Listening Point

Many people have a special place where they go to experience nature. Perhaps it is a cabin, or a campsite, or a favorite hiking trail. For Sigurd Olson it was a bare glaciated spit of rock in the magnificent Quetico-Superior country of northern Minnesota. He called it his Listening Point, and it is at the center of his book of the same name.Listening Point is Olson's second book, with over 40,000 copies sold in hardcover. Strikingly illustrated with drawings by Francis Lee Jaques, this book tells the story of Olson's Listening Point from his first night sleeping there under the stars to the eventual building of a cabin. "From this one place I would explore the entire north and all life, including my own", he writes. "For me it would be a listening-post from which I might even hear the music of the spheres".Through deeply personal stories, Olson brings life in the woods alive. He traces the history of a fallen leaf, explains the power of a canoe paddle cutting through the water, and the magic of listening to the rain pour on his tent flaps."Listening Point is dedicated to recapturing this almost forgotten sense of wonder and learning from rocks and trees and all the life that is found there, truths that can encompass all", he writes. "Through a vein of rose quartz at its tip can be read the geological history of the planet, from an old pine stump the ecological succession of the plant kingdom, from an Indian legend the story of the dreams of all mankind".Considered by some to contain Olson's most vivid and moving passages, Listening Point is the nature lover's companion for hearing the depth and beauty of the great outdoors."With a poet's lyric voice, a guide's authorityand a warrior's commitment to his beloved canoe country wilderness, Sig Olson became the 'Voice of the North' to a generation of readers. He stands comfortably among the pantheon of great American nature writers -- Thoreau and Muir, Burroughs and Krutch, Leopold, Eiseley and Teale; but like one of his great sentinel pines, he also stands alone". Douglas Wood, author of Old Turtle