Richard F. Fleck is author of Desert Rims to Mountains High, and also the foreword writer for the WestWinds Press Literary Naturalist Series. A professor of American literature for some fifty years, Fleck earned a PhD from the University of New Mexico (1970), and taught at the University of Wyoming, Osaka University, Japan, as well as Prescott College, the University of Northern Colorado, and the University of Bologna, Italy. At age seventy-five he remains active by climbing mountains and guiding Sierra Club hikes in Colorado and Utah and teaches occasional classes for Colorado Heights University. John Muir (April 21, 1838 - December 24, 1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist.