Once a person hikes a long trail, they catch the bug, but does it get any easier the second time around? Four years after starting the Appalachian Trail with his brother, Brian takes to the Continental Divide Trail for his second thru-hike in familiar company. However, trail life is not always as rewarding and romantic as the pictures you see or second-hand stories you hear.

Wit’s End isn’t just a state of mind. It’s the name of a gravel road, the address of a rundown, off-the-grid cabin, 120 shabby square feet of fixer-upper Patrick Hutchison purchased on a whim in the mossy woods of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. To say Hutchison didn’t know what he was getting into is no more an exaggeration than to say he’s a man with nearly zero carpentry skills. Well, used to be. You can learn a lot over six years of renovations. CABIN is the story of those renovations, but it's also a love story; of a place, of possibilities, and of the process of construction.

Christine discovered long distance backpacking while surfing the internet at work. She decided that day to attempt to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. One adventure led to another and a few years later she set out on the Wonderland Trail in Mt Rainier National Park. Her Rugged Outdoors Woman persona started as a joke, a nod to the outdoor adventurer that she wished to be. But in the years since, she has come into her own as a backpacker, rock climber, and trail runner. This book is a testament to the decision to name who you want to be and make it so.

We live in a place everyone calls paradise. Sure, Kauai’s beautiful, with empty beaches, drip-castle mountains, and perfect surf...but we’ve been "camping" for six months, eating boiled chicken feed for breakfast, and wearing camouflage clothes so no one sees us trespassing in our jungle hideout. The cockroaches leave rainbow colors all over everything from eating the crayons we left outside the tent, and now a tractor is coming to scrape our camp into the river. Standing in front of the tent in my nightgown, I know my own truth: I just want to be normal.

The Trail is a moving story of how nature helps us find what’s missing in our lives. The tale begins with Gil, who in the wake of his father’s death and recently fired from his job, agrees to accompany his father’s old hiking partner Syd on a month-long trek on the John Muir Trail. There’s just one problem: Gil hates camping and is woefully unprepared for the rigors of the journey. Moreover, he soon learns Syd may not survive the hike.

Have you ever driven home from work wearing nothing but a pair of rubber boots? For Dr. Melinda McCall, a large animal veterinarian in rural Virginia, this is living the dream. Caring for cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, llamas, and the occasional alpaca, unusual mishaps and mind-blowing adventures abound. Getting caught driving home naked after a tough day at work is just another day at the office for Dr. Melinda.

Author Kevin Grange—former paramedic and park ranger at Yellowstone and Grand Teton—comes face-to-face with North America’s most fearsome predator, Ursus Arctos. His quest takes him from his home in the Tetons to an eerie, mist-shrouded island of gigantic bruins; from the Bear Center at Washington State University—where scientists believe the secrets of hibernation might help treat diabetes, heart disease, and obesity in humans—to the dark underbelly of for-profit wildlife parks, illegal animal trade and black markets hawking bear bile.

Lochiel Ogle was born with a red-wine birthmark—and it put her life in jeopardy from the moment she entered the world. Mountain folks called it "the mark of the devil," and for all the evil that has plagued her nineteen-year existence, Lochiel is ready to believe that is true. And the evil surely took control of the mind of the boy who stole her as an infant, bringing her home for his mother to raise.

It was 23 months after his accident, and Peter was still dealing with constant excruciating pain. He'd seen dozens of doctors and tried a myriad of medications, but nothing seemed to work. Faced with the impossible choice of suffering through the rest of his life, he had an unlikely epiphany, "If I could somehow hike 2,000 miles on the Appalachian Trail, then my leg will have to be better." He set a starting date three weeks out, cobbled together a novice's pack, and set off on a journey destined to change his life forever—though not exactly how he had envisioned it.

Allison Holker was just eighteen when she found fame as a contestant on the reality TV show So You Think You Can Dance. Over the next several years, she had her first child, built a successful career as a professional dancer despite the industry being hostile to working moms, and fell in love with and married fellow dancer Stephen Boss, the former hype man and DJ of The Ellen DeGeneres Show known for his charisma and relentless positivity

Carrot Quinn fears that she's become addicted to the Internet. The city makes her numb, and she's having trouble connecting with others. In a desperate move, she breaks away from everything to walk 2,660 miles from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail. It will be her first long-distance hike.

Dana Trent is only a preschooler the first time she uses a razor blade to cut up weed and fill dime bags for her schizophrenic father, King. While King struggles with his unmedicated psychosis, Dana’s mother, the Lady, a cold and self-absorbed woman whose personality disorders rule the home, guards large bricks of drugs from the safety of their squalid trailer. But when the Lady impulsively plucks Dana from the Midwest and moves the two of them south, their fresh start results in homelessness and bankruptcy.

In 1994, an aspiring young cold-case investigator in California’s East Bay, Paul Holes, puts aside trying to solve the Golden State Killer case as he waits for science to catch up. Paul returns to an old file cabinet at the back of the forensic lab to look for another cold case he can work—something with DNA. He finds one. The 1978 murder of a married mother who went for a morning jog in a nearby park. The original investigators believed that a serial killer named Phillip Hughes was responsible; they just couldn’t prove it.

I learned a great many things on the hiking trails of America. One of the most important is that we all climb mountains. Every. Single. Day. I thought I was just hiking mountains. What I was really doing was learning valuable lessons that I could equate directly to life. Hiking thousands of miles over perhaps hundreds of mountains all over the United States teaches you a lot. With that said, you don’t have to be a hiker to enjoy any of these revelations.

When Leah’s daughter, Nyla, unexpectedly appears at her cabin in the Appalachian Mountains, it’s a dream come true. For five years, Leah hasn’t seen or heard from her daughter—ever since Nyla stormed out of the house, determined to go live with her idealized father.