.As an outdoor writer for over 20 years, I set out to return American outdoor writing to its storied past of wilderness and native Americans and away from today’s passionless commentary. In doing so, I researched aspects of nature rooted deep in our heritage. The places I hike to uncover this nature lore became the High Ground series guidebooks, published by my own imprint – Virgin Pines Press.

The High Ground series looks to untouched and secret places and the ideas they hold. Nothing in these books is secondhand. We talk to native Americans personally about nature, not just talk about them. We don’t repeat what others have written about foxfire or ginseng or bear trails, but speak from years of seeing these things.

The phrase “virgin pines” refers to old-growth evergreen forest.  From a hike among virgin Fraser Fir in North Carolina’s Black Mountains in High Ground I to a hike in High Ground III past a Rocky Mountain Englemann Spruce marked by the rope marks of Indian horsemen, my wife and I have traveled the unspoiled places.

I learned to write as a teenager, working in longhand with a pen and absorbing the sentence elements of Ernest Hemingway.  I embellished his simple clarity through some of the imagery and metaphor I learned from my poetry, published in England and Australia.  With my study of Hemingway, I absorbed his ethic of first living what one writes and producing an original and honest accounting.

As an outdoorsman, I embarked on countless camping trips and angling journeys with my flyfishing father, living the Pennsylvania life of devotion to outdoor sports.  The close observation of flyfishing became the close observation of wildflower and herb hunting, natural foods, tree identification and, after years, a sense of the interwoven meaning of the outside world.

In the part of southwestern Pennsylvania where I grew up, downstream from where the Ohio River forms in Pittsburgh, a current of Appalachian culture runs deep.  The attachment to hills and hollows there, and the acceptance of whatever nature provides, flows onward through southern Ohio and into Kentucky with cultural elements such as raccoon dogs and ginseng hunting.  This perspective is shunned by Pittsburghers, who struggle to maintain a distance from the organic enlightenment it offers. Yet, the scheme of high and low ground will always define that place, as will the coal and lime that the early immigrants melded into steel.  In the same way, the everyday steps in these chapters meld into symbols of self for those who follow them.