Navigating Rocky Terrain (Caves, Karsts, and the Soul of Unseen Spaces)

In Navigating Rocky Terrain, a nature memoir in essays, Laurie Roath Frazier explores the subterranean in search of footholds to move forward in an ever-changing landscape. The journey begins soon after her mother’s diagnosis of dementia. As Frazier hikes through Canyon Lake Gorge, an enormous scar left behind by a megaflood, questions emerge. What is life like in cracked and disturbed places? How do people and places—plants, animals, and the land—heal following a disturbance? How does life flourish in the shadow of an uncertain future? These questions continue to guide Frazier through the limestone terrain of the Texas Hill Country.

Each essay delves into the geology and ecology of a special place: a gorge, a cave, a sinkhole, a disappearing river—key features in the crumbling spaces, the holes and cracks, of karst terrain. Along the way Frazier meets scientists and citizen scientists, cavers, and master naturalists who lend their voices to her stories. Together they delve into such ecological issues as extreme weather events, habitat fragmentation, land use, population growth, water conservation, invasive species, and dark sky initiatives.

These hopeful, curiosity-driven essays examine how we begin to heal personally and ecologically. Frazier shares her experiences of illness, the pandemic, and the death of loved ones, including her parents, as she sets out on mini-expeditions close to home. As she searches for caves on a thirty-acre family property and makes plans to restore the land, she weaves stories of the karst she encounters above and below with her own. The journey ultimately uncovers the complex connections between the surface and the subterranean, and in the landscape of the human.