Essay Contest Winners

Guy and Laura Waterman spent a lifetime reflecting and writing on the mountains of the Northeast. The Waterman fund seeks to further their legacy of stewardship through essays that celebrate and explore issues of wilderness, wildness, and the ways in which individuals preserve and protect these important and fragile ecosystems.

Interested in entering your essay in our current contest? Learn more here ›

Meet Shane Behler and Anderson Smith— Award Recipients of the 2025 Waterman Fund Emerging Writers Essay Contest

The Waterman Fund is proud to announce the winners of our sixteenth essay contest.  We welcomed nearly 70 essays of which thirteen made the final round.  The committee is composed of current and former board members, outside readers, and the editor of Appalachia Journal.  Our First Place Winner for our 2025 Essay Contest is Shane Behler for his piece, "Immersion."  Our Runner-up is Anderson Smith for "A Forager’s Guide to the Wilderness."

The prompt for 2025 was as follows:

Wilderness and wildness have two distinctly different meanings. Yet we have observed they can be used almost interchangeably.

Wilderness is often spoken of as a means of protecting land through an act of legislation. In this country, the ideal behind it has preserved great tracts of land for public use. It has also allowed justification for times when governments displaced and took land from indigenous peoples. And perhaps the act of codifying or naming Wilderness (with a capital “W”) only further distances humans, in an abstract sense, from their primal and profound connections to the land itself. The narrative is complex and nuanced.

Nonetheless, in today’s day and age in this country wilderness areas contain some of the more rare, wild and undefined places available to citizens. The Waterman Fund invites submissions that explore how moving through mountains and rivers and wild lands brings out the uncultivated spirit, the unscathed, non-commercial, honest primal human in all of us. What is the wild in wild(er)ness?

The following are excerpts from this year’s picks. . .

 

. . .

 

And with that, I never saw so much color in the wilderness. Russulas grew underfoot in autumn hues. Coral mushrooms sprouted, pink and branching, at the corner of my eye. Yellow fairy cups festooned the underbrush. Fly agaric mushrooms burst across the ground, a buffet of vermillion-colored plates. I saw a potluck: black trumpets infused entire copses of trees with their scent. Fishy oyster mushrooms flared along rotten logs. Furred lion’s mane and dripping bear’s tooth clotted along trunks. Boletes as thick as pancakes with porous underbellies bruised blue on injury. Across lawns, puffball mushrooms lodged like golf balls. Fluted chanterelles chorused along the riverside. Their smaller cousins, golden-footed chanterelles, mixed in with spiny wood hedgehogs among the boreal carpets. I passed a group of college students, hauled up from the city for a wilderness weekend, on one of my foraging expeditions, so I plucked a tiny mushroom from my cache—“it’s a wood hedgehog, they’re edible”—and handed it to one young woman. On my return, I found the same mushroom abandoned on the trail before her where she sat, bewildered by my enthusiasm. I tried not to mind; I had a feast to prepare. I cooked the mushrooms in an ancient cast-iron pan on a propane camp stove that never burned evenly. Wilderness tasted lightly of meat, lightly of mystery. In fall, I found a lump of orange chicken-of-the-woods like a treasure chest held high on a tree. I weighed it at home: almost three pounds. I kept it in my fridge in Boston and feasted on chicken-of-the-woods noodle soup for weeks.

Anderson Smith, "A Forager’s Guide to the Wilderness”

 

. . .

 

What I’ve always sought in nature—purity in spirit, refreshing solitude, that vague sense of wildness and all it does to us—are increasingly scarce commodities. Economics teaches that when supply falls, prices will rise. As prices rise, supply—in this case access and availability—continues to fall. Fewer and fewer people will have a childhood like mine. If those parents hadn’t brought their kids to the waterfall, could they ever love the river? What if the waterfall becomes their morning on their kayak, their rambling hike with their favorite dog? What if the waterfall becomes their bobolinks?

A mirror had been held up to my privileged view of nature. The reflection was sharp, critical: I am one of the lucky few. I think about my hometown and my childhood. Most of the kids in my high school had parents who supported them, loved them, opened the right doors for them. Just like mine had done for me—a yard, a garden, a bird feeder; summer camp in New Hampshire, trips to national parks. The nature I was surrounded with while young, the nature I had taken for granted, existed on the tax dollars of those who could afford the price of admission. To lean on economics again, in my hometown, nature is a luxury good. And most people can’t have luxury goods. They would no longer be a luxury.

Shane Behler, "Immersion"

Behler_Headshot

Shane Behler, "Immersion"

Shane Behler is from Upstate New York and now lives in Washington, D.C., where he works in conservation policy. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science and a Master’s degree in Applied Economics from Clemson University. He spends as much time outdoors as he possibly can.

Anderson

Anderson Smith, "A Forager’s Guide to the Wilderness”

Anderson Smith has worked seasonally in lodges, backcountry huts, and glacier camps in New Hampshire and Alaska. Currently in Colorado, she is a master's candidate in library science at the University of Denver, where she is either in the mountains or planning on getting back to them. She has a bachelor's in creative writing from Emerson College and is always working on a novel.

2025 Waterman Fund Emerging Writers Essay Contest Finalists

BV Lawson, "Synchronicity," Falls Church (VA)
Sunny Stroeer,"Where Man Himself Does Not Remain"
Anwita D. Pillai,"The Calculus of Human Trace"
Taylor Brownlow, "Taming of the Scrub," , Jensen Beach (FL)
Caitlin Mandeville, "Scarce Light"
Jack Bartley, "untitled"
Patrick Mulready, "Closing the Circle"
Dr. Jordon Tourville, "Can a Mountain Love You Back?"
Hailey Lynch, "Grounding on Grus"
Willow Noelle Groskreutz, "Lap Dog Mountaineer," Mooresville (NC)
Spencer Ballard, "untitled," Boulder (CO)

YearAuthorEssay TitleAward (in $)
2024Catherine WesselOld Friends in the Alpine3000
2024Samantha SappSplinter Hill1000
2023Austin HagwoodSmoke Report1500
2023Lela StanleySky's the Limit500
2023Elise WallacePilgrimage500
2022Olivia BoxWhat Climate Models Don't Show1500
2022Liesl MagnusLizard Dreams and Our Same Hearts500
2021Jason MazurowskiSplitting Clouds at the Edge of the World1500
2021Claire DumontHow COVID-19 Exposed the Myth of Wilderness and Revealed its Potential: A Reflection on 2020 through a Hike of the Long Trail500
2021Keely O'ConnellBird's Eye View
2020Lorraine MonteagutThe Wild Self, What is wild to one is home to another1500
2019Jennifer O'ConnellValley of the Bulls1500
2019Alex PickensThe Do's and Don't's of Trail Running in the Appalachian Mountains1500
2019John AndersonHumor in the Wild500
2018Emily HeidenreichOn Ceding Control1500
2018Tyler SocashThe Torch of Preservation500
2017No Award Given
2016No Award Given
2015Dove HenryOne Tough Gal1500
2015Erica BerryLady and the Camp500
2014Jenny Kelly WagnerThe Cage Canyon1500
2013Michael WejchertEpigoni, Revisited1500
2012Katherine DykstraA Place for Everything1500
2012Angela ZukowskiWilderness500
2011Blair BravermanOn Being Lost1000
2011Bethany TaylorThe Warp and Weft1000
2010Dianne FallonHunting the Woolly Adelgid1500
2009Jeremy LoebA Ritual Descent1500
2008Kimberley S.K. BealClimate Change at the Top1500

Additional Notable Essays

November 2008 - Dark Night on Whitewall, Will Kemeza

October 2008 - Looking Up, Sandy Stott

September 2008 - Fay's Quandary Revisited, Nat Scrimshaw

August 2008 - Meditation on Winter Camping, Sally Manikian

July 2008 - A Pocket of the Mountains, N. Blauss

June 2008- The Evolution of a Trail Worker, Matt Moore

May 2008 - A Cup of Mountain Tea, Jeremy Loeb