The Honest Wilderness Is Here available

There is a strange moment that comes when something you have carried privately for a long time finally becomes something other people can hold in their hands.

For me, that moment is here.

The Honest Wilderness: Finding Daniel Boone and the Frontier Within is officially available.

This book grew out of miles walked, places visited, old stories followed, journal pages filled, questions I could not leave alone, and a period of my own life when I was trying to understand where I had been—and what, exactly, I was supposed to carry forward.

It eventually led me toward Daniel Boone.

Not because I set out to write a traditional biography of Boone. I didn't.

And not because I believe the answers to modern life are somehow hiding in the eighteenth century.

What interested me was something more human.

Boone spent much of his life moving toward uncertain country. Again and again, the familiar gave way to something he could not fully see from where he stood. The deeper I went into that history, the more I began seeing a mirror—not between our lives, but between the questions raised by the landscapes we each had to cross.

What happens when the life you understood no longer fits?

What do you keep?

What do you leave behind?

And how do you continue when the next part of the map has not been drawn yet?

Those questions became the foundation of The Honest Wilderness.

History You Can Walk Into

Project Mindfully Outdoors has increasingly become about going to the ground itself.

I want to see the roads.

Walk the trails.

Stand where pieces of the story happened.

Read the history, then get outside the page and see what the landscape adds to it.

That approach shaped this book.

American frontier history provides part of its backbone, but The Honest Wilderness is also memoir. The historical story and my own experience move alongside one another, occasionally crossing, sometimes challenging each other, and ultimately asking the same larger question:

What can the places and stories behind us reveal about the way we move forward?

That is where the idea of the frontier within came from.

The geographic frontier changed. Roads replaced traces. Towns grew where wilderness once stood. Maps filled in.

But uncertainty did not disappear.

Neither did loss, change, fear, identity, resilience, or the need to occasionally step beyond what has become familiar.

The frontier simply became harder to see.

This Book Came From the Field

A lot of The Honest Wilderness began far away from a desk.

It came from hiking.

From sitting beside water.

From historic sites and forgotten roads.

From carrying notebooks into the woods.

From looking at a landscape and wondering what had happened there before I arrived.

It also came from years spent working as an EMT, where life has a way of becoming very immediate very quickly.

Those experiences have shaped the way I think about resilience.

Not as a slogan.

Not as pretending everything is fine.

And not as some heroic ability to simply push through everything.

Sometimes resilience is much quieter than that.

Sometimes it is paying attention.

Sometimes it is recognizing where you actually are.

Sometimes it is admitting that the old route is gone and beginning the uncomfortable work of finding another one.

That is the territory this book explores.

The Book Is Only One Part of the Story

One of the things I value most about this project is that it does not have to remain trapped between two covers.

The same questions behind The Honest Wilderness continue through The Honest Outdoors, the Project Mindfully Outdoors podcast, where history, field experience, memoir, and conversation have room to stretch beyond what could fit into the book.

The book tour is now underway as well.

That means the project is moving into libraries, bookstores, author events, conversations with readers, and the kinds of places where the story changes again because other people bring their own experiences to it.

That part matters to me.

A book may begin with one person writing it, but once it leaves that person's hands, the meaning is no longer entirely theirs.

Every reader brings something different to the trail.

Available Now

The Honest Wilderness: Finding Daniel Boone and the Frontier Within is available now.

Signed copies are available directly through Project Mindfully Outdoors.

Digital editions are available through Apple Books, Kindle, and Google Books, with print editions also available through book retailers.

If you are joining me at one of the stops on The Honest Wilderness Book Tour, copies will also be available at participating events and locations.

This is the first time I get to say this without adding coming soon, preorder, or release day afterward:

The book is here.

And for everything that went into getting it to this point, that feels worth sitting with for a moment.

Then we keep walking.