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Jan Bowers lives in the right place. A lover of nature and the outdoors, an avid hiker and backpacker, she is surrounded by mountain ridges, peaks, and canyons of almost every description. In this book, she invites us to come along and find out why some of these places are special, why some of them stay in her mind long after she has returned to the workaday world of the city. Readers have come to expect the best from this writer, termed "a rare talent. . . uncommonly good at the craft" by Wilderness magazine. Her new book is filled with creeks and meadows, tiny ferns and towering oaks, bears and butterflies and Red-tailed Hawks. We see gray clouds clogging the sky in a canyon, "wildly, almost tastelessly romantic, as full of clouds as a tea kettle with steam," and we startle a female grouse and her half-dozen fuzzy chicks "exploding from underfoot like billiard balls scattered with a cue stick."

Faced with the prospect of moving to another place, Bowers finds herself thinking about the familiar world in new and unfamiliar ways. Through her eyes, too, we see how an interest in nature and the outdoors developed from early childhood and how simple curiosity has led her to the most surprising discoveries. At odd and unexpected moments, her work also seems to bring new insights into herself and her life as a writer, a wife, and a mother. These pages promise a new adventure at every turn in the trail. For sheer terror, there's a climb up the face of Baboquivari, for laughs, there's the great bagworm caper, and for some quiet truths, there are themes of gain and loss, of connection and reconcilliation. Crunching through winter snow or sweating under summer sun, we know we're in the hands of an experienced guide. And we know we couldn't ask for a better companion.

In the face of increasing pressures from business and government in the decades following World War II, New Hampshire residents banded together to preserve their most prized natural areas and defining geological features. From the Mountains to the Sea explores how history, memory, and tradition created a strong sense of place in the state that led citizen activists to protect Franconia Notch, Sandwich Notch, and the town of Durham on New Hampshire's seacoast from development in the last half of the twentieth century. These efforts led to the construction of a parkway instead of an interstate highway, prevented the building of an oil refinery, and saved Sandwich Notch from becoming a vacation community.

Shaped by New Hampshire's unique conservation focus on both resource use and preservation that developed during the first years of the twentieth century, as well as on the tradition of home rule in the state, the outcome of each campaign relied on the insight into, appreciation for, and dedication to protecting the historic and aesthetic values of these three places.