The personal diaries of one of America's best-loved naturalists, revealing his difficult and inspiring path to finding his voice and becoming a writer Few writers are as renowned for their eloquence about the natural world, its power and fragility, as Sigurd F. Olson (1899-1982). Before he could give expression to The Singing Wilderness, however, he had to find his own voice. It is this struggle, the painstaking and often simply painful process of becoming the writer and conservationist now familiar to us, that Olson documented in the journal entries gathered here. Written mostly during the years from 1930 to 1941, Olson's journals describe the dreams and frustrations of an aspiring writer honing his skills, pursuing recognition, and facing doubt while following the academic career that allowed him to live and work even as it consumed so much of his time. But even as he speaks with immediacy and intensity about the conditions of his apprenticeship, Olson can be seen developing the singular way of observing and depicting the natural world that would bring him fame-and also, more significantly, alert others to the urgent need to understand and protect that world. Author of Olson's definitive biography, editor David Backes brings a deep knowledge of the writer to these journals, providing critical context, commentary, and insights along the way. When Olson wrote, in the spring of 1941, "What I am afraid of now is that the world will blow up just as I am getting it organized to suit me," he could hardly have known how right he would prove to be. It is propitious that at our present moment, when the world seems once more balanced on the precipice, we have the words of Sigurd F. Olson to remind us of what matters-and of the hard work and the wonder that such a reckoning requires.

Sigurd Olson's love affair with the wilderness began in a stream near his house in Wisconsin -- he caught his first trout there with a tamarack wand, black thread, and a grasshopper as bait. Open Horizons is his autobiography, and in it he recounts a life lived on and for the land, from the wonder of boyhood fishing expeditions to decades-long conservation battles.

Writing always with the sensitive, lyric prose that characterizes his works, Olson recalls his pioneering youth on a remote Wisconsin farm, his summers as a wilderness canoe guide, and his thousands of miles of travel through the wilds of this country and Canada. "Open Horizons is the story of the unknowns I have discovered, and gone through", he writes.

While telling his story, Olson makes a compelling case for preserving the wilderness. He puts forth his own life as an example of how nature can have a spiritual effect on the human soul, and proposes diligence on behalf of those who fight to conserve our forests, wet-lands, and dunes. "If we can move into an open horizon where we can live in our modern world with ancient dreams that have always stirred us, then our work will have been done".

In the evocative words of one of America's best-loved nature writers, Wilderness Days brings together the essence of the magnificent wilderness with which he so deeply identifies. Sigurd F. Olson collects from his writings those moments that most vividly depict the turn of the seasons in the great woodlands and waters of the legendary Quetico-Superior region overlapping the Ontario-Minnesota border.

"There are few places left on the North American continent where men can still see the country as it was before Europeans came and know some of the challenges and freedoms of those who saw it first, but in the Canadian Northwest it can still be done".

With these words Sigurd Olson begins The Lonely Land, the breathtaking account of a five-hundred-mile Canadian canoe journey. Olson and five companions retraced the waterways used by the Voyageurs, the Hudson Bay traders, and a succession of adventurers who used the mighty Churchill River as a major waterway from Hudson Bay to the Mackenzie.

Now available for the first time in paperback, The Lonely Land tells two stories: that of Olson's expedition and that of the Voyageurs who came before them. The text is illuminated by historical quotes, maps, and research about life on the Churchill during the fur-trading years. But each chapter is driven by the beauty and challenges that faced Olson's group.

The Lonely Land is a tribute to the unspoiled beauty of the deep wilderness and the rugged individuals past and present who take up a canoe paddle to explore it.