Andrew Terrill's Blog

THE SPRING MONTHS of March and April are typically the two snowiest months of the year in Colorado’s Front Range. It’s the time of year when strong cold fronts are prone to slip south around the great barrier of the Rockies then push moist air up against the foothills. These powerful ‘upslope’ storms can deposit large volumes of heavy wet snow onto the land exactly when it’s most needed, to boost upcoming spring plant growth.

A notable example of such a storm was the one that occurred in mid-Mar...

OVER THREE MONTHS ago I announced my third book: One Year One Mountain. I thought it was time for an update.

One Year One Mountain is the book I wanted to write. At its core, it’s a love letter to nature and to Colorado’s mountains. I’ve spent the past quarter-century here in the Rockies, wandering through quiet forests and camping in remote glacier-carved cirques, sinking ever-deeper into ‘place’. I’ve grown deeply attached to the state’s unfrequented natural corners. The urge to share what the...

BACK AT THE start of March I spent a weekend in an igloo. It was an extraordinary experience. In fact, ‘extraordinary’ isn’t hyperbole (for once) but a gross understatement. So much happened. Every single moment was rich and full. The ‘meaning’ of the weekend was immense. I returned home feeling physically tired but also renewed and energized as though I’d been away for weeks. I returned bearing more m...

I WALKED FROM home again. A mere eight miles and roughly three hours of moderate effort, and then I was in another world.

‘Turkey Central’ I call the location, named for the wild turkeys I’ve seen up there several times. But it’s a home to others, too: mule deer, elk, black bears, mountain lions, squirrels, ten thousand singing birds, and numerous other residents besides. In summary, it’s a wild natural location that throbs with life, a location close to home, but a location that is so often ove...

IT’S THE DETAILS that do it for me. It’s the details that I step into nature for. It’s not the Big Views, not the ‘numbers’ walked, not the time taken, not the hard-to-reach famous locations to namedrop later… but the plain old details, and what they do In The Moment, the experience of them, the senses and instincts and emotions they stir…

Take the roughness of wood in hand, the feel of a twenty-year-old weather-beaten picket-fence post as I close the front gate, and the click of the gate latch;...

SINCE I ANNOUNCED my new book One Year One Mountain and explained that I wouldn’t be revealing the mountain’s location I’ve been asked a certain question several times: why not say where?

This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable question. You’re writing about a specific place. Why not say where that place is? To be honest, I did expect this. In fact, I anticipated I’d be asked this question a lot! I answer it extremely carefully in the book itself… but in an attempt to head the question off a...

SOME PEOPLE LOVE cars, and everything to do with them. They love cars for emotional, psychological and practical reasons. Some people love their cars so much they get into them and drive around… not to get somewhere but purely for fun. Imagine!

And then there are people who dislike cars, or who are, at best, merely tolerant of them, people who didn’t learn to drive until their thirties when they emigrated to a nation set up for cars (not for people) and had no other option but to learn, people w...

AS REGULAR VISITORS to my blog will have seen, I’ve been writing a third book. Finally, after three year’s of research and a full year of writing, I’ve completed the manuscript.

And so, the time has come to ‘officially’ introduce my new book…

Foreword

This is a memoir about a journey on foot in the Rocky Mountains.

The journey began with a simple idea: to spend an entire year getting to know a single mountain. Instead of hiking over many different mountains as I’ve been doing for three-plus de...

FALL COMES EARLY to Colorado’s high country, often in August, occasionally even at August’s start. While lower-altitude locations down in the foothills might still be experiencing mid-summer heat, remaining green and lush and vibrant with life, the alpine tundra can already see chlorophyll fading and russet hues spreading…

This year I noticed the first hint of Fall on August 3rd – an impressively early start to the new season. Undoubtedly, a dry July contributed to it, with alpine vegetation str...

IT’S TIME FOR an update…

As I may have mentioned a few months ago, I’m working on another book. It’s one of the reasons why my posts on here have been few and far between in recent months. I’ve been focused. I’ve been trying to stay on task.

It probably won’t be a surprise when I reveal that the new book will be another hiking memoir about another long mountain journey. But there’ll be a difference. This time, instead of writing about a traditional through-hike, a journey of forever moving on,...