Almost Somewhere

Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail

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Suzanne Roberts, Virginia Wolf: Almost Somewhere (AudiobookFormat, 2017, Tantor Audio)

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Published Sept. 26, 2017 by Tantor Audio.

ISBN:
978-1-5414-6411-7
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4 stars (1 review)

It was 1993, Suzanne Roberts had just finished college, and when her friend suggested they hike California’s John Muir Trail, the adventure sounded like the perfect distraction from a difficult home life and thoughts about the future. But she never imagined that the twenty-eight-day hike would change her life. Part memoir, part nature writing, part travelogue, Almost Somewhere is Roberts’s account of that hike.

John Muir had written of the Sierra Nevada as a “vast range of light,” and this was exactly what Roberts was looking for. But traveling with two girlfriends, one experienced and unflappable and the other inexperienced and bulimic, she quickly discovered that she needed a new frame of reference. Her story of a month in the backcountry—confronting bears, snowy passes, broken equipment, injuries, and strange men—is as much about finding a woman’s way into outdoor experience as it is about the natural world she so eloquently …

4 editions

reviewed Almost somewhere by Suzanne Roberts (Outdoor lives series)

Review of 'Almost somewhere' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

The first two thirds of this book were unbearable. Roberts comes across as whiney and spoilt, and not in a self-conscious, self-deprecating way. Her complaining about Erika in particular really annoyed me. I've met a few Erikas in my life, and I can certainly imagine how they might make vexing hiking companions, but Roberts was not giving her any chance, I could not help but feel she was being unfair.

I pushed on anyway, partly because, irritated though I was, I did want to find out what happened at the end, and partly because of some awareness on my part that my feelings might have arisen from some entrenched sexism. After all, Bill Bryson was just as whiney in his A Walk in the Woods, and I'd enjoyed that book enough to read it twice. The final third of this book was much better. I'm not really certain why. It …