Mount Rainier towers above its surroundings. The 360-degree view from its summit is stunning, encompassing Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains to the west, Mount Baker far to the north, the Columbia River country to the east, spreading south toward Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Hood down in Oregon. I saw all of this on a perfectly clear summit day and having done so makes me appreciate the approach Jeff Antonelis-Lapp takes in this book.

National park enthusiasts will likely be familiar with the writing of Terry Tempest Williams. Her previous book The Hour of Land told national park stories as only she, in her lyrical, insightful, and emotional way, can tell them. Erosion is not explicitly about national parks, though some of the essays lament what has happened to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monuments. She has already addressed the challenges of many other parks in that earlier work. The 32 pieces in this book, most of them essays, address a “world being torn to pieces,” being eroded, a condition that brings Williams, at times, to heartbreak.

The Southwest is riddled with public lands, and they are riddled with hiking opportunities. Where you go could be as simple as following your sightline into the landscape. But if you're not comfortable with that, it's nice to have a guidebook to help you find your way. This is one option.

There are many resources to help you get the most out of your national park adventures. And there are dozens of guidebooks, it seems, that profess to be the authority on visiting the parks. But there’s a book coming out later this spring that takes a new approach to visiting the parks, an approach built around a park’s residents – their plants, wildlife, and even geology.

With winter on its way, the high season at Joshua Tree National Park in California is on its way as well. And what better way to prepare for a Joshua Tree adventure than finding a guide to help you make the most of the park's hikes?

The pantheon of conservation leaders through American history is familiar; John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, and David Brower most prominent. George Bird Grinnell deserves to be among them, but his name and his contributions are not as well known or appreciated. John Taliaferro has written the first comprehensive biography of Grinnell, which is a step toward recognizing the scope and significance of his long career.

An estimated six million people visit the Grand Canyon annually. Most visitors look in from the South Rim or through the window of a helicopter, and roughly 26,000 float the Colorado River through all or part of the canyon. Very few in the recorded history of Grand Canyon exploration have walked its length (fewer than have walked on the moon, Kevin Fedarko tells photographer Pete McBride). Likely no one with the photographic skills of National Geographic photographer McBride have made this arduous journey, which covered 750 miles from Lees Ferry to the Grand Wash Cliffs at the canyon’s western end.

What do you envision when you enter a national park? What do you expect to experience? Why do we visit these places?

We all know what incredible cauldrons of beauty and history national parks hold for visitors to marvel at. You can view them as libraries of natural and cultural history. And like most libraries, you can get lost in the stacks if you don’t have a guide. Stephen Trimble has put together the guide you need to more fully appreciate Capitol Reef National Park in Utah. It’s not your typical national park guidebook. No trail, dining, or lodging information.

Any visitor to Yosemite inescapably encounters granite – it is the essence of the park. Few if any know granite like Michael P. Cohen, who has climbed big walls, wandered on and around its less than vertical presences, read deeply into its geomorphology and mineralogy, and intimately explored and reflected on the nature of Yosemite granite for over a half century. Granite and Grace is a meditation on what he has come to know of it in all these ways and years.

Redwood National and State Parks is not your typical national park. That's quite evident from its name. But when you look at a map of the park located in northern California, it becomes more clear. This is a narrow park that roams and meanders along the Pacific Coast, interspersing national and state parklands. And you need to know that if you're planning to do some hiking there. That's why you'll find the full-page map in John Soares' upcoming book on hiking this park so helpful.

A new book on the Green River examines the demands on that iconic stream that flows out of central Wyoming and adds its fill to the Colorado down in Canyonlands National Park. The text is a wonderful complement to the more lyrical book on the same river that arrived more than half-a-century ago.

It's time to move on to Molly Hashimoto's next course for mastering your sketching, painting, and drawing of birds you can spot in national parks in the West.

If you savor American history, particularly the years of the Civil War, can you ever have enough books to help understand what transpired during those bloody years? In Civil War Places, Seeing the Conflict through the Eyes of its Leading Historians, a roster of historians who studied the war offer a rich collection of essays to lend some perspective to individual battles.