Day One, and already she was laying in her journal. It was 1993, Suzanne Roberts got just finished college, so when her friend suggested they hike California’s John Muir Path, the adventure sounded just like the perfect distraction from a difficult home life and thoughts about the future. But she never imagined the fact that twenty-eight-day hike would modify her life. Part memoir, part character writing, part travelogue, Almost Someplace is Roberts’s accounts of that hike.

John Muir had written of the about Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Times for the John Muir Trail Sierra Nevada as a ‘vast range of light,’ and this was just what Roberts was looking for. But touring with two girlfriends, one experienced and unflappable and the various other inexperienced and bulimic, she quickly discovered that she required a new body of guide. Her tale of per month in the backcountry-confronting bears, snowy passes, broken equipment, accidental injuries, and unusual men-is as much about selecting a woman’s method into outdoor encounter as it is approximately the natural globe she so eloquently identifies. Candid and funny and, finally, wise, Almost Somewhere is not just the whimsical coming-of-age tale of a woman ill-prepared for a month in the mountains but also the representation of a distinctly feminine look at of nature.