Get Ready for a Great Year Outdoors

Image Gallery Winter temperatures may be frightful, but don’t isolate yourself indoors all season long. Bundle up, take a hike and breathe in the crisp, cold air. You’ll be surprised at the wonders you encounter and how they lift your spirits. KONRAD WOTHE/MINDEN PICTURES

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Winter: It has its wonders, no question. But let’s face it: In most regions, there are downsides — gray skies, chill winds and icy precipitation. As much as you enjoy the outdoors, you can expect to spend too many hours rained out, snowed in or otherwise cooped up this time of year.

But just because winter is the nature lover’s off-season doesn’t mean it has to be the season of the sofa. Here are some things you can do now to nurture your love of nature, feed your dreams of sunnier days and prepare for your best year ever exploring the great outdoors.

Fireside Reading

Sometimes all it takes is a good book to transport you beyond your confines and into the natural world. Curl up near a fire on a blustery winter’s day, open to page one, and presto — off you go, buoyed by the words of writers who have a knack for opening our eyes to the planet’s wonders.

I offer here a list of my own favorites, plus samples from a few of them; over the years I’ve come to consider these books good friends. Some are classics, some contemporary; some are well-known, others not so.

The Travels of William Bartram by William Bartram

The Journals of Lewis and Clark by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis

Broadsides From the Other Orders: A Book of Bugs by Sue Hubbell

Biophilia by Edward O. Wilson

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Another Country by Christopher Camuto

On The Wild Edge by David Petersen

A Natural History of North American Trees by Donald Culross Peattie

The Night Country by Loren Eiseley

A Dazzle of Dragonflies by Forrest L. Mitchell and James L. Lasswell

Camping and Woodcraft by Horace Kephart

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

Swampwalker’s Journal by David M. Carroll

“Boulders swelled up from the turf like huge white puff balls, and there was a flash of lightning off to the south that lit for one blue, glistening instant a hundred miles of churning, shifting landscape. I have thought since that each stone, each tree, each ravine and crevice echoing and re-echoing with thunder tells us more at such an instant than any daytime vision of the road we travel.” — Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“No matter what we do or do not see, hear, smell, or collect on a given outing, the result is always the same: when we are walking quietly in the woods alone, the weight and woes of our purely personal and human concerns fall away unnoticed. The walker is transported, expanded into the more-than-human world … where we all came from and, in our deepest heart of hearts, continue to belong.” — David Petersen, On The Wild Edge

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