California Trees Wins National Outdoor Book Award

A celebration of craft, collaboration, and California’s native forests

Release from Backcountry Press

Kneeland, CA — Backcountry Press is honored to announce that California Trees: A Field Guide to the Native Species, co-authored by botanist Matt Ritter and ecologist Michael Kauffmann, has been awarded the 2025 National Outdoor Book Award (NOBA) in the Nature Guides category. This prestigious recognition celebrates excellence in outdoor writing and publishing—and affirms the enduring importance of California’s native tree flora.

Selected by NOBA for its clarity, scientific rigor, and exceptional design, California Trees offers a vibrant, accessible guide to all 95 native tree species found across the state. Through full-color photographs, detailed range maps, and clear botanical descriptions, the book illuminates the intricate stories of the trees that shape California’s landscapes—from coast redwoods brushed by Pacific fog to the whitebark pines standing resilient on alpine ridges.

September 16, 2025September 16, 2025

Finding Hope in Trees

An ancient foxtail pine forest in the Trinity Alps.

How Forests Can Help Us Heal a Fractured World

In recent weeks, I had the chance to stand before a full room and share my passion for trees. Their quiet strength, existence across deep time, and role as living elders shape us all–though most don’t know it. What follows grew from that talk—a weaving of science and story, a call to remember what trees have always known: that we belong to the living Earth and to one another.

We are living through turbulent times. The world feels splintered, yet beneath our feet the forest still holds fast—roots touching roots, sharing, and trying to endure despite us. I believe we all need to come together around nature and stewardship and this is one way I see it happening: by walking among trees, listening, and letting them teach us how to love this place again.

You can watch the full presentation at the end of this post. May it invite you, too, to find hope in trees.

A walk among ancient foxtail pines, where wind sculpts the forest, twisted trunks gleam, and the thin subalpine air whispers ancient secrets.

Down below, the world feels louder: division, anger, disconnection, and the weight of relentless news cycles pressing like smoke. It is easy to feel small and powerless.

But the late Barry Lopez, beloved nature writer and cultural guide, offers another way. In his essay Love in a Time of Terror, he urges us to respond to hatred not with more power, but with love — fierce, rooted, enduring love for the Earth and for each other.

“ In this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”
— Barry Lopez

What if trees could show us how to love in this fractured time?

This weathered whitebark pine, long since dead yet still standing, began as seeds cached centuries ago by a Clark’s nutcracker—living testimony to how small acts can shape whole mountain worlds.

July 15, 2025July 15, 2025

Among Ancient Pines on Mount Linn

As spring transitioned to summer, we traveled deep into the Coast Range to the headwaters of the Bigfoot Trail. Mount Linn—at 8,098 feet, the highest point in California’s Coast Range—rises like an island above a sea of rugged ridges and folded drainages. Here, the Bigfoot Trail begins, and here, we spent our days working to open the path for future hikers—treading, clearing logs, and feeling that familiar rhythm of shared labor in wild places.

May 10, 2025June 28, 2025

Blue Oak (Quercus douglasii)

An Old Friend in a New Light

I first met Blue Oak (Quercus douglasii) when I moved to California as a young educator, living and teaching at SCICON, a school nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills above the Great Central Valley. The property was draped in a mosaic of oak woodland, and it was the blue oak—with its pale, ghostly bark and seasonally bare branches—that became a familiar companion during daily lessons with sixth graders. At the time, I didn’t fully grasp what I had stumbled into, but I knew it felt like home. As a kid raised in the deciduous forests of the Appalachians, these leaf-losing oaks whispered a comforting language.

March 22, 2025May 10, 2025

A Life Beneath the Canopy

How California’s Trees Shaped a Book, a Friendship, and a Calling

I first fell in love with trees as a high school student in the green underworld of the eastern deciduous forests near Williamsburg, Virginia. My teacher, Charles Dubay, believed we should know our world with both precision and appreciation. In his field biology class he taught us the trees twice—once in the fullness of leaf and light, when the crowns cast shade and shimmered in the wind, and again in the starkness of winter, when the branches and bark told their stories—bare.