NONFICTION | AVAILABLE MAY 20, 2025
THE WILD DARK: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light
by CRAIG CHILDS
“Once this book has had its way with you, you’ll throw down your bag. You’ll ditch the headlamp and turn off that damn phone. You’ll revert to the thing we were meant to be—wide-eyed and wild, to the bone.”
—AMY IRVINE, Desert Cabal
A night sky is not an absence of light; it is the presence of the universe. In The Wild Dark, master storyteller Craig Childs embarks on a quest to bike from the blinding lights of the Las Vegas Strip to one of the darkest spots in North America. Childs is a fearless explorer of both the natural world and the human imagination, making him the perfect guide to help us rediscover the heavens and to ask: “What does it do to us to not see the night sky?” In a book that is at once an adventure story, a field guide, and a celebration of wonder, Childs invites us to look up and to look inward, eyes wide and sparkling with stars.
Hard Cover ISBN: 979-8-89092-018-8 | E-book ISBN: 979-8-89092-019-5 | $24.95 | 212 pp | Trim: 5.375 x 8.2” | May 20, 2025
“As ever, Childs weaves in urgent issues, from what artificial light does to birds, to night sky advocacy, to solutions for protecting the flickering stars that grace us. One leaves this gorgeous book filled with wonder, not only for stars, but for everything from tarantulas to archeoastronomy.”
—LAURA PRITCHETT, Playing with Wildfire
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CRAIG CHILDS is an explorer who brings tales of deserts and ice caps to the page. He has published more than a dozen books of science, nature, and personal experience. His nonfiction narratives and journalism have appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, High Country News, The Sun, the LA Times, New York Times, NPR, and Radiolab. He lives in Southwest Colorado.
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
TRACING TIME: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau
Craig Childs bears witness to rock art of the Colorado Plateau—bighorn sheep pecked behind boulders, tiny spirals in stone, human figures with upraised arms shifting with the desert light, each one a portal to the open mouth of time. With a spirit of generosity, humility, and love of the arid, intricate landscapes of the desert Southwest, Childs sets these ancient communications in context, inviting readers to look and listen deeply.
“Childs brings refreshing humility . . . Readers might find here, along with a soul-saving historical perspective, a place of calm amid our noise.”
—BOOKLIST
VIRGA & BONE: Essays from Dry Places
Writer and adventurer Craig Childs dwells upon desert icons—human, animal, and otherwise—in these contemplative and visceral essays.​
From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons—a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced. Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more-than-human.
“The Southwestern panorama unfolding over the course of this beautiful book will stay with readers long after they close the pages.”
— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review
STONE DESERT
Originally published over twenty-five years ago, Stone Desert brings the wonder and wildness of one of our nation’s most geologically and culturally unique national parks to readers everywhere. With a new introduction by the author, this edition includes Craig Childs’s original journal—written over a winter in Canyonlands National Park and complete with pen-and-ink sketches—from which Stone Desert originated. Join Childs as he hikes the high mesas, navigates the winding canyons, and witnesses the ancient rock art of Utah’s most inscrutable and remote slickrock desert.
PRAISE FOR THE WILD DARK
“With Craig Childs leading the way, we’re never off-course in this cosmic overworld adventure—Dante’s Virgil doesn’t hold a candle. You’ll get thirsty, scraped and saddle sore. You’ll jump at the burst of ordnance and shiver as night creatures slither past. But you’ll never again see that big black bowl of night sky as a distant, indifferent void.”
—AMY IRVINE, Desert Cabal
​
“With resonant prose and a deep awareness, Childs basks in the awesome wonder of the night sky, and reminds us all to do that most intrinsic thing: look up!”
—EVAN SCHERTZ, Maria’s Bookshop owner
​
“The night sky—the stars and the deep, black spaces between them—may be the source of a particular wild wisdom that throughout our evolutionary history guaranteed our success as a species. Childs has written The Wild Dark because we need that vast wisdom now.”
—BROOKE WILLIAMS, The Story of My Heart
​
“Childs may be best known for looking down and beyond. He has scoured desert floors for signs of moisture in some of the driest places on earth. He has peered out from a sand burial, a place of respite in mid-day blazing heat. And he has carefully scanned canyon alcoves for signs of the ancient ones. In The Wild Dark, Childs heads out on two wheels, pedaling away from a place so bright it’s clearly visible from space, while searching for increasing darkness above. ‘There has never been this much light,’ he writes, as he guides us in exploration of the night sky in evolving phases of darkness. He goes deep into the cosmos, and into human grasp of the heavens above, and the light from below. Despite the complexity, Childs has a simple message: DO look up, where wonder and stories abound.”
—HOWARD BERKES, Investigations correspondent for NPR
“Walk away from the light. Better yet, bike overland with Craig Childs on this rapturous flight from our electric inferno to the furthest outlook of the nearest heavens, to confirm, as one poet said, that the darkness, too, blooms and sings.”
—MARK SUNDEEN, Delusions + Grandeur
“Eyes wide and sparkling with stars, Childs once agains takes us on a journey we didn’t know we needed—this time into the diminishing darkness of our night skies. With his signature reverence for mystery, adventure, wonder, and all things ancient and new, Childs turns scientific inquiry, observational acumen, poetic imagination, and a love of language into a dazzling and tragic image of ourselves—a people so in love with light we are killing the dark. And yet at every turn, we are also given a reason to laugh, a reason to love, and a reason to pay attention to the marvels that surround us every day. At the heart of this little book is a way forward, a reminder of our shared humanity, and a mirror as big as the moon.”
—WENDY VIDELOCK, Wise to the West
“Child’s bike ride out of Las Vegas clearly shows how we have conquered nature’s last outpost—the night. A personal journey and fact-packed thought-provoker.”
—JOHAN EKLÖF, The Darkness Manifesto
“Craig threads celestial connections across time and into space like no other, taking us with him and his compatriots as they travel through the landscape into darkness to reveal the sky’s light. The cosmological journey animates the physical one across the desert, and we once again experience the magic in Craig’s ability to illuminate our lives through exploring our past. If you’ve ever stared at the stars and wondered at who or what else had done the same, this book is for you.”
—DAVID EVERITT, Back of Beyond Books owner
“The firsthand experience of day turning into night, of the quiet and solitude and beauty that depends on darkness, has become inaccessible to many and forgotten by even more. And why would this matter? What do we lose when we no longer experience a natural night? In The Wild Dark, Craig Childs offers a compelling answer, mixing science and history with a journey made of good humor and vibrant language. This is a great read, one that takes the reader on a two-wheeled trek—into the desert, into the dark, under the stars—and shows us what can happen when we pay attention to the ancient wild world that still revolves around us, awaiting our gaze, welcoming our awe, inspiring our praise.”
—PAUL BOGARD, The End of Night
