This Wild Life

ONE MAN’S 92-MILE RUN OF GRIEF AND SELF-DISCOVERY.

- Patrick Rodgers

I stood there, arms raised, begging my GPS to find a signal. As I crossed the remote mountain border between Colorado and Wyoming on mile 37 of a 92-mile run, the rugged trail I had been following suddenly disappeared into a wall of ghastly gray downed trees, remnants of the recent bark-beetle epidemic. The thick canopy overhead had blocked the fragile link between my GPS and SPOT devices.

Alone, calorie-depleted and far from help, I felt painfully isolated. It was the same feeling I had nine months earlier, as I sat beside my father and watched his life come to a premature end. Devastated by that loss, my life spiraled into an abyss of depression, the path out of grief nowhere in sight.

My dad, Neil, was a kind, joyful man with wavy, gray hair, frequently adorned with a sweat-soaked National Geographic Today ball cap and a plain black T-shirt (also drenched in sweat)—his signature hiking apparel on a hot summer day. Neil was a lover of the wild—wildlife, wild places and— never shy to shout it from the mountaintops— wily me. Our adventures hiking, fishing and hunting in the mountains together instilled in me a same love for the wild, so much so that I decided to become a wildlife biologist to try and conserve what fleeting wildness remains.