Listen for the calls of nesting ravens and warblers, watch the growth of wild geranium and black cohosh, and savor the first autumn blush in the tupelo trees. Revel, as did Frank Lloyd Wright, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt--among generations of other amateur naturalists--in the remarkable natural, historical, and geological treasures of Sugarloaf, the Maryland Piedmont's only mountain.

A favored destination of nearly one-quarter million visitors each year, some 35 miles northwest of Washington, D.C., and 50 miles west of Baltimore, Sugarloaf is a National...

2015 IPPY Silver Medalist, Best Mid-Atlantic Nonfiction

Twice the size of Central Park, Rock Creek Park is the wild, wooded heart of Washington, DC, offering refuge from a frantic city pace to millions of visitors each year. Rock Creek Valley, which serves as the spine of the national park, has a long and storied history--from Amerindians who fished the creek, hunted the woods, and quarried the rock outcroppings, to Euro-Americans' claims on the land as mill sites, to widespread deforestation during the American Civil War, to its ecological restoration and designation as a federal...