Longlisted for an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year

America's national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the New York Times bestselling author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks and an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.
From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that illuminate the unique grandeur of each place while delving into what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and a manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America.

MAPPING THE TERRITORY

1. AMERICA'S NATIONAL PARKS: By definition
2. GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING: Keep promise
3. THEODORE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK, NORTH DAKOTA: All this is what the wind knows
4. ACADIA NATIONAL PARK, MAINE: -the stones, the steel, the galaxies-
5. GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA: -there is no prevailing-
6. EFFIGY MOUNDS NATIONAL MONUMENT, IOWA: Death yes but as a gathering
7. BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK, TEXAS: Any wind will tell you
8. GATES OF THE ARCTIC NATIONAL PARK, ALASKA: There is no private space
9. GULF ISLANDS NATIONAL SEASHORE, FLORIDA AND MISSISSIPPI: What more shall we do to others. To otherness
10. CANYONLANDS NATIONAL PARK, UTAH: We are in some strange wind says the wind
11. ALCATRAZ ISLAND, GOLDEN GATE NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, CALIFORNIA: The bodies are all gone from it, the purchases have been made
13. GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, MONTANA: It is so extreme this taking-the-place-of, this standing-in-for, this disappearing of all the witnesses-
14. CÉSAR E. CHÁVEZ NATIONAL MONUMENT, CALIFORNIA, AND THE FUTURE: I say to myself keep on-it will
not be the end-not yet-
POSTSCRIPT
THE GALLERY
SOURCES
AMERICA'S NATIONAL PARKS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS