Colin Fletcher, author of the longtime bestseller The Complete Walker, died on Tuesday at age 85.
Fletcher, who was born in Wales and educated in England, popularized
hiking and backpacking in the U.S. with several books. The most important of them,
The Complete Walker, first appeared in 1968 and has sold more than 500,000 copies. The fourth
edition, written with Chip Rawlins, is The Complete Walker IV (Knopf,
$22.95, 9780375703232/0375703233).
Another popular Fletcher title is The Man Who Walked Through Time: The Story of
the First Trip Afoot Through the Grand Canyon (Vintage, $14.95,
9780679723066/0679723064).
The following is from The Complete Walker, courtesy of Backpacker
magazine, which has a touching eulogy: "The important thing about
running your tight little outdoor economy is that it must not run you.
You must learn to deal with the practical details so efficiently that
they become second nature. Then, after the unavoidable shakedown
period, you leave yourself free to get on with the important
things--watching cloud shadows race across a mountainside or passing
the time of day with a humming bird or discovering that a grasshopper
eats grass like spaghetti or sitting on a peak and thinking of nothing
at all except perhaps that it's a wonderful thing to sit on a peak and
think of nothing at all."
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Ruth Bell Graham, the wife of evangelist Billy Graham,
died yesterday at age 87. She was the author or co-author of 14 books,
including poetry collection and Footprints of a Pilgrim, which the AP called an "autobiographical scrapbook."