• Updated

STEVENSON — At 76, author Linda Jo Hunter is hard to catch up with. If she’s not out paddling in the Sea of Cortez (winters in Baja), she’s in the deep woods of Washington (her summer home), trailing a bear on her eBike to discover what it’s eating and when.

At 20 years old, Pete Fromm heard of a job babysitting salmon eggs for seven winter months alone in a tent in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. He leapt at the chance to be a mountain man, even with no experience in the wilds. Thirteen years later, he published a memoir of that winter, “Indian Creek Chronicles.”

If I have learned anything in all my years of wandering in wilderness, it’s that there is the plan for the day and then there is what actually happens. And while I have come to expect the unexpected, the gift that came from putting fear aside on a hot August night in 2004 still resonates deep in the marrow of my memory.