BY KAREN BOSSICK
Several years ago, Craig Childs embarked on a quest to bike from the blinding lights of the Las Vegas Strip deep into the Nevada desert to one of the darkest spots in North America.
He has chronicled his journey in his 2025 book, “The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light.” And he will discuss it at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20, at Ketchum’s Community Library.
The book won the 2025 BANFF Mountain Book Award for Environmental Literature.
It’s a book that is at once an adventure story, a field guide and a celebration of wonder as he invites us to rediscover the heavens, asking, “What does it do to us to not see the night sky,” said Martha Williams, program and engagement director at The Community Library.
“Enchanting, mournful yet hopeful,” said a reviewer for Booklist. “Childs ruminates almost poetically on the ageless use of stellar navigation by all manner of species, from birds to grasshoppers to great human civilizations and what happens to them when the stars disappear.”
Craig Childs, who lives in Colorado, has written about cultural history, science, climate, nature and the visceral experience of living on Earth in more than a dozen published books. Those books include Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession (2010), House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest (2007), Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau and The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild (2007).
He’s won the Ellen Meloy Desert Writer’s Award, Reading the West Award, Orion Book Award, the Colorado Book Award, the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award.
Childs is currently a Writer-in-Residence at the historic Ernest and Mary Hemingway House, which is administered by The Community Library.
Reserve your seat at https://thecommunitylibrary.libcal.com/event/14468284. The presentation can also be watched online at https://vimeo.com/event/5456023. And it will be recorded to watch later on the Library Archive.