Good reads

Mammoth Hot Springs, view of the town from the top of the hot springs formation. Our happy little cabin is tucked back in there!

I just read Maeve Binchy's latest book, "Heart and Soul". She writes such good stories about life in contemporary Ireland. I have read all her others as they came out, and always wait impatiently for the next one.

I just finished reading "Journal of a Trapper" by Osborne Russell, one of the original mountain men who traversed the Yellowstone area in the first half of the 19th century. It was sometimes tedious reading as he really kept a log of miles traveled each day and in what direction, but it is also interspersed with very lovely prose and accounts of the beauty of the wilderness, gripping Indian encounters, and tales of the trappers' life. A great book if you are interested in history, and at all familiar with the area of which he writes.

I remember always being fascinated with that particular group in American History class in High School, the mountain men were a very hardy bunch, and, though trapping and hunting in that era contributed to the plundering of the land (and near-extinction of some species), that lifestyle has always appealed to me in a romantic sort of way. Imagine working all day for yourself, in the company of only the wilderness, and you are only as well-off as your persistence and ingenuity make you.

Anyway, I remember being in the bookstores of Yellowstone national park and seeing quite a few titles about the historical figures of the area. So now I am on a quest to read as many of them as I can find. And I will start here, in the online bookstore of the Yellowstone Association. Each book usually gives plenty of references to others, too.

I really want to revisit that beautiful outdoor theater of the great wild West...