The open prairies tend to be ignored or considered fleetingly by many urbanites, a blur from a car heading elsewhere. But in the last decade titles like Don Gayton’s The Wheatgrass Mechanism, Sharon Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning and Wild Stone Heart, and Trevor Herriot’s River in a Dry Land have helped create a flourishing sub-genre of prairie memoir, each speaking elegantly of depth under the flat surface.

In Rediscovering the Great Plains, part of a series on North American landscapes from Johns Hopkins Press, Norman Henderson tries to put himself in the minds of nomadic natives and European explorers by matching the pace and methods of their original journeys across the plains. Choosing Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley for his experiments, he borrows a dog, recreates an Indian travois (a V of wooden poles for carrying cargo) for the dog to pull, and sets out on foot. The next summer he repeats the route by canoe, and, a year later, on a horse. Along the way, he blends passages from historical travelogues with accounts of his own sun-blasted, mosquito-tormented journeys.

Henderson’s writing does not match the eloquence of Herriot’s moving elegy to the Qu’Appelle. The thrice-repeated journey literally covers the same ground with a limited range of description and historical insight. Henderson, a Saskatchewan-based environmental consultant, is the first to call himself an anachronism in the 21st century, but his prose seems to have absorbed the formal stiffness of the explorers’ journals he’s steeped himself in.

Rediscovering the Great Plains is certainly instructive, mostly about hardships, both Henderson’s own and the explorers’ who predated him, and it offers lessons on how to be attentive to the prairie’s subtle charms. Unfortunately, we barely learn anything about who Henderson is, where he’s come from, and why he’s so obsessed with previous modes of travel. He sketches himself lightly into the story, making it harder for the reader to see what he’s looking at and what he finds so compelling.