The Last Empty Places

By the author of Astoria. 

In The Last Empty Places, bestselling author Peter Stark takes the reader to four of the most remote, wild, and unpopulated areas of the United States outside of Alaska and mainly not part of protected wilderness: the rivers and forests of Northern Maine; the rugged, unpopulated region of Western Pennsylvania that lies only a short distance from the East’s big cities; the haunting canyons of Central New Mexico; and the vast, arid basins of Southeast Oregon.

Stark discovers that the places he visits are only "blank" in terms of a lack of recorded history. In fact, each place holds layers of history, meaning, and intrinsic value and is far from being blank. He also finds that each region has played an important role in shaping our American idea of wilderness through the influential "natural philosophers" who visited these places and wrote about their experiences--Henry David Thoreau, William Bartram, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold. It’s a fascinating look at the value of nature, the ways humans use and approach it, and what it means to seek out empty places in today’s world.

This reprint of a book originally published by Ballantine Books in 2010 is an exploration of the places that appear empty on maps of the United States. Peter Stark travels to northern Maine, western Pennsylvania, southeastern Oregon, and the high desert of New Mexico, sometimes with his family and sometimes solo, to see how empty these places are. As he writes of his experiences, he also brings in the history of these areas as well as ruminations on the impact of Thoreau, Leopold, Muir and John and William Bartram on the way we view wilderness. At the beginning of each section, there are two or three maps, one showing the general area and the others being of the area being explored. Each of these include an inset of the area at night, showing the lack of light pollution which is how the areas were selected. In selecting the wild places to explore, he tried to avoid selecting national parks or designated federal wilderness areas (though one wilderness area was selected).