From Peaks to Prairie
The Gifts of Walking in an Anxious Life
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Oregon State University
Publishing:29th Sep '26
£18.99
This title is due to be published on 29th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Along twenty-nine trails near Yellowstone National Park, Cara Chamberlain leads readers on a journey of perseverance, drawing lessons from human and natural history. She reflects on being diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and explores how walking helps manage anxiety, opening rich pathways of perception.
In From Peaks to Prairie, Chamberlain examines her personal life, family history, and struggles as she encounters the animals and plants of Montana and Wyoming. Each essay is an episode mingling the past with the present, combining sightings of bears, birds, and wildflowers with memories of her Utah childhood and family. She observes, "I walk. It's the way I've found not to eliminate GAD and OCD, as I used to long to do, but to live with them." Mountains and prairies offer strength and nurture those who need them. It is on their paths that Chamberlain finds clarity.
"With a poet's eye and a poet's ear and a poet's vulnerable openness to the dance and song of the natural world—both outer and inner—Chamberlain gives us a wild gift of a book that defies category, resists containment, and celebrates connection. Her personal anxiety is a mirror of our species' existential anxiety, yet so too is her journey into wildlands-as-healing a mirror to our collective path forward. This is the book we didn't know we were waiting for, arriving just when we need it most." —Marc Beaudin, author of Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals
"From Peaks to Prairie weaves natural history, personal history, and spirituality together into a multi-stranded story. Details of particular places draw you in, making you feel as if you are along for the adventure. Each chapter brings into sharp focus the physical and biotic realms as they blend with the changing weather of the human heart." —Susan Marsh, author of A Hunger for High Country: One Woman's Journey to the Wild in Yellowstone Country
ISBN: 9781962645669
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
256 pages