"This coming–of–age story will appeal to extreme sports enthusiasts, environmental activists, and fans of strong female characters."— BOOKLIST Fourteen–year–old Charlotte moves from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado to Washington's Cascade Mountains , where she hopes to continue training for the national snowboarding championships. After her father signs an anti–development petition, she loses access to the local resort and takes to the backcountry, where she meets nature on its own terms. When adventure turns to tragedy, Charlotte learns that even our deepest scars can be lucky ones. ANA MARIA SPAGNA lives and writes in Stehekin, Washington, a very small town in the North Cascades accessible only by foot, ferry, or float plane. She teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Spagna writes for magazines about nature, work, and life in a small community, and is the author of several award–winning nonfiction books, including 100 Skills You'll Need for the End of the World (As We Know It) , a humor–infused guide for how to live more lightly on the planet.
For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You�re so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she is also restless. In Uplake she takes road trips, flies to distant cities, fantasizes about other people�s lives, and then returns home again to muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, wonder, and love. These engaging, reflective essays celebrate the richness of it all: winter floods and summer fires, the roar of a chainsaw and a fiddle in the wilderness, long hikes and open-water swims, an injured bear, a lost wedding ring, and a tree in the middle of a river. Uplake reminds us to love what we have while encouraging us to still imagine what we want.
For most of the past century, Humbug Valley, a forest-hemmed meadow sacred to the Mountain Maidu tribe, was in the grip of a utility company. Washington’s White Salmon River was saddled with a fish-obstructing, inefficient dam, and the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland was unacknowledged within the boundaries of Death Valley National Park. Until people decided to reclaim them.In Reclaimers , Ana Maria Spagna drives an aging Buick up and down the long strip of West Coast mountain ranges—the Panamints, the Sierras, the Cascades—and alongside rivers to meet the people, many of them wise women, who persevered for decades with little hope of success to make changes happen. In uncovering their heroic stories, Spagna seeks a way for herself, and for all of us, to take back and to make right in a time of unsettling ecological change.