Exploring the West by canoe or kayak long has been near the top of my to-do list, and Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, with its 149 river miles to paddle, is naturally on that list. I'll just have to remember not to drink the water.

Cooking on a backcountry trip in Yellowstone National Park can be challenging, especially when you want to boil a couple chickens. One group solved that problem by placing the plucked birds in a burlap bag and tossing it into a hot spring in the Shoshone Geyser Basin.

We’re awash this year in a sea of propaganda and misinformation. Fake news sites, false reports, news-like stories selected and spun not to make us smarter, but to make us hate, to steer us toward supporting someone else’s cause.

Leave it as It Is is the most engaging and powerful book about Western public lands that I have read in a long time. Gessner published a terrific book in 2015 titled All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West, and I find some Abbey and Stegner in this new book, both in style and content. He traveled the West in search of Abbey and Stegner in that book as he does with Teddy Roosevelt in this one. He looks at all these icons in the context of the modern West with a clear and analytical eye.