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    Lost In My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park
    Unavailable
    Lost In My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park
    Unavailable
    Lost In My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    Lost In My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park

    Written by Tim Cahill

    Narrated by Tim Cahill

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    "Let's get lost together . . . "

    Lost in My Own Backyard brings acclaimed author Tim Cahill together with one of his-and America's-favorite destinations: Yellowstone, the world's first national park. Cahill has been "puttering around in the park" for a quarter of a century, slowly covering its vast scope and exploring its remote backwoods. So does this mean that he knows what he's doing? Hardly. "I live fifty miles from the park," says Cahill, "but proximity does not guarantee competence. I've spent entire afternoons not knowing exactly where I was, which is to say, I was lost in my own backyard."

    Cahill stumbles from glacier to geyser, encounters wildlife (some of it, like bisons, weighing in the neighborhood of a ton), muses on the microbiology of thermal pools, gets spooked in the mysterious Hoodoos, sees moonbows arcing across waterfalls at midnight, and generally has a fine old time walking several hundred miles while contemplating the concept and value of wilderness. Mostly, Cahill says, "I have resisted the urge to commit philosophy. This is difficult to do when you're alone, twenty miles from the nearest road, and you've just found a grizzly bear track the size of a pizza."

    Divided into three parts-"The Trails," which offers a variety of favorite day hikes; "In the Backcountry," which explores three great backcountry trails very much off the beaten track; and "A Selected Yellowstone Bookshelf," an annotated bibliography of his favorite books on the park-this is a hilarious, informative, and perfect guide for Yellowstone veterans and first-timers alike. Lost in My Own Backyard is adventure writing at its very best.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJun 8, 2004
    ISBN9780739308677
    Unavailable
    Lost In My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park
    Author

    Tim Cahill

    Coming off the back of the Socceroos victorious 2015 AFC Asian Cup campaign, Tim Cahill, 35, is Australia's top goal scorer of all time. He has also scored the most goals by an Australian at World Cups, with five to his name, including a jaw-dropping left foot volley against The Netherlands in Porto Alegre at the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.

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    Reviews for Lost In My Own Backyard

    3.5/5

    60 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Tim Cahill's "Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park" is a pretty quick read. It was fun to read about the places I saw during our trip out there several years ago. I'm one of the .7 percent of annual visitors who overnight in the backcountry. As such, I really enjoyed Cahill's three backpacking stories and those by far were the best part of this book. I found the daytripping stories (mostly focused on areas you can reach by car) to be a bit on the dull side.Glad I read this little book, but it didn't make me want to read others in the series.
    • 4/5
      Excellent example of a fresh view of an obvious location. The author has lived next door for 25 years and tells a personal story of why Yellowstone matters - both on the surface as a tourist sees it and behind the scenes and off the trail in the backcountry.
    • 5/5
      Great little, gift sized, conversational, go to Yellowstone and get outside book. I think Crown gave Cahill an advance the size of which just isn't done any more. Fun little read. Makes me want to go to Yellowstone soon.
    • 3/5
      I enjoy Cahill's authorial voice very much. He makes me grin a lot. This walking tour of Yellowstone was a lot of fun. It was too short! I've never been to Yellowstone, and Cahill made me want to throw a change of clothes in my backpack and just go. His nature descriptions shine here, you can hear the elk bugling. A fun little book.
    • 4/5
      I'm a fan of being prepared. As such, I've decided to start reading books about Yellowstone National Park in preparation for a trip next year. (Likely over half a year away, to be not really exact.) She who is prepared is - uhh... Something profound goes here. :)I thought this book would be a great choice to begin with. It's full of short vignettes of Tim Cahill's experiences in and around Yellowstone. He also discusses some history of the park, and overall, I felt that it was a great introduction for someone planning to visit. It was entertaining and informative but it's not a substitute for a guidebook, as other reviewers have noted, though he wasn't going for that. In the back of the book, he provides suggestions on other reading, including guidebooks that he likes. Of course, some of these will be out-of-date eight years after the book was published.After reading the book, I have a couple of places in mind that I definitely want to visit while I'm out there. This book served its purpose for me. I plan on rereading it after I come back from Yellowstone, not only to compare my experiences, but also to re-imagine his with pictures in my mind of what the places actually look like.
    • 3/5
      A really excellent book if you're going to visit Yellowstone, as it's actually more of a travel guide than a travel book, like the rest of his books. Lower on the adventure quotient, but it's a short book and a quick, easy read.
    • 4/5
      Do you remember when you first discovered your backyard? One’s excitement overflows as he follows inch worms, finds four leaf clovers, and climbs maple trees. Before long, one might begin to look over the fence at a neighbor’s backyard. By the age of eight, I was allowed to roam the entire neighborhood as long as I remained mindful of my dad’s whistling distance. (Like a cell phone, I knew my coverage area.)Author Tim Cahill lives 50 miles north of Yellowstone National Park and considers this his backyard. And what a backyard! One can spend a lifetime discovering the 2.22 million acres of mountains and valleys filled with geysers, mud pots, and thermal springs. In the past 25 years, Cahill has done just that.Cahill’s book, Lost In My Own Backyard, isn’t a guide book, but rather an answer to frequent Yellowstone questions. For instance, “How close is too close to a bison?” Um, silly question, but Cahill claims common sense lacking in some tourist. He has a special name for those who edge closer and closer to a bison for that amazing, once-in-a-lifetime shot, “instamatic injury.” He adds, “If the tail goes up it means either charge or discharge.”I feel in love with Cahill’s style of writing. He talks to the reader such as an actor, who faces the camera, might tell a plot twist. In the first section of the book titled, “Trails,” he employs his mini-me as a discussion partner on the trail. On the Mt. Washburn trail we overhear older Cahill telling younger, know-it-all self, how not to be a “dumb butt” as they view the “embarrassment of wonders” which is the park.In the second section titled, “In the Backcountry,” the reader visits the park few have ever seen. Cahill says out of a billion visitors a year, 99.2% never venture into the backcountry for an overnight stay. Could it be all those “Beware of Bear” signs? Cahill is one of the few who have seen rare moonbows, petrified forests and odd faces in the hoodoo formations while walking the outback.To my librarian’s delight, his last section is titled, “A Selected Yellowstone Bookshelf.” His shelves contain guidebooks, trail maps, and educational books associated with the park, such as biology, history, and geology. The first book mentioned, Lonely Planet Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks, just happens to include his written forward.I highly recommend this humorous book to anyone about to explore America’s first backyard, Yellowstone National Park.