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The Mountain Knows the Mountain
A Fire Watch Diary
Philip Connors (Author)
9780826368348
Hardback, published 16 September 2025
128 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.5 cm, 0.363 kg
“The Mountain Knows the Mountain is the finest example I’ve ever read that reveals what it is to ‘think like a mountain,’ a notion forwarded by Aldo Leopold and perfected by Phil Connors. His book is a perfect meld of prose and poetry (mostly haiku) that is an expression of profound love for a mountain habitat where he has long served as a fire lookout. This elegiac book re-sacralizes a habitat long fallen prey to debilitating bureaucracy that secularizes the natural world through commitment to erroneous, often fatal procedure.” - Jack Loeffler, author of Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West “Pick up The Mountain Knows the Mountain, and you will sit with Connors atop his fire lookout in the Gila Wilderness, scanning the horizon for wisps of smoke. You will also listen to Connors speak about the moving of the summer season, the writing of haiku, those fires smoldering below, the state of American wilderness and our American dream, all in beautiful prose and poetry.” - Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave “Find in these pages profound beauty, deep comfort, and vexing disquiet. Ask yourself some of the questions Connors keeps asking. Then walk out of the house to some perfect, inscrutable run of nature and fall in love.” - Gary Ferguson, author of The Eight Master Lessons of Nature: What Nature Teaches Us About Living Well in the World
A poignant and ruminative work of creative nonfiction by the bestselling, National Outdoor Book Award-winning author of Fire Season. The Mountain Knows the Mountain tells the story of the writer's return to the Gila Wilderness for fire season after missign a year for multiple surgeries. Reminscent in spirit and lyricism to great works from Peter Matthiesen, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, and Norman MacLean.
Multi-award-winning writer Philip Connors had been a fire watcher in the Gila Wilderness for fourteen straight summers when he sustained an injury and was forced to miss a year recovering. When he returned, he resolved to see the mountain with fresh eyes and to keep a detailed notebook.
The result is The Mountain Knows the Mountain, a meticulously observed experience of one fire season chronicled in haibun, the centuries-old prose form dating from Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior that recounts both inner and outer journeys and incorporates traditional haiku as an occasional element of narrative counterpoint. Though only a beginner in the practice of haiku, Connors deftly weaves close observation, personal reflection, and memory with hard-won knowledge of the forest, of the mountain, and of fire.
The Mountain Knows the Mountain is both mythic and immediate, a chronicle of daily events granular in their specificity but connected to larger themes of the observed world and the inner life of the observer. Connors captures the various moods of a long season on a mountain; plays with language and ways of seeing; and includes contributing perspectives from his partner, Mónica Ortiz Uribe, and his friend the late editor and publisher Bobby Byrd. Together with the author’s own simple drawings, the resulting snapshots offer incisive visions of how to be intimate with the wild.