A Wilderness Within

A Wilderness Within: The Life of Sigurd F. Olson is a 1997 biography of the twentieth-century American conservationist and writer by David Backes, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Olson is one of the most significant figures of the early environmental movement, best-known today for his role in the creation of several major national parks, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Point Reyes National Seashore, the Florida Everglades, and the Dinosaur National Monument. He is also remembered as a pioneering nature writer, whose debut, The Singing Wilderness, was a New York Times bestseller and has influenced many subsequent nature writers. Backes’s biography provides detailed information about Olson’s private life, including his religious upbringing and his lifelong battle with depression. A Wilderness Within, described by critics as a “smoothly written, congenial biography” (Publishers’ Weekly) won the Small Press Book Award in 1998.

Backes seeks to trace the origins of Olson’s passionate conservationism, as well as of his many internal conflicts, to his childhood and youth. Olson was born in Chicago, Illinois to parents who were devout Swedish Baptists. His father was an enthusiastic fire-and-brimstone preacher who instilled in his son an unshakeable sense of the divine. When Olson was still a boy, the family moved to northern Wisconsin, where his lifelong romance with the outdoors began. In the towns of Sister Bay, Prentice, and later Ashland, Olson spent more and more time exploring the wilderness regions of Wisconsin.

When he was 22, Olson took a canoe trip to the “canoe country” of northern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, the place that would become his spiritual home and which he would lead the fight to have designated a National Park. As his love of the wilderness deepened, Olson began to tap the literary tradition of American nature writing. Deeply inspired by Thoreau, he developed a literary vocation: “No one has as yet developed a philosophy of the wilderness. That is up to me.”



Olson’s first article—an account of his canoe trip—was published later that year in the Milwaukee Journal. In the same year, Olson married Elizabeth Uhrenholdt; their honeymoon was a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters. Irresistibly drawn to the place, Olson took a job as a canoe guide in Winton, Minnesota, before buying a canoe-outfitting business there. He led the canoe expeditions of the group known to history as the “Voyageurs,” including writer Eric W. Morse, politician Denis Coolican, and military scientist Omond Solandt.

In the early thirties, Olson decided to deepen his understanding of the wilderness through academic study. At Northland College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Illinois, Olson studied agriculture, botany, geology, and ecology. After graduating, he took up a position teaching biology at Ely Junior College in Ely, Minnesota, near his beloved Boundary Waters. He rose quickly through the ranks of his profession, becoming chair of the science department and later dean.

All the while, Olson was torn between his role as an educator, his desire to escape from behind his desk to head into the wilderness, and his need to sit at yet another desk in order to write his philosophy of the wilderness. Throughout his years of study and teaching, Olson diligently worked on essays, but publishers rejected his writing time and time again. Backes traces the legacy of a Baptist father’s preaching in the sermonizing style Olson gradually honed. Undaunted, Olson eventually sold his first book, The Singing Wilderness, in 1956. His perseverance was rewarded: the book made the New York Times bestseller list and earned Olson enough money that he could give up his academic role to focus on writing and trekking in the wilderness. Olson would eventually earn nature writing’s highest prize, the John Burroughs Medal, in 1974.



Alongside his writing—and often at the expense of it—Olson became involved in conservationism. He helped to draft the Wilderness Act of 1964, served as vice-president and then president of the Wilderness Society during the sixties, and was instrumental in the designation of many of America’s most significant wilderness reserves, including the Voyageurs National Park in his own northern Minnesota.

Passionately though he believed in this work, Olson deeply resented the time it required, preferring to be out in nature or working on his writing. This conflict helped to spur episodes of serious depression, from which only prolonged isolation in the wilderness could rescue him.

Depression also informed Olson’s writing, which became increasingly preoccupied with the theological significance of the wilderness, and profoundly influenced by the Jesuit theologian Teilhard de Chardin. For Olson, nature was God, its untouched places and processes things of “ritualistic significance.” He believed that “sin” was the state of separation from God—that is, Nature.



In 1971, Olson addressed Northland College’s environmental conference, one of the first of its kind. The conference led directly to the founding of the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute. In 1978, Olson realized a long-held dream when Jimmy Carter granted federal wilderness status to the Boundary Waters Canoe area.

Four years later, while snowshoeing near his home, Olson died of a heart attack. Left in his typewriter was the first sentence of an unfinished book: “A new adventure is coming up and I'm sure it will be a good one.”