William Wyckoff

I was born and raised in sunny Southern California and explored much of the Golden State as I grew up there in the 1960s and 1970s. After living back East and attending graduate school (M.A. and Ph.D. in Geography) at Syracuse University in Upstate New York (1977-1982), I returned west in 1986 to become a college professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, MT. Since then, I have taught classes in World Regional Geography, Cultural Geography, Geography of the United States, and Geography of the American West in the Department of Earth Sciences. I have managed to explore many corners of the West, eventually visiting every county in the 11 western states. Books on the West's mountains (THE MOUNTAINOUS WEST: Explorations in Historical Geography), Colorado's landscape (CREATING COLORADO: The Making of a Western American Landscape, 1860-1940), and Montana (ON THE ROAD AGAIN: Montana's Changing Landscape) were great preparation for completing my most recent book entitled HOW TO READ THE AMERICAN WEST: A Field Guide (University of Washington Press, 2014). The Field Guide encourages people to explore the West's contemporary landscapes (both rural and urban) and to appreciate all the ways in which environment, history, and culture mingle in this amazing setting!