Out of the Rut
Desert passions bloom as Craig Childs walks his way deep into an award-winning career
By Erin Cox

Craig Childs

Craig Childs ('90) spent seven years in the desert. He survived the harsh elements armed only with a backpack, a journal, poetic eloquence and a passion for the hidden intensity of the wilderness. Roving the deserts of the American Southwest, Childs explored the terrain, the environment and his own mind, searching for explanation, meaning, beauty and adventure.

And the deserts were good to him; they've earned him a living.

"I walk and I write, and these are my two occupations," Childs says. He is the author of eight books about the wilderness and deserts of the American Southwest, from ecology and natural history to adventure.

He has won the Southwest Book Award and acclaim as a talented nature writer. But Childs, 35, doesn't see himself as an author by trade.

"It seems happenstance," he says. Wandering into the desert, however, is a deliberate decision to seek raw experience, wilderness and dynamic existence, he says. It was a decision characteristic of the essence of Childs, a man who designed a life he calls "custom-made, more intuitive and more emotional."

Although he came in from the desert in 1998, getting his first phone number and mailing address in nearly a decade, Childs says he still spends most of his time immersed in the landscape he loves most, setting out in the hostile environment and discovering new book potential.

"I could write endlessly about these places. The landscape offers so much diversity, so much opportunity for intimacy," Childs says.

Intimacy in the open, desolate, dry and seemingly unforgiving desert seems like an oxymoron. But for the passionate naturalist Childs, the desert is anything but desolate.

He writes of dramatic contrast, topography and environment, and of life that finds a way to survive in extreme conditions. He chronicles his thoughts, poetic descriptions of the landscape and life, and numerous adventures by hand into a journal that has experienced nearly as many adventures and close calls as Childs himself: evading flash floods, escaping predators, exploring canyons and caves and, most importantly, finding water. In bits and pieces decipherable only to Childs, the journal is the content of his books, shaped into final form away from the field.

Childs says he synthesized his first books wherever he could plug in a computer.

Now, the work happens at his solar-powered home in Crawford, on Colorado's Western Slope, where he lives with his wife, artist and book illustrator Regan Choi, when they are not out gathering material for more books.

Childs says he did not always have an expectant publisher waiting for him to write about his adventures. What began as a personal passion and way of life developed into a fruitful career.

He says his first success as a nature writer came in 1991 when he set out on an 11,000-mile trek through the Yukon and Alaska, and the Sierra Club took interest in an article he submitted as part of a contest.

After it won a national award, Childs says he realized there was audience for his work. While working as a river guide and teaching high school students on the side, Childs lived in the wilderness.

He says he wrote about his life and his thoughts. He wrote stories and sent them out.

"I'd been writing all along Πtaking notes, keeping journals and writing stories for no real obvious reason," Childs says. When he went into Westcliffe Publishers' office in Englewood in 1994 to inquire about an acquaintance's photography project, the reason for his writing became apparent.

"I was carrying my journal. The publisher asked to see it and wanted to publish it as a book," Childs says. And "Stone Desert" was published.

After the success of that book, he decided to write more: The book possibilities about the destitute wilderness he finds so invigorating seemed endless, he says.

"It's this endless maze where you can walk and walk and never see the same thing twice, even if you are coming back to the same place twice."

After his first four books, which Childs describes as "creative, nonfiction, natural history narratives about the landscape and stories about moving around Πdesert stories," he says he decided to enroll in a self-designed master's degree in desert studies at Prescott College in Arizona.

His master's research centered on desert flash-flood hydrology, desert biology and the ecology of water holes.

Childs is now an artistic, scientific and poetic desert enthusiast. That enthusiasm led to the publication of four more books, each one an aggregate of poetry, beauty, science, adventure and the human experience.

Childs says he never expected success as an author. In fact, he never expected anything in particular. "When I left CU, I had an expectation of experience and experience of being," he says.

After graduation in 1990, Childs says he left Boulder on a mountain bike loaded with gear and rode through Wyoming and Colorado looking for rural newspaper employment.

He found The Ouray County Plaindealer in southwestern Colorado, a weekly publication with staff of two. It was owned by Guy Wood ('67).

"It was incredibly low pay, a tremendous amount of work, a brilliant job and an endless job," Childs says.

For a year and a half, Childs and co-worker Laura Slavick ('92) did layout, photography, copy, advertising, printing and delivery for the community paper. Childs recalls usually working until 1 or 2 a.m., then skiing to the tepee in which he lived.

That was the last real job I've held," Childs says. He says he was fired from the paper after a resident petition went around demanding that Childs be removed from the town. "I was actually pretty good at the job; that's why it happened," Childs says.

He wasn't the only one who thought he was good, even though the town wanted him out.

In 1992, Childs won the Colorado Press Association's Community Writing Award for his work on the paper.

His venture with the Plaindealer was not the first time Childs found himself on the outside looking in. He says his talent and unique way of doing things complicated his undergraduate years at CU. He changed his major a few times, from geophysics to music to journalism.

"I went in as a geophysics major and discovered I can't add. Then I decided I couldn't make a living as a musician," he says. Instead, Childs chose a very liberal education: journalism with an emphasis on women's studies.

œI needed something to diversify journalism, something that delved a little deeper into the world. You get tired of the male world sometimes," Childs says, then adds after a pause and a chuckle, "All the time." Childs took such an array of courses that he recalls his adviser remarking that his senior schedule looked like that of a freshman.

Childs says he often found a lot of pressure to "get in line" while he was in school and did not intentionally try to buck the system; he was just trying to find ways to tell stories that did not fit in a newspaper. Despite institutional pressures, Childs says he knew he was going to lead a nontraditional life. "I've always tended toward what I believed I should be doing," he says.

Childs says school tries to make sense of a chaotic world. It is the same chaotic world, incidentally, whose natural complexity provides material for his writing, he notes.

"Wilderness incorporates a lot of what inspires me," Childs says. In the wilderness, often alone for days, Childs says he writes prolifically

"I try to explain what my life is and what it means. It never comes simply to one answer," he says.

From this comes the subjects of his books: the eight published, the ninth in the printing stage, the 10th just beginning to take shape, plus at least five more still in the idea stage, he says.

For his current project, Childs and his five-months pregnant wife are back in the desert, gathering artifacts, history and information about archaeology of the Southwest. Childs says he has been running into artifacts in the desert for decades, but only recently has he had the time to launch the book project.

Childs and his wife are expecting their first child in March, but they plan to be writing and living in the desert for years to come, he says.

"I can see the next 10 years of books, and I'll probably keep writing these books," Childs says, adding that he chooses his projects in the same way he leads his life, based more on intuition and emotion.

"My wife is a major influence in the feedback loop. What enchants Regan develops into ideas," he says.

Childs says he is entertaining several ideas for future projects from language school in Guatemala to living and traveling with nomadic tribes. Whatever he decides to do, one simple truth remains. "The books modify my future," he says.

Although their schedule is always evolving, Childs says he and his wife generally spend fall, winter and spring in a series of treks into the backcountry and relax at their home during the summer.

When not working on book projects, Childs is also an NPR commentator and an amateur jazz musician. He writes articles for nature and outdoor magazines and maintains a small book-tour schedule.

The book tour recently brought him back to Boulder, which he says is just as beautiful as he remembers it. Although most landscapes fascinate Childs, wherever he goes, he says he finds himself drawn back to the desert.

"It's this endless maze where you can walk and walk and never see the same thing twice, even if you are coming back to the same place twice," he says.