The Columbia and its tributaries are rivers of conflict. Amid pitched battles over the economy, the environment, and breaching dams on the lower Snake River, the salmon that have always quickened these rivers are disappearing. On a warm day in late May, Mike Barenti entered the heart of this conflict when he slid a whitewater kayak into the headwaters of central Idaho s Salmon River and started paddling toward the Pacific Ocean. This account of his two-month, nine-hundred-mile solo journey into the world of the Columbia Basin plunges us into the adventure of navigating these troubled...

On a journey begun twenty years earlier Daryl Farmer a twenty-year-old two-time college dropout did what lost men have so often done in this country: he headed west. Twenty years later and seventy pounds heavier with the yellowing journals from that transformative five-thousand-mile bicycle trek in his pack Farmer set out to retrace his path. This is his story of pursuing that distant summer and that distant dream of home where home is endless space a roof of big sky and a bed of dry earth.

Just as the years altered the man so too have they altered the West and Farmera's second journey...

It was an age without GPS and the Internet, without high-tech monitoring and instantaneous reporting. And it was a time when women simply didn t do such things. None of this deterred Sharon Sites Adams. In June 1965 Adams made history as the first woman to sail solo from the mainland United States to Hawaii. Four years later, just as Neil Armstrong very publicly stepped onto the moon, the diminutive Adams, alone and unobserved, finally sighted Point Arguello, California, after seventy-four days sailing a thirty-one-foot ketch from Japan, across the violent and unpredictable Pacific. She was...