Miyo McGinn conducts a circuitous Q and A with \u201cThe Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere\u201d author Nicholas Triolo.<\/p>\n
The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere by Nicholas Triolo. Milkweed Editions, 2025. 224 pages.<\/p>\n
NICK TRIOLO AND I first met while working as editors at outdoor lifestyle magazines: Trail Runner (him) and Outside (me). Owned by the same parent company, both publications traffic in a very specific type of adventure narrative\u2014tales of people performing never-before-seen athletic feats, going to extremes of distance, speed, height, and effort. Reading Triolo\u2019s recently published memoir The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere, I had no trouble believing that the visceral, place-based prose was written by the same thoughtful journalist I\u2019d worked with a few years earlier. But I was struck by the antidote it offered, not just to endurance athletes navigating a personal-achievement-oriented subculture but also to anyone grappling with fundamental human questions in an era of climate crisis, fascism, and unchecked capitalism: how can we find a way to heal our relationships with the land, one another, and ourselves?<\/p>\n
The Way Around offers circumambulation as an altogether different mode of exploration, a compassionate and curious alternative to summiting literal and metaphorical peaks. If you already know the definition of the word \u201ccircumambulate,\u201d congratulations\u2014your vocabulary is superior to my own. For those of us still learning, I googled it: \u201ccircumambulate\u201d means, well, what its component parts suggest it\u2019d mean. To walk, or ambulate, in a circle. It\u2019s also a practice of attendance, reflection, and grieving found in many world religions, from revolving kora at Buddhist temples to Muslim pilgrims circling their sacred sites at Mecca.<\/p>\n
Triolo\u2019s book engages with this practice, bringing the reader along for a trio of circuits: Mount Kailash in Tibet, Mount Tamalpais in Northern California, and the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana. In Hindu cosmology, Kailash\u2019s peak is the sacred home of the gods Shiva and Parvati, while Vajrayana Buddhists believe the Buddha Demchock resides there\u2014in both faiths, as well as local Jain and Bon religions, it is taboo for humans to ascend to the summit. Tamalpais is the site of a long-running pilgrimage started decades ago by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And the Berkeley Pit is a mile-long former open pit mine and part of the largest Superfund site in the world, filled with water that kills any bird that lands on its surface in mere minutes. Over the course of each journey, Triolo draws on literature, history, and ecology to understand the complex connections between people, places, and the paths they walk through them.<\/p>\n
The two of us met up to walk a short circuit of our own not long after the book\u2019s publication in July, a three-mile loop around Green Lake in north Seattle. Our conversation followed a similarly circuitous route, traversing peaks both literal and figurative, shapes of movement and thought, and questions like \u201cWhat is the sort of dreaming that can happen at the lip of a trash fire?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a4<\/p>\n
MIYO MCGINN: Before we really get going, I just want to say that, after reading dozens of memoirs by mountaineers while I was an editor at <\/strong>Outside<\/strong>, one of my first reactions when I started <\/strong>The Way Around<\/strong> was \u201cWow, it\u2019s so refreshing to read a book about the Himalayas that isn\u2019t about climbing the 8,000-meter peaks.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n NICHOLAS TRIOLO:<\/strong> Ha, yeah. And that\u2019s exactly what made me interested in going to Kailash. You rarely hear about a mountain that people visit specifically not to summit, especially in our endurance sport world. But it ended up being complicated too, and I think I address this in the chapter, because I used the privilege of my passport to visit an occupied land to have a spiritual experience. And, by going to the farthest place I could possibly go, I summited a peak in the figurative sense in Tibet. It was an extreme. Without walloping readers over the head with that fact, that turned out to be a blind spot that started me curling back towards home for the rest of the book.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t a book explicitly critiquing endurance sport culture, but the contrast is definitely there for anyone familiar with that scene. For someone coming to<\/strong> The Way Around<\/strong> from a different background, how is it different, psychologically, to summit a mountain versus circling it?<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the central questions of this book is \u201chow do the shapes we travel in turn shape us?\u201d It\u2019s a conversation about our fixation with the \u201ctop,\u201d with linearity, with results. You know, King of the Mountain, human exceptionalism, extracting what we need from a place, plugging it into our training logs, and continuing to the next objective. I think that that attitude comes from a place of fear. In a time when our weather and politics are volatile\u2014and are only getting more so\u2014this fear ends up putting us in conversations that are quite linear and quite results-oriented, where we always need to be going someplace. If we\u2019re not advancing to the next frontier, then we\u2019re becoming invisible. If we\u2019re not progressing, we\u2019re failing.<\/p>\n So, what about a circle?<\/strong><\/p>\n An important part of it is curiosity. I think focusing only on the tops of things cultivates a lack of curiosity. And in this time of collapse and total uncertainty, I\u2019ve been asking myself: how do we find a shape that feels like home?<\/p>\n The more I did these circumambulations, what started as a pretty contrived countershape to summit fever ended up being a way into really understanding the shapes that are beneath the stories we follow in life. A circle feels deeply compassionate and egalitarian. The center is nowhere; it\u2019s a welcome shape. There\u2019s space for uncertainty in my story and anyone else\u2019s. It feels multicultural, it feels decolonial, it feels curious. It feels more playful.<\/p>\n Speaking of \u201cwelcome shapes\u201d: all of your walks were in the company of other people. You could have walked alone, but instead each journey was really communal in the true, messy sense of the word. You didn\u2019t necessarily like everyone you were with (some of them were clearly super annoying). Was the choice to make these rounds with others intentional, or did it just sort of shake out that way?<\/strong><\/p>\n One of my mentors, William deBuys, really blew up the idea for me that environmentally focused writing is supposed to be devoid of humans. One part of the design of the book is that, in every round, there\u2019s an obvious center of gravity: Kailash, Tamalpais, the Pit. But as you read deeper into every round, there\u2019s a sort of shift that happens, where the gravitational center changes. It moves to include the grief of a character, or someone\u2019s healing, or the last wish of somebody who has committed their life to water quality. And then for me\u2014and this is a nerdy way of looking at it\u2014I picture characters as the boulders that hold up the riparian integrity of the narrative. As you build your story, you\u2019re in service to these people and their heart space and their complexity. They help the reader stay anchored in what\u2019s true, and it takes the spotlight off you in some ways, widens the circumference of what it means to be human.<\/p>\n The walk around the Berkeley Pit, a Superfund site next to a depressed former mining town, seemed like the least romantic of the three circuits you make in the book. It also seemed like it was the most fruitful. What made the Pit different?<\/strong><\/p>\n I think it was the scale. There was so much dissonance there between quick-grab profit, on one hand, and, on the other, ecological trauma on a literally geologic timescale. I\u2019ve done a lot of work around stopping gold mines; I made a little film on stopping a gold mine in Mexico in 2014. There, too, it\u2019s a quick hit\u2014and then we leave the detritus to someone else to figure out. Compare that to Kailash, where part of the draw was that it\u2019s a mountain that is untouched. It\u2019s against local custom to summit it, and I was interested in seeing what a mountain looked like when it was left alone. Tamalpais is urban-adjacent, and it felt lived in and a little humbler in some ways.<\/p>\n But the Pit felt like it just throttled me with that dissonance\u2014the quick profit and the perpetuity of the damage. It was uncanny. I think it\u2019s also a larger meditation on where we are right now. Every violation\u2014atmospheric, ecological, humanitarian\u2014is sending ripples of trauma back into the system.<\/p>\n I think a lot of people, myself included, sometimes shy away from actually trying to wrap our minds around the sheer scale of damage that you\u2019re describing. And reading about your experience wasn\u2019t exactly hopeful, in the \u201cit will all be alright\u201d sense of the word\u2014but it didn\u2019t make me despair either. The feeling that keeps coming to mind was \u201cbracing.\u201d Like, supportive.<\/strong><\/p>\n It could definitely be easy to look at this big pit and see an inverted, circumambulatory descent to hell, like Dante\u2019s Inferno. But it can also be [seen as] an ecosystem of possibility: a pit can be a seed of a fruit, a location of possible growth. I bring up that tension as an invitation not to consider it as just a grave but to ask, \u201cWhat is the sort of dreaming that can happen at the lip of a trash fire?\u201d I don\u2019t want it to sound like I\u2019m trying to make lemonade out of lemons here, but when you think about the scale we talked about, the emotional and psychological response is often despair. The scale of the geologic trauma is just stifling. And the repair is endless, at least by human standards. But what do we see here that can be instructive for building something better? I keep coming back to the word \u201chypertrophy\u201d\u2014as in, what is the muscle that\u2019s being built if we can actually stay with the loss? That\u2019s my working question right now.<\/p>\n Finding a way to stay with the loss of the Pit sounds like the process you went through with your mom after she was diagnosed with cancer, which you describe in the middle chapter.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, there\u2019s resonance there. It\u2019s about not overintellectualizing. Not going, \u201cI\u2019m not going to show up for you because I don\u2019t know how to solve this.\u201d Instead, I\u2019m just going to be here. And it\u2019s not being totally unemotional about it. The care is right at the edge, and the Pit rounds felt like an upgrade to my capacity to hold something really uncomfortable. We\u2019re in this increasingly uncomfortable environmental and political situation, and it\u2019s just going to get spicier. This is one of the ways that we can hold hard things without becoming robots, or becoming unfeeling. To hold hard things\u2014and hold our own spirits too.<\/p>\n Sometimes, in my own life, I\u2019ll describe my own thought patterns as circles, but in a bad way. Like I\u2019m brooding, or fixating on something that isn\u2019t helpful. I guess I\u2019m asking: is there a bad way to go in a circle?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, it\u2019s funny. In the last part of the book, I do talk a little bit about the language that\u2019s used often around going in circles. Like, we\u2019re \u201cnot going anywhere.\u201d Or \u201cwe\u2019re going mad,\u201d right?<\/p>\n There\u2019s a little anecdote in the book about a neighbor that had lost his way and literally was just walking in circles for hours in front of our apartment building. For several months. At one point, I felt that to be airing on crazy. And it was crazy, but it was also like a mystic, right there on the edge of both. Increasingly\u2014and this is coming from my personal experience\u2014I\u2019m convinced that even that feeling of eddying is important. It\u2019s a meditation.<\/p>\n So even if it doesn\u2019t feel fruitful in the moment, you still need to keep following the circle.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, I think so. Say, for example, that over the course of an evening together, my partner and I are having a hard time understanding each other\u2014we\u2019re talking in circles. And that shape becomes an asset for us, because it\u2019s pointing to how, more than arriving at a destination, we need to be slowing down to really hear and understand each other. Part of the book is trying to embody curiosity, and maybe, sometimes, it feels like our curiosity is spinning in place, like a top, because we\u2019re dealing with something really important that needs us to slow down.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n Nicholas Triolo<\/a> is a writer, filmmaker, photographer, activist, and long-distance trail runner. His writing and images have been featured in Orion, Outside, Terrain.org, and Trail Runner. He has directed two documentary films, The Crossing (2014) and Shaped by Fire (2016), and collaborated with Salomon on a film about touring and training Death Cab for Cutie front man Ben Gibbard. Triolo\u2019s films have been official selections for several international film festivals and featured on influential platforms such as Patagonia\u2019s The Dirtbag Diaries, Upworthy, and Outside. Triolo is based in Missoula, Montana.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n Featured image: Photo of Nicholas Triolo by Rio Chantel.<\/p>\n LARB Contributor<\/p>\n Miyo McGinn is a Seattle-based writer, editor, and journalist. Her work can be found in Outside, Grist, and High Country News, among other publications.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Copy link to articleLARB Staff Recommendations<\/p>\n Lisa Kwon talks with Sam Bloch about his new book \u201cShade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource.\u201d<\/p>\n Lisa Kwon<\/a>Jul 21<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Charley Burlock interrogates the myths surrounding wildfires, grief, and California’s supposed \u201cgasoline trees\u201d in an essay from LARB Quarterly no. 45: \u201cSubmission.\u201d<\/p>\n\n