Way Out There

"I have never been lonely when alone in the wild," says J Robert Harris. It's a reality that motivates his adventurous life. A city kid, J. R. impulsively set out on his first solo adventure at age 22 in 1966 - driving nearly five thousand miles from New York City to the end of the northernmost road in Alaska. It inspired him to challenge himself with a different kind of experience - wilderness trekking. "I needed to know what was out there," he writes, "and to find out by seeing it for myself, up close." Thus a life of outdoor exploration began.

His subsequent journeys - more than forty so far, mostly alone and unsupported - have taken him from the Arctic to the Andes, through mountain ranges across North America and Europe, into Tasmania, and across Australia's outback. He has faced terrible weather, hair-raising river crossings, and wildlife encounters, yet he has also been graced by the kindness of strangers who have offered food, assistance, and friendship along the way. By turns funny, suspenseful, and uplifting, his stories reveal how he has been immeasurably enriched by the beauty, the wildness, even the unpredictability, of a life "way out there."

Now in his seventies, J. Robert Harris is still an active and enthusiastic trekker. Elected into the prestigious Explorers Club in 1993, Harris is also founder and president of JRH Marketing Services, the oldest and most expecerienced African American-owned research and consulting firm in the United States. He lives in New York City.