No folks, it’s not a warning and -contrary to popular belief- I still have most of my marbles..

However, this book: Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors

Is well worth a read. Those of us who’ve taken the professional route in arb or forestry are increasingly separated from the outdoors by the neccessity of producing reports, meetings, emails and the endless phone calls and other minutiae that make up most of our days.

The point is that we don’t get to spend much time doing what enthused most of us in the first place i.e being out in the woods and breathing that ‘as yet sweet and lucid air’ as Edmund Abbey had it.

Neccessarily we often have to take those pleasures vicariously and this book gives us an opportunity to do just that.

Phillip Connors is employed for half the year as a wilderness lookout (a fire watcher essentially) in the heart of the Gila Wilderness in Southwest New Mexico. The Gila Wilderness is on a scale most of us in the UK will be lucky to experience once in a lifetime. 872 square miles with no roads, no buildings, motorised transport, construction, mining etc etc. A true wilderness.

The book is a result of over a decade of experience in the role of lookout and is at once wonderfully introspective while providing a history of a now vanishing occupation.

It also documents the history of the Gila Wilderness in part and the changing attitudes to fire as part of the ecosystem rather than an evil to be stamped out at all costs. The evolution of ecological concepts particularly in the case of Aldo Leopold makes fascinating reading. Abbey, Muir, Thoreau, Leopold etc all get in on the act somewhere in the book with Kerouac getting an honorary mention as a former lookout himself.

The book is nicely summed up by the Associated Post: ‘Reading this book is like taking a vacation in beautiful scenery with an observant and clever guide. So relax and enjoy’.

Couldn’t say it better myself.