Nicholas Triolo at the Missoula Public Library
Shakespeare & Co., in partnership with Humanities Montana, is pleased to host a reading and discussion with celebrated Missoula-based author Nicholas Triolo at the Missoula Public Library on Thursday, October 8, 2026, at 6:30 pm. Triolo will read from his award-winning memoir, The Way Around: Walking a Reimagined Path. This event is free and open to the public.

About The Way Around: Walking a Reimagined Path:
Growing up in northern California, in a family of high-achieving athletes, Nicholas Triolo was imbued with a particularly acute form of our intensely goal-oriented culture. “Do the reps,” he internalized. “Commit to the work. Grind for your dreams.” Shortly after graduating from college, he embarked on a solo circumnavigation of the globe. And then after returning to the States, he threw himself into ultrarunning, all to combat a deepening discontent.

While traveling around the world, it was in Kathmandu that Triolo first encountered kora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around a sacred site or object—a kind of “ritualized remembering” birthed by place. Unable to shake this initial encounter with circumambulation, he sets out here on three such extended walks. First, he completes the sacred thirty-two-mile revolution around Tibet’s Mount Kailash, in search of a cultural counter to Western linearity. Then, following his mother’s diagnosis with breast cancer, he returns home to California and takes part in an annual circuit of Mount Tamalpais, tracing a route made famous by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And then finally, he meets up with a quirky hydrogeologist in Butte, Montana, and joins his walk around the Berkeley Pit Complex, the largest Superfund site in the country.

At once uncommonly humble and thrillingly transcendent, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer landscapes, The Way Around models what it means to experience a true revolution of heart and home—for the flourishing of all.

Author Biography:
Nicholas Triolo is a writer, filmmaker, photographer, activist, and long-distance trail runner. His writing and images have been featured in Orion, Outside, the Dark Mountain Project, Trail Runner, and Terrain.org. He has directed two documentary films, The Crossing and Shaped by Fire, and collaborated with Salomon on a film about touring and training Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Triolo’s films have been Official Selections for several international film festivals and featured on influential platforms such as Patagonia’s Dirtbag Diaries, Upworthy, and Outside. Triolo is based in Missoula, Montana, and you can read more about him at nicholastriolo.net.

Nicholas Triolo
Photography Credit: Rio Chantel