Author Description

Recollections of OUT THERE is a chronicle of a lifetime of gaining an insight on life and self through an intimate association with the natural world. John David Dell devoted thirty years as a line officer and fire research specialist with the U.S. Forest Service in California and the Pacific Northwest. He also served nearly twenty years as a college instructor in natural and cultural history of the intermountain forest, range, and desert wild lands, all of which provided him with a deep closeness to the landscape, its interpretation, diversity, and vulnerabilities. Now in his mid-eighties, John has lived a lifetime of developing his own open communion with the land while traversing countless mountain summits and canyons in the Sierras, the snow peaks of the Cascades, the basin and range country of Nevada and Utah, and the sky islands and deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, Baja California and northern Mexico. He shares his personal experiences as an individual seeking the wild heart of life within wilderness places described by western author and historian Wallace Stegner as our "geography of hope." John sees his world through the eyes of a poet and photographer, though not professing great expertise in either field. His words, along with his accompanying photographs, convey much of the spirit of the places and things he describes without compromising their reality. The text is augmented by a few careful selections from well-known authors, conservationists, naturalists, and individuals who have had their own up close and personal relationships with the natural world OUT THERE.