The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere

Mad Agriculture’s Director of Media, Jonnah Perkins, caught up on the phone with Nicholas Triolo’s memoir The Way Around, as he explores his global journey through the spiritual practice and ecological meditation of walking in circles around mountains.

Jonnah:
Thanks for being here with me, Nick. You’re talking to me from Montana, I’m in my home office in Wisconsin. I was trying to go back to when we first met, and I realized that we first met when I was getting ready to share a media series for Outside Magazine that was funded by Protect Our Winters, and it was your fifth day on the job. So we originally connected over running as art. I remember you talking about this book that you were working on, and how it was very abstract but spiritual and based on running. It’s finally coming out into the world in July. Can you tell us about your new project, The Way Around?

Nick:
I remember that first meeting really vividly actually. I remember getting off that call with you and being like, oh cool, this is how the job’s going to go, I get to talk to really smart people about really fun things that matter.

The Way Around has been a creative project that I have been tumbling around for the last 10 years. Really in earnest about 10 years and 20 years courting this idea. The Way Around is a non-fiction memoir. It erupted from a distaste for, or a skepticism around, or a curiosity about vernacular language that recreational culture uses around peak bagging, around mountain conquest, around King of the Mountain, FKT (fastest known time) records. I’ve been a competitive ultra runner since 2008, less so now, but it was pretty in the mix from 2008 to 2013 or something. I was part of this recreational mountain running culture that felt like both a deep immersion in wild spaces and a commitment to stewardship—bringing with it awe and wonder. With that came, particularly in the ultra running superlative recreational sport, the sense of longer, the faster, the higher, the better. I just was curious about what was underneath that, what was beneath that language.

I got put off by my own use of that language, by my own perceptual gaze which I had on landscapes. I went into the literature and in thinking about this found a pan-cultural practice of walking around or moving around landscapes, around mountains, and leaving the summits alone. The summits to a lot of different cultures, to a lot of different peoples and communities, were off limits. Or if they were on limits, they were of very limited use and there was a level of sanctity attached and applied to peaks. They weren’t just peaks to bag or to collect or to take selfies from, or to survey. That set me on this 10-year journey where I traveled to the Western lip of Tibet, to Mount Kailash. They call it the axis mundi of the world, this 23,000 foot Himalayan outlier where pilgrims, Tibetan, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain monks, Bonpo, which is the indigenous precursor to Tibetan Buddhism, would walk around. It’s called circumambulation.

They would circumambulate mountains. This particular route was a 50K, about a 32-mile route that you just walked clockwise around this mountain. I went there, I joined this big expedition to go and we walked a four-day trip around Mount Kailash. They call it kora in Tibetan, way more elegant of a word than circumambulation. Essentially that started me on this journey in 2014. I went to Peru. I went to various places around the world, and then ended up going to Mount Tamalpais in Northern California and organized the 50th anniversary of a walk that Gary Snyder, Alan Ginsburg, and Philip Whalen did in 1965. These three Beat poets were asking the same questions about American hegemony and conquest. They had just spent a bunch of time in Asia and in India and Japan, and brought back the circuitous walking practice as a way of offering a kinesthetic form of reverence and restraint into a landscape. That the peak wasn’t the objective, the peak, the top, to be the god’s eye wasn’t actually the objective to be immersed in place. I organized this 50th anniversary walk of this Beat poet walk, and then the book ends where I actually go to Montana where I live.

I designed my own walk—a 20-mile circumambulation of a massive Superfund site, an abandoned copper mine in Butte, Montana. It’s considered one of the most toxic places in the country. I spend an entire day walking clockwise around the lip of this noxious pit, a pilgrimage into the Anthropocene—both as a practice and a summoning of my own courage to, as Donna Haraway writes, stay with the trouble. Her book, Staying with the Trouble, explores how we confront and tend to a deeply traumatized landscape. How do we steward a place that has been violated? How do we bear witness to all parts of a landscape—the beautiful, the broken, the forgotten?

That’s the heart of The Way Around—a 10-year meditation on moving through landscapes differently and allowing landscapes to move us. One of its central questions is: How do the shapes we follow in life shape us? I had a growing suspicion that the paths we take in modern life—so linear, so extractive, so predictable—are not just boring but environmentally and existentially suicidal. So what would it mean to adopt, embrace and walk into an alternative shape? Not one that is new necessarily, but one that is old yet largely forgotten. That’s what the book is about.

Jonnah:
I love the use of the endurance that you built as a runner, turning that into sort of a performance art, like a moving performance art and letting the emotion of that practice through movement be the foundation of this book. I know you come from an ecology writing background, as the digital strategist/editor at Orion Magazine. How have you combined your life as a runner and your work as an ecology writer into this beautiful package of philosophy? Was there one aha moment or was there a building tension, that you knew you couldn’t ignore this project any longer?

Nick:
I think the roots of this project lie in my fascination with stories and their intersection with land and the animate world. As a kid, I was both a voracious reader and someone who spent a lot of time outside. I found that the wild world was more consistent and alive than the human one—it felt like I was being held by the land in some way. This led me to think about how my vitality was connected to the spaces around me.

I dove into the canon of environmental writing—David Abram, Gary Snyder, Naomi Klein, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and many others. Creative nonfiction, especially personal essay, intrigued me because it could evoke a different perceptual experience of land. It’s not just about stories; it’s about how stories can de-center us as the hero and invite us into a larger web of relationships.

One of the greatest gifts of creative writing is its ability to slow us down and sharpen our attention. In slowing down, we cultivate empathy and compassion, entering someone else’s world through their words. It’s a form of world-building that allows readers to feel things they wouldn’t otherwise feel. That’s the magic I’m drawn to—how stories can make us fall more in love with the world and deepen our sense of belonging.

For the last two decades, I’ve worked to understand how to weave these elements together, learning from writers and artists who do it well. I got my master’s in environmental studies from the University of Montana, focusing on creative nonfiction, where I received mentorship from people like Janisse Ray, William duBuys, and David James Duncan. It all comes back to a simple curiosity: the land is alive, stories make us feel more alive, and when you combine the two, magic happens. That’s what I’m after—creating and sharing that magic through words.

Jonnah:
When you first told me about The Way Around, you had just visited the copper mine in Montana. You described it like a moonscape—horrifying yet strangely beautiful, a glimpse of what humans have done to the land. When you walked those 20 miles, what was the experience like? What did you carry? Were you choked by dust or any remnants of the mining operation? Bring us into that day.

Nick:
The Berkeley Pit was fascinating and speaks to the book’s larger themes. It was October, getting colder, but autumn still brought color to the forest. Butte, once the biggest city between Chicago and San Francisco, now feels like a grandiose vacancy—a reflection of the pit itself. In the book, I compare it to an asteroid impact, then question: Are we the asteroid?

Walking along the tailing ponds, I was struck by the scale of human excavation—tens of thousands of miles of tunnels beneath my feet. Yet life persists. I saw foxes, deer, birds, even fungi growing along the edges. We reached the Continental Divide, where I could take in the entire scene—the pit, the town, the toxic ponds. It was the industrial sublime—awe-inspiring yet deeply unsettling.

I questioned everything: Should I touch these rocks? Would staying here too long make me sick? I didn’t drink the water, of course. But beyond the toxicity, I saw beauty. The man I walked with, a retired hydrogeologist, had spent his career balancing corporate work with citizen activism. He loved Butte, pointing out its folk festivals, mountain biking, and growing arts scene.

By the end, my senses felt confused but whole. I could hold both disgust and wonder—seeing the destruction yet also the endurance of life. Even in the face of severe ecological violation, the planet persists. There’s a deeper story of resilience here, in the land and in us.

Jonnah:
The cover art of your book, I think it’s the Ourobos. The snake eating its tail, or am I reading into that or seeing into that something that isn’t there?

Nick:
That is totally one way of interpreting it—the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. But there’s another form of circularity called enso. Enso is a Japanese form of calligraphy, a fascinating art where a monk or meditator sits in contemplation for minutes or even hours. Next to them is a bucket of black paint and a horsehair mop—a large paintbrush or a smaller one. When they are ready, they rise, pick up the brush, and make one singular swoop. That’s it—just one stroke. The enso, the circle, is an outward expression of the internal state. However calm or turbulent the meditator’s mind is, it manifests in that single brushstroke.

I actually visited Kaz Tanahashi, a Japanese calligraphist and enso master, about ten years ago. I interviewed him about this practice, and his art deeply influenced my understanding of movement—how we move our bodies, our hearts, and our animal selves through landscapes. It’s an ongoing enso, a process of clarifying, distilling, and being attuned to both self and surroundings—always moving in concert with the land.

It’s a powerful symbol that appears in different places, though I’ve never practiced enso myself. But yeah, the cover also reflects the Ouroboros.

Jonnah:
There’s this sense among runners—this never-ending push to tweak something, hoping for a different outcome. But your book seems to strip away the grandiosity of running, of results, and just focuses on the act itself. How do you feel about running now, after shifting to this more process-based approach of walking in circles—an act with no real start or end?

Nick:
I’m still very much a runner; I love mountains. But what’s changed is that I walked a lot this past year—hundreds of miles through landscapes. Not all were literal circles, but the approach was: process over destination. I walked across canyon country in Utah, the Boundary Trail in Washington, the Côa River in Portugal. What I found was surprising. Instead of fixating on time or distance, I embraced unpredictability. Like in Portugal—I walked 120 miles from the river’s source to its mouth, barely seeing another person. I got lost. A wild boar rushed me. I stumbled on what I thought was a dead body—it was just a passed-out shepherd. Even food poisoning at the end felt like part of the experience.

Looking back, I don’t think about a finish line—I remember moments. Something shifted: my senses dilated. I was more attuned, more open to awe and wonder. I probably cried more out of sheer beauty on the Coa than I ever have while running. Slowing down made me available to be surprised by the world and myself.

Jonnah:
That’s the luxury of training in running—you get to be in your body, not just perform.

Nick:
Exactly. It’s a shift from moving through a landscape to being moved by it. Instead of seeking an experience, I’m learning to let the landscape move through me. That shift—decentering the human, the runner, the hero—is a core part of the book. It mirrors the shift we need as a species, with a planet on fire largely because we’ve placed ourselves at the center of everything.

Jonnah:
That’s amazing. So the book comes out summer 2025—how does it feel knowing people will be holding it, reading it?

Nick:
Honestly? I’m nervous as hell—part of me fears people will rip it apart. But in my wholeness, I’m excited. Someone told me, “A book launch isn’t an end, it’s the beginning of a conversation.” That’s what excites me most—traveling, hearing how people relate to landscapes, how movement shapes them. By the end of the tour, I won’t just be sharing my perspective—I’ll be shaped by others’ experiences. That’s the real opportunity.

Pre-order The Way Around: A Field guide for Going Nowhere from Milkweed Press

cover photo: Yvan Cohen