The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere

Triolo, Nicholas

ISBN 10: 1571313958 / ISBN 13: 9781571313959

Published by Milkweed Editions, 2025

About this Item

All pages and cover are intact including the dust cover, if applicable . Spine may show signs of wear. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting. May include "From the library of" labels. Shrink wrap, dust covers, or boxed set case may be missing. Item may be missing bundled media.

Seller Inventory # MINV.1571313958.G

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1571313958
• ISBN 13: 9781571313959
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: good

About this title

Synopsis

“The Way Around is the kind of book my soul perpetually yearns for. It reshaped how I see the world.”—Robert Moor, author of On Trails: An Exploration

Growing up in northern California, in a family of high-achieving athletes, Nicholas Triolo was imbued with a particularly acute form of our intensely goal-oriented culture. “Do the reps,” he internalized. “Commit to the work. Grind for your dreams.” Shortly after graduating from college, he embarked on a solo circumnavigation of the globe. And then after returning to the States, he threw himself into ultrarunning, all to combat a deepening discontent.

While traveling around the world, it was in Kathmandu that Triolo first encountered kora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around a sacred site or object—a kind of “ritualized remembering” birthed by place. Unable to shake this initial encounter with circumambulation, he sets out here on three such extended walks. First, he completes the sacred thirty-two-mile revolution around Tibet’s Mount Kailash, in search of a cultural counter to Western linearity. Then, following his mother’s diagnosis with breast cancer, he returns home to California and takes part in an annual circuit of Mount Tamalpais, tracing a route made famous by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And then finally, he meets up with a quirky hydrogeologist in Butte, Montana, and joins his walk around the Berkeley Pit Complex, the largest Superfund site in the country.

At once uncommonly humble and thrillingly transcendent, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer landscapes, The Way Around models what it means to experience a true revolution of heart and home—for the flourishing of all.

About the Author

Nicholas Triolo is a writer, filmmaker, photographer, activist, and long-distance trail runner. His writing and images have been featured in National Geographic, Orion, Outside, Terrain.org, and Trail Runner. He has directed two documentary films, “The Crossing” and “Shaped by Fire,” and collaborated with Salomon on a film about touring and training Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Triolo’s films have been Official Selections for several international film festivals and featured on influential platforms such as Patagonia’s Dirtbag Diaries, Upworthy, and Outside magazine. Triolo is based in Missoula, Montana, and you can read more about him at nicholastriolo.net.