Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets, this stunning collection of memories, observations, and narratives is acute and lyrical, Whitmanesque in dadth, and as elegant as a Japanese tea house. "Sentience and sunderance," she writes. "How we know what we know, how we lose it all." As if to stave off impending loss, she embarks on strenuous adventures to Greenland, Africa, Kosovo, Japan and an uninhabited Alaskan Island, always returning to her simple Wyoming cabin at the foot of the mountains and the trail that leads into the heart of them.