The Full Range: Essays from a Life Outside

by Carolyn Highland

Carolyn Highland's 41 essays follow a life shaped by backcountry skiing, trail running and mountain landscapes, and by the questions carried into them.

In The Full Range, outdoor experience is both subject and lens. Highland writes about days in deep snow, miles on foot and time alone in mountain country, but the essays keep returning to the rest of life that travels with her. Relationships shift. Expectations change. The reasons for going outside change too.

Rather than presenting adventure as an escape from ordinary life, Highland pays attention to the ways the two remain entangled. Physical effort can sharpen a thought without resolving it. A familiar landscape can look different after loss or change. What once felt like achievement can become a way of asking a harder question.

These essays sit within contemporary nature writing and women's outdoor literature rather than guidebook or instructional territory. They are grounded in movement through wild places, but their real subject is how a life keeps being revised by experience.

288 pages, Paperback

Published October 13, 2026

About the author

Carolyn Highland is a writer and educator with over 80 published essays in print and online, in publications such as Outside Magazine, Backcountry Magazine, The Ski Journal, SKI Magazine, and Trails Magazine, among others. Her writing has also been used in course readers on expeditions through NOLS, the Prescott College Outdoor Program, the Second Nature Wilderness Program, and NatureBridge. In her free time, you'll find her backcountry skiing, trail running, mountain biking, and backpacking. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska.

Reviews

[Kimberley Megis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Carolyn’s pen. She put words on feelings I’ve had for a long time, as someone who also spends her life outside. The Full Range is a beautifully written collection of essays that any woman who adventures outside will resonate with.