When she titled her book Hiking Alone: Trails Out, Trails Home, Mary Beath referred literally to the long, solitary hikes she takes for weeks at a time and figuratively to the path she (and everyone else) pursues through life.

She uses the format of essays to construct an autobiography. By using concrete language to tell what happens during her hikes, she is able to weave in material that is heavy on creativity, spirituality and self-examination without sounding incomprehensible, or pretentious - most of the time.

The Albuquerque author begins with a hike in the Weminuche Wilderness where she writes, "Two hundred elk, a mile away across one wide scooped bowl, suddenly raced in a pointillistic burst like a land-bound flock of chickadees. Half of southern Colorado framed miniscule, purple trunks of blooming elephants head."

But then Beath reached The Knife Edge and remembered all of those cautions from rangers about not hiking alone.

" ... (T)he boot-width trail crossed near the top of a sharply angled talus slope. On the trail's right, the slope continued steeply unbroken for a mind-numbing thousand feet ... Nothing to hang onto or break a fall. No trees, no shrubs ... My heavy pack only made my idea of balance worse."

It won't be a spoiler to reveal that Beath made the 300-yard crossing, since she's survived to write the book. And that the men she met while alone on the trail, a second potential source of danger, turned out to be pleasant and neighborly rather than a menace. And no wild animals gave her any trouble except for the mice that nested in her truck's engine.

Beath is a visual artist as well as writer and outdoorswoman. She's painted a symbolic picture on her book cover, a New Mexico landscape that incorporates earth, air, a flowering plant and what is either fire or water laced with blood and iron. The picture features holes in the earth for the seeker to dive beneath.

Beath has also printed her own accomplished woodcuts for each chapter head.

But, her subject isn't only hiking. She details her stint as a volunteer Washington lobbyist for the grass-roots group the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. She also travels to help a friend recreate Zuni blue maize and plant fields of it to compare with modern hybrids. Then, she profiles a dancer who found her passion, Afro-Brazilian dance in Brazil, learning as a lone, white woman in an almost entirely black society.

The last half of the book is the tale of a wilderness quest Beath took, fasting for four days with half a dozen other seekers and a leader who steered the imagery toward American Indian and Jungian sources, among others.

This is material you'll either find intriguing or not to your taste at all. I was part of the former group. The dreams, visions and insights captured me.

The book's timing is surprising. The quest stories read with immediacy; they seem as if the author had raced right to her laptop and then to the printing press, but she reveals at the end that they'd happened seven years before the book was published.

Besides hikers, this book will appeal to aspiring writers who may learn from watching how Beath intertwines the strands of her past life and even her parents' lives with descriptions of events and landscapes.

Her book Refuge of Whirling Light won the 2006 Wrangler Award for Poetry. Here, she's tackled a longer format with `E9lan and confidently interspersed it with her beautiful pictures. That's hiking alone.