" Yosemite Falls is a book for which I've been waiting: a history of Yosemite National Park that becomes a history of California, refracted through the lens of myth and family. It also represents a culmination, in which Duane stakes his claim as contemporary chronicler of the Golden State, with all the complexity and contradiction such a role requires. Duane is a fluid writer, able to move from John Muir to the largely forgotten figure of Ishi to himself as both adult and child." --David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times " Yosemite Falls is the mountain book we've all been waiting for. It's the great, big, sad, and funny update to the John-Muir-Jack-Kerouac-Cheryl-Strayed epic of California life outdoors. Nobody else but Dan Duane could tell a can't-put-it-down story that weaves together freaking out on El Cap with the question of whether his dad's best friend was an asshole, burning religious scripture on the Muir Trail with the possibility that the California genocides might have been Muir's own fault. Duane was already the underground GOAT of Yosemite writers.

Yosemite Falls makes it official. This book is Duane's masterpiece: serious as a heart-attack, full of love and rage and, like Dan himself, always ready to hug it out." --Jimmy Chin, mountaineer and Academy Award-winning director of Free Solo " Yosemite Falls flays open the dark history of a beloved national park with diamond-sharp prose that will make you question so many more of our founding myths. Along the way, Daniel Duane flays himself open too, as he sets out to walk the famous John Muir trail and finds the most difficult terrain to be the one inside himself. Yosemite Falls takes us past wildflower meadows, through storms, up epic climbing pitches, and then back through time; like any revelatory outdoor adventure, you won't want this book to end." --Caroline Paul, New York Times -bestselling author of Why Fly and The Gutsy Girl " Yosemite Falls is an exhilarating book about climbing--in particular, climbing the legendary peaks of California's Sierras--but it's also about making your way through the peaks and valleys of life. For Daniel Duane's father, climbing was a religion, and, in his own path from son to dad, Duane struggles to reconcile not just his father's zealous adulation of death-defying climbs and climbers, but the myth of California, a genocidal terrain camouflaged by scenic beauty. In Yosemite Falls , Duane learns how to listen to the land, to the past, and to the people around him--in the end, making life at sea level that much more beautiful.

" --Robert Sullivan, author of Double Exposure "Fans of Duane's writing will recognize his evocative storytelling, fine irony, and intimate knowledge of the outdoors. A lifetime in the making, Yosemite Falls is a captivating blend of introspection and unvarnished history. A revelatory and deeply moving examination of California's so-called 'wilderness.'" --Rosanna Xia, author of California Against the Sea "I always knew I loved Yosemite, but it took this book, and its reckoning with our painful past, for me to understand the depth of that love, which I now know to be unconditional. I've rarely read anything that made me ponder so much." --Tommy Caldwell, rock climber and author of The Push Praise for Caught Inside : "[Duane is] an ontologist of dudedom, Henry David Thoreau doing aerials on a fiberglass board." Will Blythe, Esquire.