The traces of our life here will lie cold and still, dreaming, like the brittle eyes of dolls in an abandoned cabin, and the last men will look to them for explanations, or apologies.

For me, to find a place that doesn't have an organized tour going to it is becoming more and more difficult. A lot of times it involves danger of a political nature - places where the adventure-travel trips can't go because they can't get any liability insurance.

I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.

Many people go into the wilderness to experience it, and if they experience it in comfort, there's very little in a literary sense for them to write about.

It occurred to me that for a long time I tried not to write about my own backyard and my home. I suppose I was selfishly keeping it to my self. And in doing so, I was never able to get out into this incredible wilderness area - by the way, I live right at the edge of the most incredible wilderness area probably in the northern hemisphere.

My concept of drama requires obstacles, and there's no obstacles in comfort.

The hard wind we get around here on the eastern slopes of the Rockies is called a Chinook. It's a katabatic wind and comes from mountains to the west of us and the mountains to the south.