I have worked a wide variety of jobs including jazz musician, journalist, gas station attendant, beer bottler, college field instructor, and river guide - not necessarily in that order. These days I am mostly writing and speaking, and wandering in wild places when I can.

I am a father of two sons, Jasper and Jaden, both born at home in front of a roaring woodstove. Regan Choi is my wife and the mother of these two young children. She is an artist, photographer, and has countless occupations, capable of damn near anything. When we first got together, she was living in a ten-by-twelve cabin she built herself in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Now we live off the grid together in Colorado, at the foot of the West Elk Mountains. Regan is a mountain woman. Please, let me explain: I once chided her for not being born in the Colorado River drainage, as were Jasper, Jaden, and I (she is from the headwaters of the South Platte River). Regan replied, "I was born in the mountains. I was not born in a drainage." That should explain the difference between us. I am drawn down, toward desolate, rocky places, while she is drawn upward toward aspens and snow. Our home is balanced between the two.

When I first began publishing books in the mid 1990s, I lived nowhere. For seven years I had no residence or phone number, slept in the back of a truck or in the wilderness, and worked seasonally as a guide and field instructor. My first few books were typed in bars, libraries, and laundromats.

Since then, I have written several other books and my work has appeared in a number of anthologies. I have written for the LA Times, New York Times, Natural History, Orion, Outside, Audubon, Sierra, High Country News, and Mountain Gazette. I am also a commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition. After a live radio report from lower Manhattan on September 11th, 2001, the Washington Post called me one of the only sane voices heard on that day. It is good to be called sane now and then.

I am deeply grateful that my writing has been well received. I won the Spirit of the West Award for my body of work, an honor I share with the likes of Wallace Stegner, N. Scott Momaday, Tony Hillerman, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Terry Tempest Williams. I am also recipient of the Colorado Book Award. Twice my books have made the Book Sense 76 list, and have been listed as top books of the year by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

My writing continues at a frenetic pace, the cab of my truck littered with receipts and envelopes scratched upon with illegible words. But this a mere byproduct, verbiage left over from experiences had on the land, raw encounters among mountain lions, boulders, water holes, and drifting thunderstorms.

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For a New Times article on Craig Childs see: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/garden/27childs.html?_r=1&oref=slogin