Lighting Out – A Golden Year in Yosemite and the West

Lighting Out by Daniel Duane is a coming-of-age memoir, first and foremost.
But it’s also about the Yosemite climbing lifestyle in the early 1990s and the
author’s effort to immerse himself in that dirtbag world, while figuring out
what to do with his life. It beautifully evokes a specific time and place, as
well as captures that post-college searching and desire for adventure and
romance that resonates for so many.

From the Grateful Dead to an awkward
tumble into a relationship, and from California surf towns to the sheer wall
of El Cap, Duane’s story meanders through loosely linked events and
observations that, taken together, convey a tangible sense of freedom and the
search for fulfilment.

Duane climbed actively in the Yosemite Valley from 1987 to 1992, then went on
to get a Ph.D. in American Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Lighting Out was his
first book, published two years before his seminal cult-favourite, Caught
Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the Calfiornia Coast.