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Heather Hansman

@hhansman

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Better at words than pictures. Author of DOWNRIVER, POWDER DAYS and FIERCE COUNTRY (out now!)

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This is the cover for my new book, FIERCE COUNTRY, which is about three women—Georgie White, Anne LaBastille and Dolores LaChapelle— who shaped conservation, climate science and recreation and the ways those things are intertwined, but whose stories were never widely told.

If you’ve talked to me in the last 5 years, or maybe forever, you know I’ve been wrestling with ideas about heroes and power, and how to take care of the rapidly warming planet, and the frustrating ways gender shows up in outdoor world (and, like, the world). And with how identity intersects with care and with the tangled relationship between recreation and conservation and why being outside is so important to my sense of self. It’s about all of that and more. My mom keeps saying I need to come up with a shorter pitch so she can tell her soccer team, but I cannot.

I went in looking for role models and I came out with a story about land use policy and philosophy and relationships and climate science and independence. With a side of wild first descents (of mountains and rivers) and big adventures. I love it a lot.

It comes out in July, and I’ll tell you more about it before then, but for now I’m just excited. The link to preorder it is live in my bio and I would love any of your brilliant ideas about how to get it out into the world. by @hhansman

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9 months ago

Do you agree or disagree? 👀

Award-winning environmental journalist, Heather Hansman, joins PaddyO to discuss her new book Fierce Country—and to vent about the speakerphone epidemic sweeping the world in the latest episode of the Outside Podcast. by @hhansman

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a month ago

My official review of Fierce Country is that it was good enough to interrupt my river time lol.

But seriously though, if I asked a publisher to make a book that my audience would love, it would be this. It’s about three remarkable women who fundamentally changed America’s relationship with wild places:

-Georgie White (the first woman guide on the Grand Canyon)

-Anne Labastille (mountain guide and early climate scientist)

-Dolores LaChapelle (skier and environmental philosopher)

This book is about the stories they left behind, but it also explores why those stories aren’t part of the dominant narrative about conservation and recreation in the American West.

@hhansman and I met on a @FreeFlowInstitute writing course on the Green River a few years ago, and I’ve been lucky to call her both a friend and mentor ever since. Hilariously, it was not a women’s only trip but the only ppl that signed up were women 💅 10/10 amazing experience and I am so thankful that Heather and I had the opportunity to connect.

Anyways, watching this book come to life has been incredibly cool, and I’m so excited that it’s finally out in the world.

Go pick up a copy. I think you’re going to love it. 🩵 #water #rivers #womensupportingwomen #writing #books taken in Durango, Colorado by @hhansman

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3 months ago

We had a blast at last night's author event with Heather Hansman, Molly McKeon, and YOU!

Thanks to everyone who came out, shared stories, and helped to make the launch of Heather's newest book, Fierce Country, such a spectacular community event! taken in Maria's Bookshop by @hhansman

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3 months ago

Today is the day! FIERCE COUNTRY is out in the world today, you can get it anywhere you buy books. I took it camping in one of Dolores’s favorite places to celebrate. I hope that you get it, I hope that you get to read it somewhere like this, and I hope you tell me about it when you do. by @hhansman

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3 months ago

I’m not sure if your parents told you where books come from, but books come from other books, and from digging in the archives, and talking to strangers, and from lots of weird time alone in your head. And sometimes from songs or paintings or perfect snow. That all goes into the meatgrinder of your brain and comes out in a new form. Am I saying a book is a sausage? Maybe.

What I AM saying is that we’re a week out from Fierce Country’s birthday (Tuesday July 14th. Fun fact: books always come out on Tuesdays!) and I’m feeling really grateful for all the pieces that went into it and how that came out. So I made you guys a reading list and a playlist. The robots could never.

I also got to talk to wonderful @semi_rad the other day for his new podcast, My Favorite Things, and got to go off on some of my all-time favorite creative things (the first tapes I ever bought, Ellen Meloy and EB White, the @colbymuseum , shitty watercolors). I’m sick of talking about myself, so links to all that stuff up in the bio. by @hhansman

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3 months ago

We’re taking this show on the road. I’ll be in some of my favorite places talking about FIERCE COUNTRY with some of my smartest, coolest, funniest friends(@sierra_time in SLC, @jane_c_hu in Seattle, @cragcrest in Paonia, people who are too wise for instagram in other real-life places!) Come hang?? Event links and rsvps up in bio. by @hhansman

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3 months ago

The big question underlying this whole book is why any of this matters. Why does it feel important to be outside, and what do we get out of it? And it turns out the person who had the answer to that (or at least the beginning of an answer) had figured that out in the mountains up the road.

When I moved here, someone (Was it wise @jamie_jane ?) asked me if Dolores LaChapelle brought me to the San Juans. And back then I didn’t know what to say, but now I think that might be true. You, like me, might know Dolores because of DEEP POWDER SNOW, her weird, skinny book about skiing. She gets pegged as a ski bum evangelist. But really she was an environmental philosopher, digging through history and religion and ecology to try to come up with a framework for how to live connected to place, and an understanding of why it was important. She just thought skiing showed her how to get there. Her thinking helped me put the pieces of the book together and being out in these mountains helped me think about it all for myself. by @hhansman

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4 months ago

Do you, like me, say F it I’m going to live in a cabin in the woods at least three times a week these days? Like that would be the dream. It’s not my fault. I grew up near Walden Pond, so I was indoctrinated into thinking off the grid hermitude was cool early. But lately that fantasy has been getting stronger. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the current state of the world or the way my hand twitches straight to my phone every eight seconds. Anyways. In my obsession with that idea, at some point I found WOODSWOMAN, Anne LaBastille’s book about her life at her Adirondack cabin she built in 1964: guiding people into the woods, writing by the lake, taking skinny dipping breaks, watching the seasons change. Exactly that dream. But Anne wasn’t just a misanthropic hermit, like some people(ahem, Thoreau). At the cabin she was also tracking climate change, working for the EPA, crafting policy to protect endangered birds. She was independent and capable and outside all the time, but she was also changing things. Did I mention I got obsessed with her life? And went on a sneaky mission to find her hidden cabin site(that’s where the pics are from). I loved the dreaminess, but also the work, because it showed me an example of how to live a good life outside. Anne added some depth to Georgie’s story, she was another kind of hero, and she became the next piece of the book. by @hhansman

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4 months ago

OK, more book origin stories: I love this picture of Georgie White, which I found taped up on the boathouse wall the night before I headed into the Grand Canyon to do research about her. I’d never been down there and I felt like I needed to see it before I could really understand her story. Georgie is sort of a mythic creature in river world: The first female Grand guide, the only woman down there for decades. She was known for her leopard print outfits (hides the grease), her hot boatman(exclusively firemen who called her mother), and her habit of blasting through the gut of rapids. I’d never really had heroes but based on the few things I knew she seemed like a good one because she seemed tough and cool and sure of what she wanted. But beneath the rim I learned that she was more complicated than that: reckless and mean. Shitty to other women. Prone to bending the truth. But also fully dedicated to the canyon, and groundbreaking in how she helped other people fall in love with it, too. And maybe I’d never had a hero because that idea of idolizing someone is inherently kind of messed up. So down in the canyon my idea of her got more complicated, but it also got more interesting, and it launched me down a bunch of wormholes about why she might have been defensive and mean, and gatekeeping on public land, and why so many of us are obsessed with wilderness. by @hhansman

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4 months ago

Fierce Country (my new book, have I told you about it🙃?) comes out six weeks from today. And in the nervous lead up to pub day I’ve been thinking a lot about where a book comes from, and where this one in particular came from.

I’m probably 23 in this picture. It’s one of the first summers after I moved west. I’m on a Cataract Canyon trip with dudes I guided with, trying to prove myself as a boater. Scared shitless (and very loosely rigged. yikes.) but mindblown by canyon. I wanted to stay down there forever.

I knew that everything I was feeling—the place, the stories, the way I felt like I had to prove myself as the only girl—seemed important, but back then I couldn’t explain why.

Now, almost two decades later, I have a better sense of why it all felt important. And those were the things I was trying to pull together as I worked through this book: Who gets to feel comfortable outside, which women I could have looked up to then, why places like that are important and what it’ll take to hold onto them.

So I think what I’m saying is that this book has been in the works for far, far longer than I realized, and a lot of things are coming to the surface now. by @hhansman

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4 months ago

Technology, bots, and private contractors are reshaping access to America’s public lands.

Journalist @hhansman 's reporting started with a question familiar to many boaters, hikers, and campers: Why do permits on rec.gov disappear almost instantly? And what she found was that automated tools may be skewing access while agencies face staffing cuts and reduced resources to manage and enforce the rules.

“They’re definitely bots in the system and that’s creating these big equity issues that the government contractor, who’s making a lot of money, isn’t addressing,” said Hansman.

🔗 Read more on our website, linked in our bio
✍️ @hhansman. Co-published with @wired
📸 Tory Robinson and Thomas Graves
📫 Subscribe to our newsletter for more reporting on public lands at the link in our bio by @hhansman

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5 months ago