ABOUT THE AUTHOR
My younger years were filled with adventure: building a log cabin, trapping timber wolves for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and climbing in the Tetons shaped my early thinking. Education became my next driver because I knew it would test my will more than anything I had ever accomplished. After making a bazillion revisions to my dissertation, my PhD advisor said, “It’s not a matter of how smart you are, it’s a matter of how tough you are.” I was tough enough. I have now moved from academic to creative writing, which is stimulating and testing my brain in new ways, and my latest challenge is writing a screenplay for my memoir. These challenges provide me with meaning and purpose that keep me fully alive.My younger years were filled with adventure: building a log cabin, trapping timber wolves for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and climbing in the Tetons shaped my early thinking. Education became my next driver because I knew it would test my will more than anything I had ever accomplished. After making a bazillion revisions to my dissertation, my PhD advisor said, “It’s not a matter of how smart you are, it’s a matter of how tough you are.” I was tough enough. I have now moved from academic to creative writing, which is stimulating and testing my brain in new ways, and my latest challenge is writing a screenplay for my memoir. These challenges provide me with meaning and purpose that keep me fully alive.
I came to writing the long way around. Before I sat down to describe nature, I spent years in it—experiencing lengthy expeditions, guiding, teaching, and eventually writing. The books followed, slowly, from a habit of paying attention.
My academic work began as a way to defend something I had seen with my own eyes: that students taught through direct experiences with real consequences learn important life skills like communication and problem solving. The Experiential Learning series, and Adventure Education books, all argue for that experience.
The young adult titles came after readers kept asking for a way to start. They are first invitations — to climb, to paddle, to read a river — written for the person you wish you had met at fifteen.
Escaping to Nature is my memoir : a gut wrenching childhood filled with trauma, breaking the cycle of abuse, and achieving what I never thought was possible. It is the book I have been working toward, in one way or another, for thirty years.
A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY
1998 First published — Philosophical Issues In Adventure Education
2005 Begins the Adventure Education series of academic works.
2007 Releases the four-book Young Adult outdoor series.
2024 The memoir Escaping to Nature is released.
2026 Publishes Thoughts From a Tree Stand to wide acclaim.
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