MISCALCULATED RISKS

Cooper offers a memoir of successfully pursuing passions.

Though he received a full scholarship after graduating high school in 1971, the author took a detour to embrace his interests in music and exploring some of America’s most remote wild places. The detour became an adventurous road that he ably chronicles in this memoir. Leaving behind his Long Island, New York, nightclub-junk-food-drug-filled life for healthy living in California, he encountered the first of his travels’ trials in 1978, when a poisonous scorpion sting sustained in remote Yelapa, Mexico, led to a near-death experience and a spiritual awakening. After recovering in Long Island, he returned to California. Backpacking en route to the Great Western Divide in 1980, Cooper saw a backpacker who had navigated an off-trail course; this was “the inspiration for [the author] becoming an expert cross-country navigator, planning and executing over the following decades scores of remote wilderness routes far from paint-by-number trails.” In 1981, he moved to Oregon, where he was successful as an audio engineer and could pursue his wilderness adventures. Classes and expeditions with the Sierra Club and the Obsidians (a club devoted to outdoor experiences in the Pacific Northwest) improved his mountaineering skills. With like-minded friends, he organized a series of risky and sardonically named Desert Death Marches, starting in 1994 with a 50-mile expedition through the Joshua Tree National Monument and culminating in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park in 2015. By then, at age 61, health issues and years of rugged backpacking had taken a toll on his body. Whether climbing, backpacking, whitewater rafting, or undergoing brain surgery, Cooper portrays his adventures in immersive detail. His descriptions of his experiences in untouched areas are lyrical: “I had that priceless feeling one gets only in very remote wilderness: a deep and abiding calm, primitively simple and absent of thought, unshackled from all obligation and carefree.” Throughout the book, the author depicts his friends and family with empathy. Lovers of the outdoors and armchair travelers alike will enjoy adventuring along with him.

The wilderness comes alive on the page in this (literal) trailblazer’s memoir.