Results by title

The highpoints of the fifty states range from Alaska’s 20,310-foot-high Mount McKinley to 345 feet at Lakewood Park in Florida. Some highpoints, such as Mount Mitchell in North Carolina and New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, can be reached by car on a sightseeing drive. Others, including Colorado’s Mount Elbert or Mount Marcy in New York, are accessible as wilderness day hikes. Still others, such as Mount Rainier in Washington or Gannett Peak in Wyoming, are strenuous and risky mountaineering challenges that should be attempted only by experienced climbers. Whatever your level of skill and interest, these varied highpoints offer a diverse range of experiences.

The third edition of this classic guide updates route descriptions and maps, changes to private property ownership and public lands requirements, lists of guides and outfitters, and essential online resources. As with the two popular previous editions, Highpoints of the United States is arranged alphabetically by state, each site description accompanied with a map, photographs, information on trailhead, main and alternative routes, elevation gain, conditions, historical and natural history notes, and lists of potential guides or outfitters. Appendices include a list of highpoints by region and by elevation, useful resources, and a personal log for the unashamed “peak-bagger.”

Whether you’re an armchair hiker or a seasoned climber, interested only in your state’s highest point or all fifty, this book will be an invaluable companion and reference.

How outdoor industry marketing promotes an image of “the wilderness” as an unpeopled haven

Marketing the Wilderness analyzes the relationship between the outdoor recreation industry, public lands in the United States, and Indigenous sovereignty and representation in recreational spaces. Combining social media analysis, digital ethnography, and historical research, Joseph Whitson offers nuanced insights into more than a century of the outdoor recreation industry’s marketing strategies, unraveling its complicity in settler colonialism.

Complicating the narrative of outdoor recreation as a universal good, Whitson introduces the concept of “wildernessing” to describe the physical, legal, and rhetorical production of pristine, empty lands that undergirds the outdoor recreation industry, a process that further disenfranchises Indigenous people from whom these lands were stolen. He demonstrates how companies such as Patagonia and REI align with the mining and drilling industries in their need to remove Indigenous peoples and histories from valuable lands. And he describes the ways Indigenous and decolonial activists are subverting and resisting corporate marketing strategies to introduce new narratives of place.

Through the lens of environmental justice activism, Marketing the Wilderness reconsiders the ethics of recreational land use, advocating for engagement with issues of cultural representation and appropriation informed by Indigenous perspectives. As he discusses contemporary public land advocacy around places such as Bears Ears National Monument, Whitson focuses on the deeply fraught relationship between the outdoor recreation industry and Indigenous communities. Emphasizing the power of the corporate system and its treatment of land as a commodity under capitalism, he shows how these tensions shape the American idea of “wilderness” and what it means to fight for its preservation.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.