BY KAREN BOSSICK

Kerrin McCall was wandering along Warm Springs Creek when a moose charged out of a willow thicket.

She and her Australian shepherd Treya beat a hasty retreat, then watched the moose from a safe distance.

“I love that even in this breaking world there are moose and mountain lions to scare me and ducks that wing whistle overhead at dusk, sweeping the neighborhood for any lingering remnants of light before settling into the night,” she would write later that evening.

That experience became one of many that Kerrin McCall shared in her book “Confluence: Season Notes from the Idaho Mountains.”

McCall will read from and discuss the book at 6 p.m. Tuesday, July 24, at Ketchum’s Community Library. A slide project of Idaho’s Mountain Landscape by Cheri Lenhart and Carl Metzler will welcome people as they arrive.

“My hope for this journal of seasons is to serve as a guide into the topography of the senses, a trail map of pathways to our neurological attunement to Earth and our own wild hearts,” said McCall. “Because many have been sleeping for years with the dysfunctional partners of complacency, material abundance and separation we are now on uneven terrain, losing our footing, ungrounded...”

McCall, who wrote the book “Cougar: Ghost of the Rockies” years ago, got the idea for this book from a book her grandmother sent her when she moved to the Sun Valley area in 1978.

The book—“Twelve Moons of the Year” by New York Times contributor Hal Borland—contained a year’s worth of short nature essays framed by the New England seasons.

“I loved the book and so, for many, many years I thought I would write one from my own experiences,” McCall recounted.

McCall embarked on that odyssey in September 2015, spending the next 12 months making notes about the natural world in which she ventured.

She wrote about “the jewel-like flash of an American Goldfinch flying across the periphery” of her vision, and she wrote about staging a reciprocal dialogue with the varied chortles, gurgles and clucks of a raven perched in the needled limbs of a Douglas fir.

Kerrin wrote about walking the shelf of freshly formed ice in December, listening to the language of ice as she tested the solidity of its freeze. And she wrote of watching a flock of Cedar Waxwings fly off, their yellow-tipped tails moving as one with a high trilled “zeeeee” after feasting on the dried crimson berries of a radiant crabapple.

She described how she had witnessed the shifting seasons, the changing timing of those seasons, the collapse of ecosystems, a haze in the distance and forests of dead trees over the 40 years she had lived in the Wood River Valley.

“Disheartened by the planet’s warming, her suffocation and gasping as the atmosphere became increasingly clogged with carbon, I thought any record would eventually be obsolete, a natural history inapplicable for future generations,” she wrote. “Then the obvious occurred to me: that disruption at the hand of humanity is precisely the reason to establish a record of an ecosystem’s condition.”

And, so, McCall began writing about the way the semi-urban mountain towns that make up Sun Valley, Ketchum, Hailey and Bellevue intersect and collide with nature. Kerrin wrote about how summer is longer and winters not cold enough. And she wrote about how she’s seen noxious weeds and invasive species take over, despite the community’s efforts to deal with them.

“Forty years ago there was knapweed. Now there’s A LOT of knapweed in the meadows and along the river. One of my sections even describes Treya trying to pull burrs out of her fur,” she said.

McCall said she hopes her essays will prompt readers to think about what they can do to preserve the incredible space in which they live.

“While I was writing, I realized that recreating in the outdoors is one thing but participating with the natural world is another dimension,” she said. “Wandering down by the river or up on a mountain, I realized that I am a part of the river or the mountain. We carry the earth with us and it carries us with it.”

Taking time to pause in nature, rather than being determined to reach the end of the trail, allows us to see such things as how rocks have their own identity in the way they’re shaped and the color they boast, she said. And simple acts, such as balancing rocks one upon another and watching them click into place, can lead us to ponder how we find our balance in the universe.

“Wandering with no intention other than to be there creates wonder,” she said. “Wandering is the precursor to wonder.”