Field Notes from Yosemite: Apprentice to Place (Sketchbook Expeditions)

Wallace Stegner once wrote, "We depend upon wilderness increasingly for relief from the termite life we have created." But that poses the question: if wilderness is our sole antidote, don’t we risk loving it to death, using it up as we have used up so much else? How can great places teach us to live more fully within our daily lives? What might this mean for the health of wilderness itself?

Author and artist Teresa Jordan looks for the answers in four essays of apprenticeship, turning to the work of two previous students of Yosemite—naturalist John Muir and the painter Chiura Obata—as well as from those most elemental of teachers, the rocks and the trees.

Both Muir and Obata used painting and drawing as primary tools for understanding, and Jordan’s own watercolors illuminate her journey of exploration. Like "Field Notes from the Grand Canyon," this second volume in Teresa Jordan’s series of Sketchbook Expeditions uses superb full-color reproductions on special paper that approximates the look and feel of a watercolor sketchbook. This beautiful little volume makes an irresistible gift, to be read and re-read time and time again.

Teresa Jordan is the award-winning author of "Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album," "Field Notes from the Grand Canyon" and "Cowgirls: Women of the American West," as well as the editor of two anthologies of western women’s writing. With her husband, folklorist Hal Cannon, she has been a regular contributor to "The Savvy Traveler" and other public radio shows, introducing a large audience to the land, culture and folklife of the American West.