Leave No Trace: A Guide to the New Wilderness Etiquette

by Annette McGivney

* Wilderness ethics for minimizing impact on fellow wilderness travelers and wildlife
* A portion of the proceeds goes to the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics

Beyond cleaning up your trash and not cutting down trees for firewood, how far should you go to minimize your impact on wilderness lands? What is really important, and what is too extreme? Annette McGivney provides thoughtful answers based on scientific facts. She presents practical tips and techniques tailored for hikers, climbers, backcountry skiers, mountain bikers, equestrians, sea kayakers, canoeists, and rafters. And most importantly, there are tips for teaching Leave No Trace practices to children and others.

Genres: Outdoors, Nonfiction, Environment, Reference, Nature

208 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1998

About the author

Annette McGivney is an award-winning investigative journalist and author based in Cortez, Colorado. Plastic Shaman is her sixth book and publishes in September 2026. Her previous book, Pure Land, about the murder of Tomomi Hanamure in Grand Canyon, won the National Outdoor Book Award in 2018. Pure Land was the debut selection for Outside magazine’s book club in 2017 and named by the magazine on a list of “outdoor books that shaped the last decade.”

Annette is a frequent contributor to the Guardian, Outside and Arizona Highways; her articles focus on Southwest culture, the environment and Indigenous issues. She is a professor emeritus in Journalism at Northern Arizona University where she taught for two decades. Annette is also the founder of the non-profit Healing Lands Project, which is managed by Grand Canyon Youth, and provides guided wilderness trips to underserved populations. Annette’s next book, titled Lucky, explores the unique, life-affirming relationship between humans and dogs.
For more, go to: www.annettemcgivney.com

Reviews

[J]

Surprisingly readable. Didn't think reading over 100 pages of preaching about cleanliness and especially waste handling and removing would be this enjoyable. There was just enough personal accounts and supporting research, documentation, and official essays to accompany the main text. Plus it was laid out very nicely grouping it by travel type and also by environment.

[Rhonda]

4.25 rounded down. A little dated as there are 7 principles now for LNT. Despite that, very informative with helpful amd practical info to use in the outdoors.

[Nathanael Coyne]

A well-organised approach to describing the environmental and social impacts of our behaviour and decisions in wilderness areas and how we can minimise our impact on plants, animals, soils, rocks and waterways. I appreciated the non-preachy pragmatic tone of the book ... do what you can, just be mindful of what you and those in your group are doing; if you can follow all the advice that's really good, but really anything is better than nothing. All the examples are of regions in North America and refer to The Wilderness Act 1964 and land management practices in the United States, but it's relevant anywhere in the world. We all gotta shit in the woods, we try and avoid muddy sections of trail, climb boulders and want to explore off-trail.

[Steve]

If you are an outdoors type of person, if you spend any time camping,hiking,fishing,hunting,trail running or even walking through parks in your hometown, if you do ANYTHING in the outdoors, you should know about Leave No Trace,and how to implement it. If you do any of these things, you need this book.

[John Weibull]

An excellent book about how to enjoy the outdoors and leave no trace for the other outdoor enthusiasts.

[Lisa]

history of wilderness land management; did not know they did not have it all together so recently and that we are still evolving

[Michelle]

First hiking/back-camping book I've read. Mcgivney made the book pretty clear and easy to read, even for a novice like myself. Hopefully I'll put all her tips to good use out in the wild someday :)