Book Review: The Cold Vanish And The New Wilderness

If there is one thing I learned in 2025, it is that I can not read and write at the same time. I set a goal at the beginning of the year to read at least 12 books (one a month) and actually managed to read 36 books! There were many things that I could do at the same time as enjoying a book (eating breakfast, driving my car, sitting by the river) but writing was not one of them. Maybe in 2026 I will figure out that trick?

Of the books I read, about 75% were audio format. It is just easier to both access and fit into my day. But I did have a chance to read not one but TWO print books during the summer, both related to the outdoors. When school was out for summer I set my sights on reading more non-audio books and decided I would accomplish this by keeping a book on the dining room table that I could read in the mornings with coffee or while cooking meals. It turned out to be much more successful than keeping books by the nightstand.

My stepmom gave me a copy of The Cold Vanish: Seeking The Missing In North America’s Wildlands by Jon Billman when she was visiting in July and I pulled The New Wilderness by Diane Cook off my bookshelf where it had been resting for a couple years since it was the pick for Everett Reads. Both books were both published in 2020, the first is non-fiction and the second is fiction. They were interesting enough to keep me reading until the end so I thought I would share!

The Cold Vanish is a book about people who have gone missing in wilderness areas, particularly national parks or other public lands.

A snippet from the jacket:

On April 4, 2017, a cyclist named Jacob Gray left his bike on the side of the road, disappearing into Olympic National Park. He is one of the many who each year vanish seemingly without a trace. In The Cold Vanish, Jon Billman follows Jacob’s father, Randy Gray, in his courageous search for his son. Braided around this narrative are accounts of those who fill the vacuum created by a vanished human being: backcountry search and rescue experts, the world’s foremost Bigfoot researcher, psychics, and countless others who dedicate their time to assist those desperately searching for loved ones.

The book was less about those who have gone missing and more about those who remain to look for them. Although some of the disappearances are solved, many remain a mystery that haunts their loved ones well beyond the last time they were seen. It is fascinating what the human mind will do in the absence of complete information. When the simplest answer is usually the right one, we still tend to imagine a more complicated possibility.

It also touches on how it can be challenging to search for a missing person when having to work with local and/or federal jurisdictions with conflicting policies and procedures (or the lack of them). This can be why some families choose to take matters into their own hands by hiring private searchers, often against the advice of the land managers.

With Jacob Gray’s disappearance being in the Sol Duc area and referenced often during the book, it was easy to imagine the places mentioned having hiked the Seven Lakes Basin and High Divide the last two years. Thinking of that young man trying to hike the High Divide in April with less than ideal winter gear was heartbreaking.

The book was an captivating read and doesn’t try to offer an explanation for everything because sometimes we just don’t know. I won’t give it away but I was glad to see that at least Jacob’s family did find some answers by the end of the book.

The New Wilderness is a dystopian novel about a time in the future when we as humans have basically made most of the planet unhealthy to live in and an area known as the “Wilderness State” has been cordoned off from humans with the exception of a few people who have been allowed to venture in as an experiment after promising to leave absolutely ZERO trace.

From the back of the book:

“The New Wilderness” is a wildly imaginative debut novel of a mother’s battle to save her daughter in a world ravaged by climate change. Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State, guinea pigs in an experiment to see if humans can exist in nature without destroying it. The farther they get from civilization, the more their bond is tested in astonishing and heartbreaking ways.

Diane Cook wrote much of the book while living in Eastern Oregon and it influenced the landscape that the characters have to make their way through in the story. While reading along, I tried to imagine what familiar landscapes they may have been traveling in based on my knowledge of the area.

An underlying theme of the book is based on the Leave No Trace principles but to a much stricter level that many of us that venture outdoors adhere to. The rules that the volunteers must live by are:

Leave no trace.
All microtrash should be cleaned and bagged
meticulously.
Garbage will be weighed at Post checkins.
Any garbage found will result in a fine.
Always refer to the map.
Entering a restricted area will result in a fine.
Dying in the Wilderness State will result in a fine.
You may stay in one place for a maximum of five
days.
You may not camp in the same place twice.
You may not break off from the Community.
Domestication of animals is strictly prohibited.
If there is a natural fire, you will not be rerouted.

Think Naked and Afraid or Alone but with families. Needless to say, much of the conflict in the book is because the community breaks more than a few of these rules. Could any of us actually meet all of these rules long term?

What was meaningful to me about the story was imagining myself living in the “wilderness” and having to be nomadic without a place to call home. Although I love my outdoor adventures, I know that I have a place to return to where I can feel safe and sheltered. The characters in the book who are living in the wilderness thought they would love being free from a polluted city life but the wilderness area (with its rules) could not offer them the home and belonging they needed as all humans do.

How was reading like for you in 2025? Did you set and meet goals? Read any interesting books you think are worth sharing?