Calvin Rutstrum
Calvin Rutstrum (October 26, 1895 – February 5, 1982) was an American writer who wrote fifteen books, most relating to wilderness camping experiences and techniques.
[1] "His wilderness experiences begin just before WWI and span the modern era including the environmental movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Many of his wilderness years were spent wandering the Canadian Shield or the Boundary Waters area of Minnesota on long canoe, walking, or sledding trips.
[2][3] Though his mother remarried, the family had little money and Rutstrum worked at a wide range of odd jobs, some of them entrepreneurial, at a very young age.
At the same young age he also sought to maximize his time exploring and playing in his neighborhood's hardwood forest.
"a healthy young animal with less than a dozen years from birth, alive in the early summer sunshine, barefooted, youthfully entranced, eager as spring for life, as intrinsically a part of the river.
I believed, as the waterthrush that foraged at the mouth of Minnehaha Creek, where the rippling current joined the mighty Mississippi...To be free as a wild creature, not having to shoulder human cares, able to climb, run, jump.
swim, lie on an embankment in the sunshine—these gave a release to the young spirit that may be perhaps described as primitive, but nevertheless exquisite in the most elemental sense.
[3]At age 16, after acquiring his 30-30 carbine, .22 rifle, fishing tackle, ammunition, tent, bedroll, axe, knife, cook kit, and $25, he spent $24 of that for passage to Montana when he worked at a ranch riding fence in the summers and spent winters in a log cabin (line shack) in the mountains.
He served in World War I as a Navy medical corpsman, and as a criminal bank investigator for 10 years, and as a camp instructor and guide.
[2] In the early 1920s Rutstrum bought, subdivided and sold three 40 acre tracts on the northwest shore of Lake Superior.
This, combined with his limited lifestyle requirements provided a significant large step towards financial independence, where jobs became superfluous.
[3] Early in his life he lived in a cabin on the Flute Reed river along Lake Superior's northwest shore between Grand Marais and Duluth.
His next home was a cabin on an island in Sea Gull Lake, near the end of the Gunflint Trail in Minnesota where he lived for 10 years.
He then built a stone house in Marine-on-St. Croix, Minnesota, which became his primary residence, while retaining his Ontario cabin.
His wife Florence had been visiting Mexico with her aunt every year, and coaxed Cal to head southwest.
Rutstrum and his wife Florence bought an adobe house in Puerto De Luna, New Mexico, in the Pecos River Valley, which they remodeled and modernized.
Paradise Below Zero covered long term sub-zero (Fahrenheit) wilderness camping and travel.
[3] The book "Wilderness Visionaries" included Rutstrum on a list of eight (North American) wilderness visionaries along with Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Robert Service, Bob Marshall, Olaus Johan Murie and Sigurd Olson.
It is 276 pages, published by Macmillan (New York) and, according to Outdoors Magazine, superbly illustrated by Les Kouba.
The methods he covers include map and compass, stars, sextant and radio direction finding.
[2][9] It is less detailed and less complete than a typical autobiography; Rutstrum chose certain areas to cover and expand on, and others to leave out.
Four years before, in Chips from a Wilderness log Rutstrum wrote: "If you want to do something for me after I'm gone, live so as to not defile the precious earth".
