Half my life ago I went to a job fair at the University of Colorado. I put on my good boots and a button-down, loaded my arms with papers I'd written and opened the door on the waiting room where intent young men and women sat wearing neatly pressed business outfits. Like me, they were waiting for their future to happen. At that instant, I spilled every paper I had, a beautiful white cascade. Scooping my life's work off the floor as every person sat and stared, I realized I was in the wrong room. I excused myself out the door and promptly exited the job fair.

That's not when it started, but it was one of those turning points where yet again the obvious became painfully clear to me. Roads diverge in the wood and I start climbing trees.

I look for the places in between whether I have a month, a day, or a minute. Pinacate, Olympic Peninsula, Manhattan, I find wilderness. The Ramble in Central Park at dusk: I tried to explain with my body language to lurking, silent men that I was not here for a filthy blow job. I was looking for dark stitches in the city. Tibetan Plateau: I arrived knowing nothing, intentionally not reading up or chatting with other travelers, so that every step I took would dissolve what I once believed. This morning I was in scrub oak near my house in western Colorado, cock-eyed and backwards in nets of branches finding bones left from mountain lion meals and labyrinths of rabbit paths. It's what I do.

This website is dedicated to these moments, which I keep compiled under the "Writing" button. There are periods of silence, of course, unable to find my way back to a computer. But I do my best to always return.

For a more formal bio, see below.

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Craig Childs is writer who focuses on natural sciences, archaeology, and mind-blowing journeys into the wilderness. He has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books on nature, science, and adventure. He is a commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men's Journal, Outside and Orion. His subjects range from pre-Columbian archaeology to US border issues to the last free-flowing rivers of Tibet.

The expeditions Childs undertake often last weeks or months, informing his writing with a hard-earned sense of landscape and culture. The New York Times says "Childs's feats of asceticism are nothing if not awe inspiring: he's a modern-day desert father." He has been called a born storyteller by the New York Sun, and the LA Times says his writing is like pure oxygen, and "stings like a slap in the face." He has won several key awards including the 2008 Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, the 2007 Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award and the 2003 Spirit of the West Award for his body of work, an honor he shares with Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams and N. Scott Momaday. Childs is an Arizona native, and grew up back and forth between there and Colorado. With a mother hooked on outdoor adventure, and a father who liked whiskey, guns, and Thoreau, his life was rigged from the start. In his teens, Childs began working as a river guide, and since then has held numerous jobs to support his field time, from gas station attendant to journalist to beer bottler. Now making a living as a writer, Childs lives off the grid with his wife and two young sons at the foot of the West Elk Mountains in Colorado.