The Way Home: Essays on the Outside West

"Anyone who is concerned about the numerous local and global threats to the environment will find in McVey a kindred spirit who has articulated the dangers and an ethos to deal with them."---Blair Oliver, author of Last Call and The Long Slide

The Way Home ought to be read by politicians, corporate executives, every entrepreneur...and by all of us who have ever wondered who we are and what our role is in this magnificent and magnificently confusing world."---Gary Holthaus, author of Wide Skies: Finding a Home in the West

"A sense of place can be a complicated matter," writes James McVey in the prologue to his new collection of essays, The Way Home. Based on twenty years of living and traveling in the West, the collection includes essays on river running, backcountry skiing, fly fishing, and backpacking---all describing varous attempts to engage in meaningful contact with the elements of wild nature, and to have a deep firsthand knowledge of a place. With an essayist's breadth McVey engages ecology, geology, anthropology, psychology, and history as well as his own personal outdoor experiences in order to peer into the particulars of living in as complicated a place as the West. While the essays function within the tradition of western nature writing, they transcend regional issues insofar as they maintain a broader philosophical context that accounts for such global concerns as mass extinction and climate change.

The essays use backcountry experiences as occasions for reflection on such topics as nature and culture, conservation, and the human relation to the wild. They combine the naturalist's commitment to landscape with the adventurer's attention to technique and skill. McVey describes his own journey in the West, traveling through the varying philosophical revelations wilderness presents---"a lifetime of questions"---finally landing on a conservation ethic, a feeling of home.