The Tracker  by Tom Brown
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Focuses on a twentieth-century frontiersman initiated into the secrets of the trail by an old Apache tracker, recounting his tracking adventures in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, the Grand Tetons, the Dakota Badlands, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley.
Reading level: Young Adult

 

The Search by Tom Brown
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Continuing the story begun in his bestselling book The Tracker, Brown offers another tale of wilderness survival, based on the year he spent in the woods with only a knife and his famous survival skills.
“His story is fascinating”. – Roger Tory Peterson
Reading level: Young Adult

Hatchet

by Gary Paulsen
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Thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson is on his way to visit his father when the single engine plane in which he is flying crashes. Suddenly, Brian finds himself alone in the Canadian wilderness with nothing but his clothing, a tattered windbreaker, and the hatchet his mother has given him as a present – and the dreadful secret that has been tearing him apart ever since his parents’ divorce. But now Brian has no time for anger, self-pity, or despair – it will take all his know-how and determination, and more courage than he knew he possessed, to survive.
Reading level: Young Adult

Brian’s Winter

by Gary Paulsen
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In Hatchet, 13-year-old Brian Robeson learned to survive alone in the Canadian wilderness, armed only with his hatchet. Finally, as millions of readers know, he was rescued at the end of the summer. But what if Brian hadn’t been rescued? What if he had been left to face his deadliest enemy–winter? Gary Paulsen raises the stakes for survival in this riveting and inspiring story as one boy confronts the ultimate test and the ultimate adventure.
Reading Level: Ages 9-12

Island of the Blue Dolphins

by Scott O’Dell
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Inspired by the real-life story of a 12-year-old American Indian girl, Karana. O’Dell tells the miraculous story of how Karana forages on land and in the ocean, clothes herself (in a green-cormorant skirt and an otter cape on special occasions), and secures shelter. Perhaps even more startlingly, she finds strength and serenity living alone on the island.
Reading Level: Young Adult

Julie of the Wolves

by Jean Craighead George
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When the village is no longer safe for her, Miyax runs away. But she soon finds herself lost in the Alaskan wilderness, without food, without even a compass to guide her. Slowly, she is accepted by a pack of Arctic wolves whom she grows to love as though they were family. With their help, and drawing on her father’s teachings, Miyax struggles day by day to survive. But the time comes when she must leave the wilderness and choose between the old ways and the new. Which will she choose? For she is Miyax of the Eskimos–but Julie of the Wolves.
Reading Level: Ages 9-12

Maroo of the Winter Caves

by Ann Turnbull
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Maroo, a girl of the Ice Age, must take charge after her father is killed and lead the rest of the family to the tribe’s winter camp.
Reading Level: Ages 9-12

Into the Wild

by Jon Krakauer
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In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.
Reading Level: Adult

My Side of the Mountain

by Jean Craighead George
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Young Sam Gribley decides to run away–all the way to the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. There he sets up house in a huge hollowed-out tree, with a falcon and a weasel for companions and his wits as his tool for survival. In a spellbinding, touching, funny account, Sam learns to live off the land, and grows up a little in the process. Blizzards, hunters, loneliness, and fear all battle to drive Sam back to city life. But his desire for freedom, independence, and adventure is stronger. No reader will be immune to the compulsion to go right out and start whittling fishhooks and befriending raccoons.
Reading Level: Ages 9-12

The Sign of the Beaver

by Elizabeth George Speare
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When his father returns East to collect the rest of the family, 13-year-old Matt is left alone to guard his family’s newly built homestead. One day, Matt is brutally stung when he robs a bee tree for honey. He returns to consciousness to discover that his many stings have been treated by an old Native American and his grandson. Matt offers his only book as thanks, but the old man instead asks Matt to teach his grandson Attean to read. Both boys are suspicious, but Attean comes each day for his lesson. In the mornings, Matt tries to entice Attean with tales from Robinson Crusoe, while in the afternoons, Attean teaches Matt about wilderness survival and Native American culture. The boys become friends in spite of themselves, and their inevitable parting is a moving tribute to the ability of shared experience to overcome prejudice.
Reading Level: Ages 9-12

The Kin

by Peter Dickinson
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It is two hundred thousand years ago. A small group of children are cut off from their Kin, the Moonhawks, when they are driven from their “Good Place” by violent strangers. While searching for a new Good Place, they face the parched desert, an active volcano, a canyon flood, man-eating lions, and other Kins they’ve never seen before. Told from four points of view, with tales of the Kins’ creation interspersed throughout, this epic novel humanizes early man and illuminates the beginning of language, the development of skills, and the organization of society.
Reading Level: Young Adult