White Heat
Hiking in the White Mountains
ABOUT
White Heat is an oversized instant book and 16-page slit zine drawing from my experience hiking all 48 of the 4000 foot mountains in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.The project combines personal reflection, regional history, trail culture, survival advice, and environmental storytelling through an interactive publication format. My interest came from wanting to document the strange psychological space that forms while hiking for long periods of time, especially in unfamiliar or difficult terrain.Most outdoor publications frame hiking through accomplishment, clarity, and guidance. Maps are designed to orient you, guidebooks are designed to reassure you, and outdoor culture often removes the strangeness and uncertainty of being alone in the wilderness.
My experience never felt that clean. Hiking often involved exhaustion, disorientation, paranoia, weather anxiety, and moments where continuing forward felt almost impossible. I wanted the publication itself to physically reproduce that feeling of confusion and uncertainty.
White Heat uses the structure of the book itself to mimic the feeling of navigating an unfamiliar trail system.
Text blocks are positioned at constantly shifting angles, forcing the viewer to rotate the publication in their hands like somebody trying to understand a confusing map. The content moves between practical hiking advice, discussions of Indigenous history and colonization, wildlife observations, trail culture, and reflections on endurance
and fear.
Glow-in-the-dark imagery appears throughout the publication, introducing the suggestion that the previous owner of the map became lost in the woods after nightfall. The project moves between guidebook, folklore, and horror narrative.
The final outcome is a large-scale slit zine printed as a single oversized sheet that folds into a 16-page instant book format.
The publication combines typography, sequencing, illustration, and glow in the dark printing techniques to create an experience that changes depending on lighting conditions and physical interaction. The viewer is constantly required to rotate,
reorient, and navigate the object while reading.
OUTCOME & REFLECTION
White Heat became an exploration into how publication design can create physicaland psychological discomfort through interaction and sequencing.
The project reinforced my interest in using material and structural decisions as narrative tools rather than treating layout as a neutral container for content. It also allowed me to combine personal experience, environmental storytelling, and experimental publication design into a single system