaska as only someone who knows it deeply can give us-a deliciously readable encounter with the place beyond the myths." - BATHSHEBA DEMUTH, author of The Floating Coast Edward Abbey, who never much liked Alaska, called it "our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state." To others, it has been a cure for despair. When the author moved to Fairbanks more than three decades ago, he was a cheechako, a subarctic tenderfoot. Gathering skills and experiences the hard way, he attained "Sourdough" status while realizing there would always be more to learn, see, and do in the land of midnight sun and auroras.En route, Michael Engelhard suffered frostbite, stubborn yaks, grizzly charges, trophy hunters, cold-water immersion, heartbreak, incontinent raptors, one pesky squirrel, and honeymooners from abroad. He tried to rescue a raven and explored Arctic dunes and a glacier's blue heart, and his own, as he mingled with caribou on their epic journeys.This collection opens with an essay about the highest point in the state and finishes with one about one of its lowest, at the continent's northern edge. The writings in between span thirty-three years, the most formative decades of this author's life. Rivers have been a constant in them, the sinews connecting highpoints and low points, outlier and main events, as they do Alaska's elevation extremes. Engelhard is no slouch either when it comes to walking. Backpacking was his first love, for the sense of self-sufficiency and independence it provides.

Prime Arctic predator and nomad of the sea ice and tundra, the polar bear endures as a source of wonder, terror, and fascination. Humans have seen it as spirit guide and fanged enemy, as trade good and moral metaphor, as food source and symbol of ecological crisis. Eight thousand years of artifacts attest to its charisma, and to the fraught relationships between our two species. In the White Bear, we acknowledge the magic of wildness: it is both genuinely itself and a screen for our imagination.Ice Bear traces and illuminates this intertwined history. From Inuit shamans to Jean Harlow lounging on a bearskin rug, from the cubs trained to pull sleds toward the North Pole to cuddly superstar Knut, it all comes to life in these pages. With meticulous research and more than 160 illustrations, the author brings into focus this powerful and elusive animal. Doing so, he delves into the stories we tell about Natureand about ourselveshoping for a future in which such tales still matter.

Offers a range of creative nonfiction essays that describe the chance meetings which bring Alaska's residents face-to-face with their animal neighbors.

Inspired by a year of hiking 120 desert canyons, Where the Rain Children Sleep is nature writing in the best tradition of Edward Abbey, Ellen Meloy, and Craig Childs. Much more than one man's memoir of his time in these canyons, it is an eclectic, well-informed, critical, and in-depth collection punctuated by flashes of humour and whimsy.