My Wilderness Life: One Man's Search for Meaning in Montana's Wilderness
My Wilderness Life: One Man's Search for Meaning in Montana's Wilderness

Author: John Fraley

Publisher: Farcountry Press

Published:

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1560378344

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A wildlife biologist's journey of discovery through Montana's wilderness As young men, John Fraley and Terry McCoy were kindred spirits, drawn to Montana’s most remote, rugged, wild places. Tragically, one of them died young, his wilderness dreams cut short. The other went on to a forty-year career studying fish and furbearers in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. My Wilderness Life chronicles John Fraley’s lifelong love of all places wild and his obsession with uncovering what happened on the August 1974 morning when Terry McCoy’s airplane crashed in what would become the Welcome Creek Wilderness. Join Fraley on a frantic search to find his friend, and also on epic treks to traverse an impassable river canyon, snorkel with pure westslope cutthroat trout, retrace the footsteps of conservation icon Bud Moore, track lynx and mountain lions across the Great Bear Wilderness in winter, hike 42 miles through the Bob in a single day, and much more. At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, My Wilderness Life reveals how one man’s unfulfilled dreams can inspire another’s adventures. Wilderness risks and rewards come alive in first-hand accounts of daring escapades, solo treks, and a few foolhardy misadventures. An inside glimpse of the life of a fisheries biologist in the backcountry. Amply illustrated with 100 black-and-white photographs.

Heroes of the Bob Marshall Wilderness
Heroes of the Bob Marshall Wilderness

Author: John Fraley

Publisher: Farcountry Press

Published: 2020-09-07

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1560377747

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Follow author John Fraley as he traces the lives and times of past and present heroes of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, from old-timers like Joe Murphy, to Smoke Elser, and on to the present. Over the past century, these heroes have ridden, packed, and hiked from one end of the Bob to the other, and they’ve helped make the wilderness what it is today. You’ll ride along on horse and mule treks and wrecks, and discover the sport of trout wrangling. You’ll meet the fluorescent hunter, White River Sue, and the black-clad backpacker. You’ll battle packrats, fish-eating deer, tricky bears, and a tree-hugging criminal. Sit back and read about a dog rescue, smokejumper adventures, kids raised in the wilderness, and the first study of grizzlies in the Bob. Witness a tense moose-lassoing rodeo, and meet a backcountry rooster named Bob Marshall, the first live chicken to attempt a traverse of the Bob. The heroes in this book have ridden and hiked hundreds of thousands of miles through the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. Now, come along with them and celebrate their contributions, their challenges, and their fun times.

My Wilderness Life: One Man's Search for Meaning in Montana's Backcountry
My Wilderness Life: One Man's Search for Meaning in Montana's Backcountry

Author: John Fraley

Publisher: Farcountry Press

Published: 2022-11-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781560378228

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As young men, John Fraley and Terry McCoy were kindred spirits, drawn to Montana's most remote, rugged, wild places. Tragically, one of them died young, his wilderness dreams cut short. The other went on to a forty-year career studying fish and furbearers in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. My Wilderness Life tells of John Fraley's life-long love of all places wild, and his obsession with uncovering what happened in August 1974 when Terry McCoy's airplane crashed in what would become the Welcome Creek Wilderness. Join Fraley on a frantic search to find his friend, and on epic treks to traverse an impassable river canyon, snorkel with pure westslope cutthroat trout, retrace the footsteps of conservation icon Bud Moore, track lynx and mountain lions across the Great Bear Wilderness in winter, hike 42 miles through the Bob in a single day, and much more. At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, My Wilderness Life reveals how one man's unfulfilled dreams can inspire another's adventures.

A Woman's Way West: In and Around Glacier National Park, 1925 to 1990
A Woman's Way West: In and Around Glacier National Park, 1925 to 1990

Author: John Fraley

Publisher: Farcountry Press

Published: 2020-02-24

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 1560377712

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Doris Ashley left Iowa and came to Montana as the frontier era came to a close and the hard transition to the modern West began. In 1925, already a widow at the age of twenty-four, she took a job as “cheap help” in Glacier National Park and thus began a lifelong affair with Montana’s landscape, wildlife, and people. Doris soon met the love of her life, native son Dan Huffine, another park worker with an abiding love for the region. Together, they shared many adventures over the next sixty years, helping to shape the character of northwest Montana and participating in the growth of Glacier Park on both sides of the Continental Divide. Between them, the Huffines shared stints as backcountry park ranger, driver of the classic red tour buses in the park, and cook for the crew that did the perilous work surveying the famous Going-to-the-Sun Road. The couple operated tourist camps along the Glacier Park boundary and became co-proprietors of the Huffine Montana Museum. Many people considered the couple endearingly eccentric, and for good reason, as they kept skunks, badgers, coyotes, bears, a mountain goat, and a beaver as pets. The Huffines were also world-class raconteurs, and enjoyed telling their tales later in life to author John Fraley, who shared their love of the outdoors and of Glacier Park. Using many hours of tape recordings, numerous journals, and a great deal of research, Fraley has pieced together the story of Doris’s early life in Iowa, her fateful meeting with Dan, and their love story, which is also very much a work story—a tale of building a life together while at the same time helping to shape the “Crown of the Continent” region.

Wild Spectacle
Wild Spectacle

Author: Janisse Ray

Publisher: Trinity University Press

Published: 2021-10-26

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 1595349588

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Looking for adventure and continuing a process of self-discovery, Janisse Ray has repeatedly set out to immerse herself in wildness, to be wild, and to learn what wildness can teach us. From overwintering with monarch butterflies in Mexico to counting birds in Belize, the stories in Wild Spectacle capture her luckiest moments—ones of heart-pounding amazement, discovery of romance, and moving toward living more wisely. In Ray’s worst moments she crosses boundaries to encounter danger and embrace sadness. Anchored firmly in two places Ray has called home—Montana and southern Georgia—the sixteen essays here span a landscape from Alaska to Central America, connecting common elements in the ecosystems of people and place. One of her abiding griefs is that she has missed the sights of explorers like Bartram, Sacagawea, and Carver: flocks of passenger pigeons, routes of wolves, herds of bison. She craves a wilder world and documents encounters that are rare in a time of disappearing habitat, declining biodiversity, and a world too slowly coming to terms with climate change. In an age of increasingly virtual, urban life, Ray embraces the intentionality of trying to be a better person balanced with seeking out natural spectacle, abundance, and less trammeled environments. She questions what it means to travel into the wild as a woman, speculates on the impacts of ecotourism and travel in general, questions assumptions about eating from the land, and appeals to future generations to make substantive change. Wild Spectacle explores our first home, the wild earth, and invites us to question its known and unknown beauties and curiosities.

Grizzly Years
Grizzly Years

Author: Doug Peacock

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Published: 2011-04-01

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 142993347X

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For nearly twenty years, alone and unarmed, author Doug Peacock traversed the rugged mountains of Montana and Wyoming tracking the magnificent grizzly. His thrilling narrative takes us into the bear's habitat, where we observe directly this majestic animal's behavior, from hunting strategies, mating patterns, and denning habits to social hierarchy and methods of communication. As Peacock tracks the bears, his story turns into a thrilling narrative about the breaking down of suspicion between man and beast in the wild.

The Stranger in the Woods
The Stranger in the Woods

Author: Michael Finkel

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2018-01-30

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1101911530

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The remarkable true story of a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, making this dream a reality—not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his own. “A meditation on solitude, wildness and survival.” —The Wall Street Journal In 1986, a shy and intelligent twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the forest. He would not have a conversation with another human being until nearly three decades later, when he was arrested for stealing food. Living in a tent even through brutal winters, he had survived by his wits and courage, developing ingenious ways to store edibles and water, and to avoid freezing to death. He broke into nearby cottages for food, clothing, reading material, and other provisions, taking only what he needed but terrifying a community never able to solve the mysterious burglaries. Based on extensive interviews with Knight himself, this is a vividly detailed account of his secluded life—why did he leave? what did he learn?—as well as the challenges he has faced since returning to the world. It is a gripping story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude, community, and what makes a good life, and a deeply moving portrait of a man who was determined to live his own way, and succeeded.

At the Mercy of the River
At the Mercy of the River

Author: Peter Stark

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13:

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Even in this age of extreme sports and made-for-TV survival games, there still exist places on earth where the most intrepid among us can plunge into truly unknown territory. The acclaimed adventure writer Peter Stark had waited all his life for just such an opportunity. But when he was invited to Africa to join a small expedition kayaking down Mozambique’s Lugenda River, he balked. The 750-kilometer rivercourse was largely uncharted–dotted with rapids, waterfalls, and home to deadly crocodiles and hippos; two of his four travel companions were not skilled kayakers; and he had a family to think of, (not to mention that at forty-eight, he himself was feeling a bit old for the life untamed). Suppressing inner doubts and driven by that most human of urges–to see what lies beyond the next bend–Stark signed on for the adventure of a lifetime. At the Mercy of the River is Stark’s harrowing, insightful account of this venture into the unknown. “Why,” he muses between capsizes in the Lugenda’s croc-infested waters, “are humans compelled to explore?” The expedition’s five distinct–and sometimes clashing–personalities provide individual answers to that question. Equipped with only the most rudimentary comforts and lacking the customary explorer’s gun, the party encounters breathtaking natural splendor, rich wildlife, and villages little affected by modern life. Ever aware that they are following in the metaphorical footsteps of great explorers of the past–Vasco da Gama, Mungo Park, Ibn Battuta, David Livingstone, and other men of adventure who bridged Africa and the West–Stark shares these explorers’ stories with us, finding a common thread linking his experience with theirs. Using their accounts, his travails on the Lugenda River, and the insights of wilderness philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau, Stark attempts to understand the very nature of “exploration” while pondering the question, Where will we go when our wilderness vanishes? At the Mercy of the River is at turns inspiring, heart-thumping, and even amusing. But most of all, it is a riveting adventure story for a time when adventure is in danger of losing its meaning.

Into the Wild
Into the Wild

Author: Jon Krakauer

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2009-09-22

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0307476863

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. This is the unforgettable story of how Christopher Johnson McCandless came to die. "It may be nonfiction, but Into the Wild is a mystery of the highest order." —Entertainment Weekly McCandess had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Not long after, he was dead. Into the Wild is the mesmerizing, heartbreaking tale of an enigmatic young man who goes missing in the wild and whose story captured the world’s attention. Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild. Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interest that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the drives and desires that propelled McCandless. When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity, and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding—and not an ounce of sentimentality. Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling blaze through every page.

Be Audacious
Be Audacious

Author: Michael W. Leach

Publisher: Graphic Arts Books

Published: 2015-10-01

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1941821936

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It goes without saying that everyone wishes to live a life that matters. But how do we harness this potential and positively impact the world around us? In Be Audacious: Inspiring Your Legacy and Living a Life that Matters, author and motivational speaker Michael W. Leach offers a simple, four-part game plan for overcoming adversity, living authentically, uncovering purposeful passion, and developing vision. Leach encourages readers to embrace nonconformity—to "shed the shackles of societal norms"—in pursuit of their dreams. Fresh, vulnerable, and contemporary, this call to action speaks to millennials and any others who aspire to break out of the box on the path to a purposeful journey uniquely their own.