Above Timberline

This is the fourth volume in The New Explorer Series, a project initiated by Alan Landsburg Productions of Los Angeles. The idea of the series: to immerse a biologist in a natural environment for an extended period, alone, far from any laboratory or highway. Each biologist was asked to observe his environment and the organisms sharing it with him, and to record those observations on tape at the end of each day. The goal of the series: to understand not only the creatures and rhythms of that natural place, but also the ties between those creatures and rhythms and the human life of the biologist himself. This fourth volume relates the experiences of Dr. Dwight Smith, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University, who spend four and a half months just below the Continental Divide in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, living in an 85-year-old cabin that had been the center of a gold-mining operation. There he studied, ate, and kept his primitive house, alone except for occasional visitors. He came to know not only the hardy plants and animals of this region but also what it is like to live in such a high, cold, and windy place.