Releasing October 21, 2024
Waking Up in the Wilderness: A Yellowstone Journey
Waking Up in the Wilderness: A Yellowstone Journey
Encounter | Experience | Explore
Available October 21!
Waking Up in the Wilderness: A Yellowstone Journey
Are you an armchair traveler, an outdoor adventurer, or a national park enthusiast? Are you ready to trek across Yellowstone through the pages of a book?
If so, this may be the book for you.
It’s more than an adventure story about me and my family doing what we love in a place we love with people we love. It’s a sign pointing beyond all that and saying, “Look at this!” so you can see what there is to see for yourself.
For You: A Glimpse into Waking Up in the Wilderness
Get the prologue + first 3 chapters here!
Encounter | Experience | Explore
Experience Yellowstone for Yourself.
Waking up in the Wilderness invites you to embark on a four-decade journey into Yellowstone National Park. Travel with Natalie Ogbourne as she navigates the fine line between isolation and solitude—on the road, on the trail, and in life. Encounter the park’s inseparable dangers and delights. Explore Yellowstone through each of its seasons—hiking, canoeing, fly fishing, snowmobiling, and camping along the way. Experience the transformational power of its wilderness.
It’s said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Or the rotation of a tire. Or the turn of a page.
Let’s go to Yellowstone.
Natalie Ogbourne is known to some as a “girl who went to Yellowstone and never really came back.” A former park employee and longtime return visitor, she’s been helping Yellowstone visitors plan their time in the park since 1987. She has exactly one athletic bone in her body, and it happily divides its time between hiking and downhill skiing. Natalie and her husband enjoy heading into wildernesses of all kinds together and with their grown kids.
Responses to Waking Up in the Wilderness
“Natalie Ogbourne is a long-standing citizen of the Yellowstone Nation, and in Waking Up in the Wilderness she chronicles the richly rewarding arts, skills, and wisdoms she has earned in many seasons of watching “Yellowstone being Yellowstone.” Her enthusiastic and affable tales of exploring the park display not only good sense but an admirable humility in the face of Yellowstone’s wonders.”
–Paul Schullery, author of Mountain Time, Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness, and The Bear Doesn’t Know: Life and Wonder in Bear Country.
“Natalie Ogbourne’s Waking Up in the Wilderness takes us on adventures where the epic wild majesty of Yellowstone National Park is as much a character as Ogbourne and her family. From the bison and bear that prowl the landscape, to the trails threaded through deep pinewoods, to the author’s beloved Old Faithful Inn where her journeys in this magic place first began. This account of Ogbourne’s repeated pilgrimages to Yellowstone illuminates a place where the wilderness and civilization interact in a very intimate and strange way, like the dynamic landscape in Yellowstone itself. Through this lens of forays into this special place, Ogbourne shows readers the mercies of nature, love, passing time, and family.”
—Nicholas Trandahl, award-winning poet, author of Mountain Song and Purgatory
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.” ~ John Muir