In the wilderness, one false step can make the difference between a wonderful respite and a brush with death.

On a beautiful summer afternoon in 1998, Dan Stephens, a twenty-two-year-old canoeist, was leading a trip deep into Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Recreation area. He stepped into a distance among cedar trees to consider the next portage-and didn’t return. A lot more than four hours later on, Dan awakened from a fall with a lump on his mind and stumbled deeper into the woods, confused.

3 years later, about Lost in the open: Danger and Survival in the North Woods Jason Rasmussen, a third-year medical student who enjoyed the forest’s solitude, walked alone in to the Boundary Waters Canoe Region Wilderness on the crisp fall day. After a two-day trek into a remote control area of the woods, he stepped from his campsite and made some seemingly trivial mistakes that left him separated from his materials, wet, and dropped, as cool darkness fell.

Enduring times without meals or shelter, these men faced the full harsh pressure of wilderness, the place that they had searched for for tranquil refuge from town life. Lost in the Wild takes listeners with them because they enter realms of pain, fear, and courage, as they suffer dizzying dilemma and unending disappointment, and because they get over apparently insurmountable hurdles in a race to survive.