Phyllis Anderson Art

In my work, I often use sentences and fragments of text that recount the wilderness experience. Some of my sources are books that appeal to me because they were written long before global warming, when there were still large glaciers in the Rockies and thick snow-pack.  It was a time before GPS navigation on everyone’s phone, and we didn't need warnings against posting selfies that would reveal wilderness locations leading to overuse.  And yet, despite the undeniable cultural and environmental changes, the experience of wilderness, the idea of wilderness, hasn’t altered all that much. There is still a sense of awe, an intimation of geological time, and the humbling, existential insight, somehow comforting, of our own comparable insignificance.

 

Isabella Bird    A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains  1879

Bird was a British explorer and best-selling author who travelled the world. She was the first woman “allowed” to join the Royal Geographic Society.  The book is based on letters she wrote during her travels in Colorado in 1873 when she was 32. 

 

John Muir   Travels in Alaska 1915    Steep Trails 1918

A naturalist and writer, Muir was the co-founder of the Sierra Club and became famous for his writings on Yosemite, which helped preserve it as a National Park.

 

Jack Kerouac   Dharma Bums 1958  Desolation Angels   written 1956, pub.1965

The “beat” generation writer spent a summer as a fire watcher in an isolated mountaintop tower in the Cascades, and both books include long passages on his wilderness impressions.

 

Wallace Stegner  Angle of Repose 1971  The Sound of Mountain Water 1946

Stegner was a pulitzer prize winning author of the American west, whose fiction and non-fiction confront the degradation of the land and the inadequacy of western mythology.