Author Gary Ferguson first answered the call to adventure at age 12, loading up his purple sting-ray bike with camping gear and riding with his brother across the central Midwest. By age 18 bicycles had given way to boxcars and backpacks, as he made his way across North America by rail and by thumb - more often than not, heading west, and heading for mountains. Ferguson believes that strong writing grows out of strong experience.

Hence, Gary has hiked and skied thousands of miles through high deserts and forests, canoed countless miles of wild rivers, and explored some of the remotest corners of the earth.

He trekked 500 miles through Yellowstone to write Walking Down the Wild, spent a season in the field at a wilderness therapy program to write Shouting at the Sky, spent a year in the backcountry following the first 14 wolves released into Yellowstone National Park for The Yellowstone Wolves: The First Year, and bicycled with his wife Jane from Canada to Mexico for his very first published book, Freewheeling. "What I'm looking for," he says, "what I'm celebrating, is the power of story. Tales of people finding their voices. Of life outside the box. And always, stories of the tracks nature leaves in the human heart."