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Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Poor Richard’s Books in Colorado Springs recommend a true story of survival and tragedy in the Colorado backcountry and a guide to surviving modern life.
The Way Out
By Devon O’Neil
Harper One
$28.99
November 2025
Purchase
From the publisher: Fifteen-year-old Cole Walters-Schaler couldn’t resist. This was why they’d come to the backcountry, after all — three fathers and four teenage children together for a bonding alpine getaway outside Salida, Colorado, in January 2017.
Within minutes, Cole and Brett Beasley, a longtime Forest Service ranger and expert outdoorsman in his mid-forties, had pushed off from their cabin, expecting to be gone for a half hour or so. But an unforgiving blizzard transformed their quick jaunt into a thirty-hour ordeal that would end in tragedy, as the community raced to find them.
“The Way Out” is the story of those ensuing hours and their aftermath—an almost unbelievable event that shook a tight-knit mountain community and raised difficult questions about life and death, guilt and redemption, and the pursuit of adventure.
From Jeffery Payne, assistant retail manager: Salida, Colorado is one of my favorite places. I have wondered what it would be like to live and work in that small community, so close to an abundance of outdoor opportunities. After reading “The Way Out” by Devon O’Neil, I’m not sure I have the wherewithal to do so.
The author brings us a gripping survival story with suspenseful detail, high emotions and unlucky decisions. The insightful writing vividly conveys the sorrow of losing someone greatly cherished, making the experience profoundly heartbreaking. I was seriously choked up through the entire “Tragedy/Miracle” chapter where we find out who survived.
The aftermath and consequences of the fateful event are a challenge to read through also. Those who survive live through personal hells but not all is lost.
Kinship Medicine
By Wendy Johnson
North Atlantic Books
$20.95
July 2025
Purchase
From the publisher: Our modern way of living is incompatible with our survival. Most of us intuitively know this truth, but almost everything in our society encourages us to ignore it. Dr. Wendy Johnson confronts this undeniable fact and breaks down how we think and act every day in ways that undermine our individual and collective wellbeing.
The antidotes to many of the causal factors of poor health—loneliness, industrial diets, systemic inequality, fear of death, profit-based health care—are relational, with each other and with the living Earth. Through evidence from public health, sociology, anthropology, human ecology, and her experience as a family physician, Dr. Wendy Johnson offers a clear vision of what a new society might look like, methods to accomplish this transformation, and concrete examples of where it is being done successfully.
From Jeffery Payne, assistant retail manager: My affinity of nature is instinctual; I’ve my father to thank for that. Spending several formative years on the family farm in the Ozark Mountain region of Missouri developed a sense of communion whenever on the land. Watching, really observing, seeing the outside world takes a different approach, a separate sense of time and space. That symbiotic relationship between the natural world and humankind ebb and flows. Currently a disconnect seems to be growing wider between the two and that is bringing harm to both.
Wendy Johnson’s insightful “Kinship Medicine” offers practical ideas for addressing that disconnect and the continued exploitation of land, wildlife, and ourselves. Her thoughtful guidance provides both encouragement and motivation in pursuing meaningful connections to both land and people through attainable steps. For this I am glad and hopeful.
As part of The Colorado Sun’s literature section — SunLit — we’re featuring staff picks from book stores across the state. Read more.
