Walking the High Desert

"Beautifully written, graceful, and engaging. Waterston's blend of travelogue, memoir, and meditation brings a new focus to Oregon's high desert."—Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses and Unforeseen

"There is no better guide to Oregon's high desert than Ellen Waterston. Her sense of place, her lyrical love of this sometimes hard to love place, her balanced yet passionate dissection of the issues roiling the big land of junipers and open sky is a wonderful match for her subject. While the West is full of poets who love the land, few of them are as intellectually nimble as Waterston."—Timothy Egan, author of The Worst Hard Time and Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

"Walking the High Desert grows right out of the relatively new and little-traveled Oregon Desert Trail, but it is no trail guide, much less a braggadocious through-hike log. Ellen Waterston has given us her own very personal Baedeker to a little-known landscape that she knows well as both rancher and writer, hitting all the high points of the heart as well as in elevation. In language as crisp as the desert air, her book serves equally well as a primer on Western conservation, a lure into difficult but hugely rewarding country, and a who's who and what's what of high desert life and culture. Woven out of her own remarkable stories, her trek becomes an insightful search for how we might all get along, here and elsewhere, in a perilously shifting world."—Robert Michael Pyle, author of The Thunder Tree, Mariposa Road, and Magdalena Mountain

"Since time immemorial, humans have been living, loving, and exploring the West's high desert. In turn, those of us living here are influenced by how the desert is subtle, nuanced, and rich. Waterston's book is at once profound and worthy of all these descriptors of the high desert. Uniting stories from across this diverse landscape—the human and non-human voices—Waterston weaves an incomparable narrative of wonder, science, history, and prose. This book deeply and cleverly explores the desert landscape and the complexity of the interplay of humans and this amazing piece of the intermountain west."—Dana Whitelaw, executive director of the High Desert Museum