Download or read book Wilderness Days written by Sigurd F. Olson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of Sigurd F. Olson's finest writing on the splendor of the great outdoors, hand-picked by the master himself

Download or read book Sigurd F Olson s Wilderness Days written by Sigurd F. Olson and published by Knopf. This book was released on 1972 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the evocative words of one of America's best-loved writers about nature, and in 56 beautiful photographs, this book crystallizes the very essence of that magnificent wilderness with which its author is so deeply identified. In it he has culled from his writings those moments that most vividly summon up the turn of the seasons in the great woodlands and waters of the fabled Quetico-Superior region overlapping the Ontario-Minnesota border.

Download or read book Singing Wilderness written by Sigurd F. Olson and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-05-30 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To do with the calling of loons, with northern lights, and the great silences of land lying northwest of Lake Superior. It is concerned with the simple joys, the timelessness and perspective found in a way of life which is close to the past. I have heard the singing in many places, but I seem to hear it best in the wilderness lake country of the Quetico-Superior, where travel is still by pack and canoe over the ancient trails of the Indians and voyageurs." Thus the author sets the theme and tone of this enthralling book of discovery about one of the few great primitive areas in our country which have withstood the pressures of civilization. Acute natural perceptivity and a profound knowledge of the relationships to be found in nature combine here in vivid evocations of the sights, the sounds, the vast stillnesses, and the events of the wilderness as the seasons succeed each other. But Mr. Olson is not content merely to "describe; he probes for meanings that will lead the reader to a different and more revealing way of looking at the out-of-doors and to a deeper sense of its eternal values. In each of the thirty-four chapters of The Singing Wilderness he has sought to capture an essential quality of our magnificent lake and forest heritage. He shows us what can be read from the rocks of the great Canadian Shield; he offers a delightful essay on the virtues of pine knots as fuel; he writes of the ways of a canoe, of flashing trout in the pools of the Isabella, of tamarack bogs, caribou moss, the flight of wild geese, timber wolves, and the birds of the ski trails. And much more, with something to satisfy every taste for wilderness experience. Superbly illustrated with 38 black-and-white drawings by Francis Lee Jaques, The Singing Wilderness is a book that no lover of nature will want to be without. To anyone who contemplates a vacation in the lake country of northern Minnesota and adjoining Canada, it is the perfect vade mecum.

Download or read book LISTENING POINT written by Sigurd F. Olson and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-07-04 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Listening Point tells of what I have seen and heard on a bare glaciated spit of rock in the Quetico-Superior country. Each time I have gone there I have found something new that has opened up whole realms of thought and interest. From it I have glimpsed the immensity of space and at times the grandeur of creation. “I believe that I have experienced there one of the oldest satisfactions of man; when as he gazed upon the earth and sky, he sensed the first vague glimmerings of meaning in the universe. I know that while we were born with curiosity and wonder, and our early years are full of the adventure they bring, such inherent joys are often lost. I also know that, being deep within us, their latent glow can be fanned to flame again by awareness and an open mind. “Listening Point is dedicated to rekindling that flame by capturing this almost forgotten sense of wonder, and learning from rocks and trees and all the life that surrounds them truths that can encompass all. “I named this place Listening Point because only when one comes to listen, only when one comes sharpens one’s awareness, can one see and hear in the sense in which I use these words. Everyone has a listening point somewhere, some quiet place where he can contemplate the awesome universe. This book is simply the story of what such a place has meant to me. The experiences that have been mine can be known by anyone who will make the effort.” Thus the author of The Singing Wilderness sets the tone of his new book—a book that not only successfully recaptures the to-be-treasured sense of wonder of which he speaks, but also brings to life, in all its essential grandeur, the unparalleled heritage of lakes and rivers and forests we are so fortunate to be able to call our own. Listening Point is a book that will rekindle spirits wearied by the turmoils of twentieth-century living—that will teach us a new way to look at the world around us and to feel the better for it. With 28 magnificent black-and-white drawings by Francis Lee Jacques.

Download or read book Of Time and Place written by Sigurd F. Olson and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-07-04 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of Time and Place is a legacy from one of the best-loved woodsman writers of our time. To the outdoorsmen who often canoed and portaged with him through the northern Lake country, Sigurd Olson was affectionately known as the Bourgeois—the name that voyageurs gave two hundred years ago to the trusted guides who took them over this same territory. And in this, his last book, completed just before his death in early 1982, Olson is our guide through his wide-ranging memories of a lifetime dedicated to the preservation of the wilderness, especially of his beloved Quetico-Superior country. He recalls his many friendships of trail and woods and portage, his favorite campsites, the stories behind the artifacts and mementos hanging in his cabin at Listening Point. He muses on the fragile beauty of the prairies, on the significance of ancient trails, on the resonance and the origins of place names. Whether he is remembering the day when he caught his first brook trout, or admiring the playful grace of the otter, or pondering the earth’s great cycles of climatic change, these moving and evocative essays reaffirm Audubon magazine’s celebration of Sigurd Olson as “the poetic voice of the modern wilderness movement.”

Download or read book Lonely Land written by Sigurd F. Olson and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-07-04 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of The Singing Wilderness and Listening Point begins this grand adventure: “There are few places left on the North American continent where men can still see the country as it was before Europeans came and know some of the challenges and freedoms of those who saw it first, but in the Canadian Northwest it can still be done. A thousand miles northwest of Lake Superior are great free rivers, lakes whose horizons disappear, countless unnamed waterways, and ridges and forested valleys still largely unknown.” Into this land of Crees, Chippewyans, Yellow Knives, and Dig Rib Indians had once come the voyageur, the Hudson Bay trader, and a succession of adventurers—gentlemen and otherwise—who used the mighty Churchill River as a major waterway from Hudson Bay to the Mackenzie. “It was the trail of these voyageurs we followed,” says the author, “a trail that led from the height of land where waters flow north to the Arctic and east to Hudson Bay, to Cumberland House five hundred miles away. Every portage, camp site, and rapids, every mile of this waterway of lakes and rivers was steeped in the drama of exploration and trade.” “We traveled as the voyageurs did by canoe, paddled the same lakes, ran the same rapids, and packed over their ancient portages. We knew the winds and storms, saw the same sky lines, and felt the awe and wonderment that was theirs at the enormous expanses and grandeur of a land that was once as strange and challenging to them as to us.” Mr. Olson has illuminated his own cruise with quotations from journals and diaries of such men as George Simpson, David Thompson, Alexander Henry, and Alexander Mackenzie—as well as a host of other explorers-traders whose voices speak from the old Moose Fort Journals of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Mr. Olson serves as the Bourgeois of the party of six—the boss who ran the trip, chose the routes, picked the camp sites. His companions and he relived for all readers of this book what life was then in the wilds of the Canadian Northwest. Mr. Olson combines his inimitable ability to evoke the beauties and wonders of the wilderness—its animals, birds, and its very spirit—with a dramatic talent for taking the reader along the route of the men who pioneered that wilderness. Francis Lee Jacques, whose genius to evoke the wilderness in pen and ink is unchallenged, has illuminated this book by his drawings, as he did The Singing Wilderness and Listening Point.

Download or read book Reflections from the North Country written by Sigurd F. Olson and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the last years of his life, Reflections from the North Country is often considered Sigurd Olson's most intellectually significant work. In an account alive with anecdote and insight, Olson outlines the wilderness philosophy he developed while working as an outspoken advocate for the conservation of America's natural heritage.Based on speeches delivered at town meetings and government hearings, this book joins The Singing Wilderness and Listening Point as the core of Olson's work. Upon its initial publication in 1976, Reflections from the North Country, with Olson's unique combination of lyrical nature writing and activism, became an inspiration to the burgeoning environmental movement, selling over 46,000 copies in hardcover. In this wide-ranging work, Olson evokes the soaring grace of raven, osprey, and eagle, the call of the loon, and the song of the hermit thrush. He challenges the reader to loosen the grasp of technology and the rush of contemporary life and make room for a sense of wonder heightened by being in nature. From evolution to the meaning and power of solitude, Olson meditates on the human condition, offering eloquent testimony to the joys and truths he discovered in his beloved north-country wilderness.

Download or read book A Private Wilderness written by Sigurd F. Olson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The personal diaries of one of America’s best-loved naturalists, revealing his difficult and inspiring path to finding his voice and becoming a writer Few writers are as renowned for their eloquence about the natural world, its power and fragility, as Sigurd F. Olson (1899–1982). Before he could give expression to The Singing Wilderness, however, he had to find his own voice. It is this struggle, the painstaking and often simply painful process of becoming the writer and conservationist now familiar to us, that Olson documented in the journal entries gathered here. Written mostly during the years from 1930 to 1941, Olson’s journals describe the dreams and frustrations of an aspiring writer honing his skills, pursuing recognition, and facing doubt while following the academic career that allowed him to live and work even as it consumed so much of his time. But even as he speaks with immediacy and intensity about the conditions of his apprenticeship, Olson can be seen developing the singular way of observing and depicting the natural world that would bring him fame—and also, more significantly, alert others to the urgent need to understand and protect that world. Author of Olson’s definitive biography, editor David Backes brings a deep knowledge of the writer to these journals, providing critical context, commentary, and insights along the way. When Olson wrote, in the spring of 1941, “What I am afraid of now is that the world will blow up just as I am getting it organized to suit me,” he could hardly have known how right he would prove to be. It is propitious that at our present moment, when the world seems once more balanced on the precipice, we have the words of Sigurd F. Olson to remind us of what matters—and of the hard work and the wonder that such a reckoning requires.

Download or read book Runes of the North written by Sigurd F. Olson and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-07-11 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rune is, in its general meaning, a tale of magic and mystery. To Sigurd Olson it expresses his feelings about the haunting appeal of the wilderness and of the tales and legends to be found there. His runes are legends, yards, and wilderness reflections drawn from the great northern vastness of Canada and Alaska. Whether he is recounting a charming Indian myth, such as “The Dream Net,” or describing the exhilaration of the sauna, the primitive Finnish bath, or sharing the pleasure of digging a spring for a remote Runes of the North is divided into two sections: one, “Le Beau Pays,” reveals woodland lore of the land of big timber, rushing white water streams, and “lost” lakes of the Canadian border; the other, “Pays d’en Haut,” has for the setting of its chapters the wilderness farther north, from Hudson Bay across the Barren Grounds and tundra to the Yukon and Alaska. This new book by the author of The Singing Wilderness, Listening Point, and The Lonely Land will please thousands of readers who have found in him a kindred spirit and a man who puts into words their own deep feelings about nature. Robert Hines’s jacket drawing of the loon, symbol of far places, and his atmospheric pen-and-inks of birds, animals, and voyageurs add pictorial appeal to these tales and ruminations of the Big North, ancient, old, and modern.

Download or read book The Hidden Forest written by Sigurd F. Olson and published by Voyageur Press (MN). This book was released on 1990 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Olson's prose remains timeless, and the lovely photographs are a feast for both the eyes and the spirit". Mpls./St. Paul magazine. A landmark book in nature photography and writing, opening a door to a vision of the forest seldom seen by most.

Download or read book Songs of the North written by Sigurd F. Olson and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1995 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lost in the Backyard written by Alison Hughes and published by Orca Book Publishers. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flynn hates the outdoors. Always has. He barely pays attention in his Outdoor Ed class. He has no interest in doing a book report on Lost in the Barrens. He doesn’t understand why anybody would want to go hiking or camping. But when he gets lost in the wilderness behind his parents’ friends’ house, it’s surprising what he remembers—insulate your clothes with leaves, eat snow to stay hydrated, build a shelter, eat lichen—and how hopelessly inept he is at survival techniques.

Download or read book The Wilderness Life written by Calvin Rutstrum and published by . This book was released on 2004-05-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Using his knowledge of campcraft, Rutstrum describes the wilderness life and details what one can expect from the wild - inspiration from exploring, pleasure from encountering natural settings, satisfaction after gaining experience, and mental stimulation from observation and problem solving. In the process he reveals many adventures, including his first trek into the deep Canadian wilderness, a journey by dogsled to bring out a human body, and a rescue mission to save two lost, inexperienced campers. Always respectful of nature and the skills of his Native American neighbors, Rutstrum argues for a modern esteem for true wilderness and explains what one can do with "all of that leisure time.""--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Paddle Whispers written by and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The sun climbs over the pines. Over the spruces. Over Saganaga, Kabetogama, Nistowiak, Namew, Athabaska. And ten thousand other places with no names. The North Woods calls. The river pulls, the paddle whispers. I listen. And gradually...gradually the mist burns away."And so begins a journey - not only an exploration of rapids, lakes, and forests, but also an inner journey of discovery. Through poetic text and drawings, woven gracefully with quotes by John Muir, Walking Buffalo, Sigurd F. Olson, Henry David Thoreau, and others, Douglas Wood traces a journey by paddle and canoe that renews the spirit.

Download or read book Fire Season written by Philip Connors and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-04-05 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Fire Season both evokes and honors the great hermit celebrants of nature, from Dillard to Kerouac to Thoreau—and I loved it.” —J.R. Moehringer, author of The Tender Bar “[Connors’s] adventures in radical solitude make for profoundly absorbing, restorative reading.” —Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air Phillip Connors is a major new voice in American nonfiction, and his remarkable debut, Fire Season, is destined to become a modern classic. An absorbing chronicle of the days and nights of one of the last fire lookouts in the American West, Fire Season is a marvel of a book, as rugged and soulful as Matthew Crawford’s bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft, and it immediately places Connors in the august company of Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, and others in the respected fraternity of hard-boiled nature writers.

Download or read book Crow Planet written by Lyanda Lynn Haupt and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2009-07-08 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are more crows now than ever. Their abundance is both an indicator of ecological imbalance and a generous opportunity to connect with the animal world. Crow Planet reminds us that we do not need to head to faraway places to encounter "nature." Rather, even in the suburbs and cities where we live we are surrounded by wild life such as crows, and through observing them we can enhance our appreciation of the world's natural order. Crow Planet richly weaves Haupt's own "crow stories" as well as scientific and scholarly research and the history and mythology of crows, culminating in a book that is sure to make readers see the world around them in a very different way.

Download or read book The Omnivore s Dilemma written by Michael Pollan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-08-28 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Outstanding . . . a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our eating habits." —The New Yorker One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year and Winner of the James Beard Award Author of This is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind and the #1 New York Times Bestseller In Defense of Food and Food Rules What should we have for dinner? Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. In the years since, Pollan’s revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. Ten years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.