Born and raised in the lowlands of South Carolina, I spent many youthful days roaming the piney woods near my home. But it was my first trip to the Rocky Mountains in 1967 that really affected my life. In high country I felt, and continue to feel, spiritually as well as physically at home. I became an outdoor educator before anyone could define that label, working first for a small company in the Northwest, now long gone, later for Outward Bound and even later for NOLS. I lived for years with the question “When are you going to get a real job?”
 
Now I find my name on lists of “experts,” and to those who wonder why, my response is I have survived a long time in wilderness medicine and rescue, the specific field of outdoor education I have focused on. I was able to found the Wilderness Medicine Institute, now WMI of NOLS and now the largest school of wilderness medicine in the world. Backpacker Magazine has paid me to write for them for more than 18 years, many of those as a columnist, and I have been salaried as medical consultant to Atwater Carey outdoor health and safety products for 17 years. Recently I completed the process of publishing a book—the good, the bad, and the all-consuming--for the thirty-sixth time. When a thousand-plus magazine articles are added to the total, “they” say I have published more words on wild med than anyone else in history. The Wilderness Medical Society gave me the Warren Bowman Award for contributions to wilderness medicine. The Wilderness Education Association saw fit to hand me the Paul Petzoldt Award for excellence in wilderness education, and my book Wilderness First Responder stimulated the American Medical Writers Association to honor me with an award for excellence in medical writing. Survivors, like arthritic joints, are recognized by their persistence.
 
The greatest rewards of life, however, are the growing number of people who tell me they have been helped, and they have been helped to help others, by something I have written or taught. “It is quite clear,” said the Dalai Lama, “that there are many, many mysterious things.”