Our favorite outdoor adventure books for every US state

The Iowa one definitely piqued my curiosity too:

Wildland Sentinel: Field Notes from an Iowa Conservation Officer, by Erika Billerbeck (2020)

If you’re curious about what wilderness looks like in a state that’s 97 percent privately owned, try this fresh memoir by a rookie law enforcement ranger. “I am an Iowa native,” Billerbeck writes. “But as a newly badged officer, standing in the bed of my pickup for a better view, … I found myself wondering if I would be able to find the natural resources I was sworn to safeguard.” Her work includes everything from arresting drunken boaters to chasing down wayward skunks. “I once read a memoir by a game warden who seemingly emerged from the womb with a badge on his chest and a gun on his hip,” she writes. “My story is much less heroic.” Still, there may be no better way to get to know Iowa’s wild spaces than riding shotgun in Billerbeck’s truck.

And so did the one for Georgia:

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, by Janisse Ray (1999)

Part memoir, part natural history, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood earned Ray the sobriquet The Rachel Carson of the South. The book chronicles her childhood growing up in a junkyard alongside Highway 1—”not a bad place to grow up,” she writes, “weird enough to stoke any child’s curiosity, a playground of endless possibility.” Much of that possibility lay behind the piles of cars and radiators in “a singing forest of tall and widely spaced pines,” the longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the entire South. When Ray wrote this book, only 1 percent of those old-growth longleaf forests remained. It took her a while to embrace her origins, but now, she writes, ”What I come from has made me who I am.”

And I've actually already read the one for Maine, since Christopher Knight has long fascinated me. So I highly recommend it as well:

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, by Michael Finkel (2017)

Ever since Henry David Thoreau struck off for the Maine Woods in 1864, we have turned to this wilderness to both find and lose ourselves. At 20, Christopher Knight made an arguably childish decision to get lost in these storied woods in the spring of 1986. Then he decided to stay that way for 27 years, not by surviving off the land but by raiding nearby vacation cabins. He was a modern-day robber-hermit who never took more than he needed and almost always locked up after he was done “shopping.” With spare, precise prose, Finkel lays a case that Knight, who had only two conversations during his time in the woods, is a uniquely Maine phenomenon, combining a sincere need to be left alone with the local live-and-let-live sensibility that allowed for such an existence. “He does not care if people fail to understand what he did in the woods, “ writes Finkel. “He didn’t do it for us to understand. He wasn’t trying to prove a point. There was no point.” Knight was, in his own words, “completely free.”