Miyo McGinn conducts a circuitous Q and A with “The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere” author Nicholas Triolo.
The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere by Nicholas Triolo. Milkweed Editions, 2025. 224 pages.
NICK TRIOLO AND I first met while working as editors at outdoor lifestyle magazines: Trail Runner (him) and Outside (me). Owned by the same parent company, both publications traffic in a very specific type of adventure narrative—tales of people performing never-before-seen athletic feats, going to extremes of distance, speed, height, and effort. Reading Triolo’s recently published memoir The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere, I had no trouble believing that the visceral, place-based prose was written by the same thoughtful journalist I’d worked with a few years earlier. But I was struck by the antidote it offered, not just to endurance athletes navigating a personal-achievement-oriented subculture but also to anyone grappling with fundamental human questions in an era of climate crisis, fascism, and unchecked capitalism: how can we find a way to heal our relationships with the land, one another, and ourselves?
The Way Around offers circumambulation as an altogether different mode of exploration, a compassionate and curious alternative to summiting literal and metaphorical peaks. If you already know the definition of the word “circumambulate,” congratulations—your vocabulary is superior to my own. For those of us still learning, I googled it: “circumambulate” means, well, what its component parts suggest it’d mean. To walk, or ambulate, in a circle. It’s also a practice of attendance, reflection, and grieving found in many world religions, from revolving kora at Buddhist temples to Muslim pilgrims circling their sacred sites at Mecca.
Triolo’s book engages with this practice, bringing the reader along for a trio of circuits: Mount Kailash in Tibet, Mount Tamalpais in Northern California, and the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana. In Hindu cosmology, Kailash’s peak is the sacred home of the gods Shiva and Parvati, while Vajrayana Buddhists believe the Buddha Demchock resides there—in both faiths, as well as local Jain and Bon religions, it is taboo for humans to ascend to the summit. Tamalpais is the site of a long-running pilgrimage started decades ago by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And the Berkeley Pit is a mile-long former open pit mine and part of the largest Superfund site in the world, filled with water that kills any bird that lands on its surface in mere minutes. Over the course of each journey, Triolo draws on literature, history, and ecology to understand the complex connections between people, places, and the paths they walk through them.
The two of us met up to walk a short circuit of our own not long after the book’s publication in July, a three-mile loop around Green Lake in north Seattle. Our conversation followed a similarly circuitous route, traversing peaks both literal and figurative, shapes of movement and thought, and questions like “What is the sort of dreaming that can happen at the lip of a trash fire?”
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MIYO MCGINN: Before we really get going, I just want to say that, after reading dozens of memoirs by mountaineers while I was an editor at Outside, one of my first reactions when I started The Way Around was “Wow, it’s so refreshing to read a book about the Himalayas that isn’t about climbing the 8,000-meter peaks.”
NICHOLAS TRIOLO: Ha, yeah. And that’s exactly what made me interested in going to Kailash. You rarely hear about a mountain that people visit specifically not to summit, especially in our endurance sport world. But it ended up being complicated too, and I think I address this in the chapter, because I used the privilege of my passport to visit an occupied land to have a spiritual experience. And, by going to the farthest place I could possibly go, I summited a peak in the figurative sense in Tibet. It was an extreme. Without walloping readers over the head with that fact, that turned out to be a blind spot that started me curling back towards home for the rest of the book.
This isn’t a book explicitly critiquing endurance sport culture, but the contrast is definitely there for anyone familiar with that scene. For someone coming to The Way Around from a different background, how is it different, psychologically, to summit a mountain versus circling it?
One of the central questions of this book is “how do the shapes we travel in turn shape us?” It’s a conversation about our fixation with the “top,” with linearity, with results. You know, King of the Mountain, human exceptionalism, extracting what we need from a place, plugging it into our training logs, and continuing to the next objective. I think that that attitude comes from a place of fear. In a time when our weather and politics are volatile—and are only getting more so—this fear ends up putting us in conversations that are quite linear and quite results-oriented, where we always need to be going someplace. If we’re not advancing to the next frontier, then we’re becoming invisible. If we’re not progressing, we’re failing.
So, what about a circle?
An important part of it is curiosity. I think focusing only on the tops of things cultivates a lack of curiosity. And in this time of collapse and total uncertainty, I’ve been asking myself: how do we find a shape that feels like home?
The more I did these circumambulations, what started as a pretty contrived countershape to summit fever ended up being a way into really understanding the shapes that are beneath the stories we follow in life. A circle feels deeply compassionate and egalitarian. The center is nowhere; it’s a welcome shape. There’s space for uncertainty in my story and anyone else’s. It feels multicultural, it feels decolonial, it feels curious. It feels more playful.
Speaking of “welcome shapes”: all of your walks were in the company of other people. You could have walked alone, but instead each journey was really communal in the true, messy sense of the word. You didn’t necessarily like everyone you were with (some of them were clearly super annoying). Was the choice to make these rounds with others intentional, or did it just sort of shake out that way?
One of my mentors, William deBuys, really blew up the idea for me that environmentally focused writing is supposed to be devoid of humans. One part of the design of the book is that, in every round, there’s an obvious center of gravity: Kailash, Tamalpais, the Pit. But as you read deeper into every round, there’s a sort of shift that happens, where the gravitational center changes. It moves to include the grief of a character, or someone’s healing, or the last wish of somebody who has committed their life to water quality. And then for me—and this is a nerdy way of looking at it—I picture characters as the boulders that hold up the riparian integrity of the narrative. As you build your story, you’re in service to these people and their heart space and their complexity. They help the reader stay anchored in what’s true, and it takes the spotlight off you in some ways, widens the circumference of what it means to be human.
The walk around the Berkeley Pit, a Superfund site next to a depressed former mining town, seemed like the least romantic of the three circuits you make in the book. It also seemed like it was the most fruitful. What made the Pit different?
I think it was the scale. There was so much dissonance there between quick-grab profit, on one hand, and, on the other, ecological trauma on a literally geologic timescale. I’ve done a lot of work around stopping gold mines; I made a little film on stopping a gold mine in Mexico in 2014. There, too, it’s a quick hit—and then we leave the detritus to someone else to figure out. Compare that to Kailash, where part of the draw was that it’s a mountain that is untouched. It’s against local custom to summit it, and I was interested in seeing what a mountain looked like when it was left alone. Tamalpais is urban-adjacent, and it felt lived in and a little humbler in some ways.
But the Pit felt like it just throttled me with that dissonance—the quick profit and the perpetuity of the damage. It was uncanny. I think it’s also a larger meditation on where we are right now. Every violation—atmospheric, ecological, humanitarian—is sending ripples of trauma back into the system.
I think a lot of people, myself included, sometimes shy away from actually trying to wrap our minds around the sheer scale of damage that you’re describing. And reading about your experience wasn’t exactly hopeful, in the “it will all be alright” sense of the word—but it didn’t make me despair either. The feeling that keeps coming to mind was “bracing.” Like, supportive.
It could definitely be easy to look at this big pit and see an inverted, circumambulatory descent to hell, like Dante’s Inferno. But it can also be [seen as] an ecosystem of possibility: a pit can be a seed of a fruit, a location of possible growth. I bring up that tension as an invitation not to consider it as just a grave but to ask, “What is the sort of dreaming that can happen at the lip of a trash fire?” I don’t want it to sound like I’m trying to make lemonade out of lemons here, but when you think about the scale we talked about, the emotional and psychological response is often despair. The scale of the geologic trauma is just stifling. And the repair is endless, at least by human standards. But what do we see here that can be instructive for building something better? I keep coming back to the word “hypertrophy”—as in, what is the muscle that’s being built if we can actually stay with the loss? That’s my working question right now.
Finding a way to stay with the loss of the Pit sounds like the process you went through with your mom after she was diagnosed with cancer, which you describe in the middle chapter.
Yeah, there’s resonance there. It’s about not overintellectualizing. Not going, “I’m not going to show up for you because I don’t know how to solve this.” Instead, I’m just going to be here. And it’s not being totally unemotional about it. The care is right at the edge, and the Pit rounds felt like an upgrade to my capacity to hold something really uncomfortable. We’re in this increasingly uncomfortable environmental and political situation, and it’s just going to get spicier. This is one of the ways that we can hold hard things without becoming robots, or becoming unfeeling. To hold hard things—and hold our own spirits too.
Sometimes, in my own life, I’ll describe my own thought patterns as circles, but in a bad way. Like I’m brooding, or fixating on something that isn’t helpful. I guess I’m asking: is there a bad way to go in a circle?
Well, it’s funny. In the last part of the book, I do talk a little bit about the language that’s used often around going in circles. Like, we’re “not going anywhere.” Or “we’re going mad,” right?
There’s a little anecdote in the book about a neighbor that had lost his way and literally was just walking in circles for hours in front of our apartment building. For several months. At one point, I felt that to be airing on crazy. And it was crazy, but it was also like a mystic, right there on the edge of both. Increasingly—and this is coming from my personal experience—I’m convinced that even that feeling of eddying is important. It’s a meditation.
So even if it doesn’t feel fruitful in the moment, you still need to keep following the circle.
Yeah, I think so. Say, for example, that over the course of an evening together, my partner and I are having a hard time understanding each other—we’re talking in circles. And that shape becomes an asset for us, because it’s pointing to how, more than arriving at a destination, we need to be slowing down to really hear and understand each other. Part of the book is trying to embody curiosity, and maybe, sometimes, it feels like our curiosity is spinning in place, like a top, because we’re dealing with something really important that needs us to slow down.
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Nicholas Triolo is a writer, filmmaker, photographer, activist, and long-distance trail runner. His writing and images have been featured in Orion, Outside, Terrain.org, and Trail Runner. He has directed two documentary films, The Crossing (2014) and Shaped by Fire (2016), and collaborated with Salomon on a film about touring and training Death Cab for Cutie front man Ben Gibbard. Triolo’s films have been official selections for several international film festivals and featured on influential platforms such as Patagonia’s The Dirtbag Diaries, Upworthy, and Outside. Triolo is based in Missoula, Montana.
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Featured image: Photo of Nicholas Triolo by Rio Chantel.
LARB Contributor
Miyo McGinn is a Seattle-based writer, editor, and journalist. Her work can be found in Outside, Grist, and High Country News, among other publications.
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