While standing on top of Baker Mountain in 2019, I marveled at the vast Adirondack expanse all around me. How much of it had I explored during the past few decades? How much of it had I not yet explored? Too much of my focus had been on the High Peaks region. I resolved right then and there to visit as many wilderness areas and wild forests inside the park boundaries as I could during the next five years or so.
Beyond the High Peaks is a collection of twelve hiking narratives that recount my recent and more interesting outings in the Adirondack wilds – both day hikes and overnighters. Only two of these narratives have been previously published. I’m pleased to announce the release of this book. The print version contains black and white photos to enhance my descriptions. This is new for me. And while this is a slender volume, I think it contains some of my best writing to date. But I’ll let you, dear readers, decide that.
In 1990, I published a slender, olive green paperback called Tracks across the Forest Floor. It was my first attempt to write a nonfiction narrative about one of my ventures into the woods. Tracks went out of print a long time ago, but I included it in a set of six hiking narratives called Backcountry Excursions, released in 2005. That book has been nearly out of print for several years now. Well, in celebration of the 30th anniversary of Tracks, I have reprinted Backcountry with a new cover and preface. And a few fixed typos to boot.
Three of the narratives in this collection appear in other collections of mine, namely Loon Wisdom and The Great Wild Silence. Tracks and the remaining two can be found nowhere else. Just as important as Tracks, I think, is the 25-page narrative about a trip into northern Maine that I took in ’96 with my buddy Charlie, following Thoreau to Mt. Katahdin by water and land. We used a two-man sea kayak instead of a bateau and ended up hiking a different path up the mountain, but it was great fun all the same. And it gave me a reason to recount one of Thoreau’s excursions into the Maine Woods.
The real reason for reprinting this book is simply to keep it in print. Backcountry Excursions is now available at Amazon.com as well as the Wood Thrush Books website. Most of my readers are already familiar with this book, but now it’s out there for everyone to see how I got started, and what kind of critter I really am.
Backcountry traveler, freelance writer, and philosopher of wildness, McLaughlin has ventured into the wilds of Southeast Alaska and New York’s Adirondacks as well as the forests of northern New England. More about Walt.
