'The Way Aroundis the kind of book my soul perpetually yearns for. It reshaped how I see the world.' Robert Moor, author of On Trails: An Exploration

Growing up in northern California, in a family of high-achieving athletes, Nicholas Triolo was imbued with a particularly acute form of our intensely goal-oriented culture. 'Do the reps', he internalised. 'Commit to the work. Grind for your dreams.' Shortly after graduating from college, he embarked on a solo circumnavigation of the globe. And then after returning to the States, he threw himself into ultrarunning, all to combat a deepeningdiscontent.

While travelling around the world, it was in Kathmandu that Triolo first encountered kora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around a sacred site or object a kind of 'ritualised remembering' birthed by place. Unable to shake this initial encounter with circumambulation, he sets out here on three such extended walks. First, he completes the sacred thirty-two-mile revolution around Tibet's Mount Kailash, in search of a cultural counter to Western linearity. Then, following his mother's diagnosis with breast cancer, he returns home to California and takes part in an annual circuit of Mount Tamalpais, tracing a route made famous by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And then finally, he meets up with a quirky hydrogeologist in Butte, Montana, and joins his walk around the Berkeley Pit Complex, the largest Superfund site in thecountry.

At once uncommonly humble and thrillingly transcendent, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer landsc