Retired Ground

He went looking for adventure. The mountains gave him so much more.

In Retired Ground, Michael J. Collins documents his fifty-year pilgrimage into wild places, braiding his lifelong travel journal together with poetry, history, philosophical musings, and hard-earned reflection. The book begins with a twenty-one-year-old hitchhiking through Ireland as The Troubles gather in the distance, then ranges outward to blizzards in Nova Scotia, volcanic slopes in Mexico, backcountry solitude on Isle Royale, cliff paths on Kauai, and, again and again, the knife-edge ridges and misty peaks of Scotland’s Isle of Skye.

The climbing is intense, but the story is not only about ascending physical summits. With each trip, Mike’s search shifts from thrill seeking to solitude and from risk to beauty until a night beneath an astonishing sky forces a reckoning with what has been calling him all along.

Honest, soulful, and vivid, Retired Ground is a climber’s odyssey about faith, family, and the pursuit of transcendence within the wilds of nature.