Category Archives: Books/resources

How America fell in love with camping: book review

Book Review of Under the Stars: how America fell in love with camping by Dan White (Henry Holt & Co., 2016)

by Sam Demas

This is a pretty good popular-level introduction to the development of recreational camping in the USA, which the author characterizes as “a Victorian passion that got out of hand.”  Unfortunately, a significant part of the author’s methodology is to take the reader along on a series of camping trips that he believes allow him to come close to living through what the people of the era experienced.  While Dan White is an experienced hiker and a very good story teller, I personally found the device of including his personal camping stories a bit tedious and beside the point.  Others will disagree. Continue reading →

News: Great New Yorker article about Via Alpina and the hut-to-hut experience

Poet, writer and walker James Lasdun has published a wonderful exploration of the delights and challenges of the famous Via Alpina, and the experience of walking hut-to-hut.  Published in the April 11, 2016 issue of the New Yorker magazine, this is a delightful and serious essay on the Via Alpina, a trail that wends its way through 8 nations and has more than 300 huts spaced a days walk apart.  He describes parts of the trail, gives glimpses of hut life, and relates his own challenges and observations in walking a portion of the trail in the Triglav National Park in Slovenia.  Its not often that an American general interest magazine devotes space to describing the hut-to-hut experience, and this one — humorous, well-written, and informative — is an especially worthy contribution to America’s growing consciousness of the hut experience of long distance walking.

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Book Review: “The Hut Builder”, by Laurence Fearnley

Published by Penguin Books New Zealand, 2010

With 950 huts in a nation the size of Oregon, huts are a vital part of New Zealand’s landscape and imagination.  What I loved most about this novel, in addition to this it’s sensitive portrayal of the life story of a quiet poet-butcher named Boden Black, was an even quieter main character: the “Far-light hut”.

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Book Review: “The Old Ways” by Robert Macfarlane

Book Review by Reidun D. Nuquist

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Penguin Books, New York, 2012). 433 pp., $18.00 paperback.

This elegantly written book by Robert Macfarlane is about “how people understand themselves using landscape.” Or put another way, how “we are shaped by the landscape through which we move.”

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“A Hut in the Wild”: essays on huts from down under

Book notice of “Hut in the Wild” by Dianne Johnson, with a link to chapter one “Hut as Inscape“.

Dianne Johnson’s quirky, delightful, and inspiring book Hut in the Wild (http://www.loveofbooks.com.au, 2011) explores the hut as an archetype, “a cabin of the imagination, and inscape, it is redolent of a lost paradise regained, a gleaner’s bliss….and sometimes a place of hospitality.”  Dr. Johnson, an anthropologist, has compiled a series of essays as homage to the hut as a powerful “inscape”, or idea and  archetype. Johnson wrote books on many topics (including Aboriginal social justice and indigenous astronomies), and this little book (97 pages) is a flowering of her love affair with huts and wilderness.

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New journal published: “World of Trails”

The World Trails Network (WTN) has published the first issue of “World of Trails”.  Robert Searns, editor, states in his welcome note:

This publication is the first global resource of its kind, serving trail advocates, designers, planners, trail managers, tourism industry professionals, national economic development agencies and, of course, trail enthusiasts from around the world.  Our goal is to offer, on a regular basis, with this digital magazine, current information about trails, featured trails in many nations, access to trails development resources, a forum for exchange on trail matters and much more.

Check it out for an international perspective on the WTN’s movement to bring advocates and experts together around the world and to promote high quality trails worldwide.

Book Review: New Monte Rosa Hut Swiss Alpine Club

Review by Sam Demas; for pictures of Monte Rosa Hut, see photo gallery

Hut design is a prized architectural specialty in Switzerland, and this book is a prism through which to view this specialty — as well as to learn about the remarkable New Monte Rosa Hut.  This beautifully produced book comprises 6 thoughtful introductory essays providing historical and architectural context for the project, 15 informative technical notes on key aspects of the project, many architectural drawings, and dozens of beautiful photographs.  Published shortly after construction, it is a both a form of public documentation and a celebration of this remarkable design and construction project of ETH-Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.  It was published in conjunction with a 2010 exhibition on the hut.

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Why Walk? – essay by Robert Manning

Why walk, indeed? History can be read as a millennia- long struggle to free ourselves from the need to walk. Freedom from walking has always been highly coveted, coming first to the rich and powerful; slaves carried their masters, knights rode horses, the rich owned carriages, and the upper and now middle classes drive cars. Today, only the less fortunate are forced to walk. Most people prefer to sit and ride rather than walk, or so it’s been.

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Book review: “Walking Distance” by Robert and Martha Manning

Walking Distance: Extraordinary Hikes for Ordinary People, by Robert and Martha Manning, Oregon State University Press, 2013

The message of this beautiful, intelligent, and highly readable book is: long distance walking is within the walking distance of ordinary folks.  Walking Distance makes the unique and primeval pleasures of long distance walking seem accessible to the average healthy person.  Which it is!

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Book Review: Huts of the Swiss Alpine Club

The Huts of the Swiss Alpine Club

by Marco Volken and Remo Kundert

AS Verlag, 2013.

 WOW.…a comprehensive view of the world’s premier hut-to-hut hiking systems! This is a luscious feast for trip planners, armchair trekkers, architecture mavens, and dreamers and designers of future hut systems in America and elsewhere!

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