The Mountain Knows the Mountain: A Fire Watch Diary

A poignant and ruminative work of creative nonfiction by the bestselling, National Outdoor Book Award-winning author of Fire Season. The Mountain Knows the Mountain tells the story of the writer's return to the Gila Wilderness for fire season after missing a year for multiple surgeries. Reminiscent in spirit and lyricism to great works from Peter Matthiesen, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, and Norman MacLean.

Multi-award-winning writer Philip Connors had been a fire watcher in the Gila Wilderness for fourteen straight summers when he sustained an injury and was forced to miss a year recovering. When he returned, he resolved to see the mountain with fresh eyes and to keep a detailed notebook.

The result is The Mountain Knows the Mountain, a meticulously observed experience of one fire season chronicled in haibun, the centuries-old prose form dating from Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior that recounts both inner and outer journeys and incorporates traditional haiku as an occasional element of narrative counterpoint. Though only a beginner in the practice of haiku, Connors deftly weaves close observation, personal reflection, and memory with hard-won knowledge of the forest, of the mountain, and of fire.

The Mountain Knows the Mountain is both mythic and immediate, a chronicle of daily events granular in their specificity but connected to larger themes of the observed world and the inner life of the observer. Connors captures the various moods of a long season on a mountain; plays with language and ways of seeing; and includes contributing perspectives from his partner, Mónica Ortiz Uribe, and his friend the late editor and publisher Bobby Byrd. Together with the author’s own simple drawings, the resulting snapshots offer incisive visions of how to be intimate with the wild.