Wild Running: Lessons from Dogs, Wolves, and the Natural World - A Memoir (Special Edition)

THE SPECIAL EDITION PAPERBACK INCLUDES OVER 50 COLOR PHOTOS

In this insight-filled memoir, Wallick testifies to the power of dogs: to their companionship, the ways they connect us with the natural world, and the solace they provide when life throws us curveballs.
—Claudia Kawczynska, Founder, The Bark magazine and Editor-in-chief of The Bark and TheBark.com

When ultrarunner Rebecca Wallick was in her forties, a life-altering medical diagnosis upended her world. Running away from both emotional and physical pain, in 2005 she and her two Alaskan Malamutes moved to rural Idaho to forge a new life of solitude. Together, they began exploring remote trails in the vast wildness of the Salmon River Mountains, reveling in the natural world. Wallick shares lyrical descriptions of wildlife encountered while running trails in all seasons with her dogs, including one quiet summer morning in 2006, when a magical encounter with a gray wolf made a transformative impression.

Unbeknownst to Wallick, by moving to Idaho’s mountains, she and her wolf-like Malamutes landed in the middle of heated discussions and passionate opinions regarding the reintroduction of gray wolves in the West. When hunting of wolves became legal in Idaho, running forest trails with her dogs—who were often mistaken for wolves—made the issue both keenly personal and potentially dangerous.

In Wild Running, Wallick not only chronicles her “running with dogs” life but also provides history and context for the ongoing debates, enduring myths, and cultural wars following gray wolves as they expand their territory across the West.

Dogs have been at Wallick’s side at home, on trail runs, and throughout life’s challenges. Wild Running is, at its core, a love letter to those dogs, and to all our canine companions.

Sometimes we choose the dog, sometimes the dog chooses us. In Wild Running, Rebecca Wallick’s honest-to-the-core memoir, the choosing was not only mutual, it was mutually beneficial. Trail-runners, Malamute fans, and those who value nature in general and wolves in particular will all find something to like here.
—Susan Tasaki, Senior Editor, The Bark magazine

Wallick writes a beautiful book about dogs and trail running. But really, Wild Running is about Wallick’s love affair with wildness—her own, and her dogs’—and how those dogs help her become “a part of nature.”
—Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey