The Mountain Knows the Mountain: A Fire Watch Diary

by Philip Connors

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 missing a year for multiple surgeries. Reminiscent 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.

Genres: Nature

173 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 16, 2025

About the author

Philip Connors is the author of Fire Season, which won the Banff Mountain Book Competition Grand Prize, the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, and the Reading the West Book Award. Connors's writing has also appeared in Harper's, n+1, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in New Mexico.

Reviews

[Lucy Seward · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eloquent, idiosyncratic, and (literally) poetic memoir that shares the experience of a firewatcher for the US Park Service. This book slowly grew on me. Connors's writing style drew me in to the point where I actually wondered how it would be to trek up "his" mountain to experience his perspective, both physical and spiritual.

TBH, initially the haikus were not my favorite part, but, as the memoir progressed, I began to see how this genre uniquely nailed the heart/mind epiphanies or sensations of life on the mountain - elaboration not needed and often a distraction to the soul laid bare by this natural communing.

Meaty quote: "I once thought that being that sort of person who loves places more than people offered a built-in insurance policy against disappointment. How could places ever disappoint the way people sometimes do? Places were never capable of malice or greed, hate or duplicity. [haiku] I didn't think to factor in the damage that people can do to places, not just with individual acts of selfishness and stupidity, but by living and burning in aggregate."

Lovely, insightful, incisive.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where have you been Felipe? Certainly not on Instagram. As you so thoroughly explained. Lol. We have missed you.

Just another love letter to the mountain and a life lived in the now. This book chronicles April- August 2017 in the tower in the Gila. Lots of musings. Lots of haiku. Lots of joy. But also an elegy for what we as a species has lost.

I think I am in NM because of you. My house at 6,910 feet is a watch tower as everyday I am transfixed by a mountain- Sierra Blanca (11,981 feet). It's in my face looking right back at me. It dominates the landscape. What's a delta of 5k feet to neighbors?

[Nischal Mali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t expecting to feel such a strong connection to the book but it ended up being one of the most impactful reads of my year.

[Sierra · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first book by Philip Connors, but certainly not my last. Beautiful nature writing about the Gila.