In August of 2002 Pat Garber, accompanied by her dog Huck, moved into a log cabin in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Birchbark Chronicles is a combination of the daily journal she kept while living on the mountain and a memoir of her early life. The award-winning author, soon after her arrival on Mt. Sabattis, began writing on sheets of bark she stripped from birch trees, recording her daily life,. Soon the project became too large and she switched to paper and a word processor. Her journal entries focus on exploring the mountains and lakes around her and learning about their natural history. They include getting to know the people who live there and the stories of the people who settled this wilderness. Cutting and splitting wood for her wood stove, climbing up the long hill in her snowshoes, collecting and eating native berries and plants, making long trips in her kayak, and waiting tables at the local diner. Garber shares her cabin with a lovable, flop-eared doberman pinscher and a sassy tabby cat, whose antics form part of her journal. Also recorded are her interactions with the wildlife which share her mountain--bears, red fox, coyotes, squirrels, deer, white-footed mice, ruffed grouse, and a variety of songbirds who come to her feeders. During the year covered in this account she also begins examining and recording memories from her life; growing up on a small Virginia farm with a loving family; setting out on her own and hitch-hiking through this country, the Virgin Islands, the British Isles and France; falling in love with and marrying a charismatic but trouble-making rock-and-roll musician. The stories she records include working on a fishing boat long-lining for halibut in the North Pacific, picking pears in the hills along the Columbia River of Oregon, milking 60 cows twice a day on a small farm in western Washington, and working as an archaeologist on a Makah Indian dig on the Straits de San Juan de Fuca. Garber tries throughout the book to find meaning in her experiences and guidance for where to go in her future. She hopes that the answers she finds will have meaning not only for herself but for her readers as well.