January 1954 (age 54)

During 1953—the year his father died, and the year he became president of the National Parks Association—Sigurd Olson quietly began writing a book manuscript. On January 16, 1954, a bitterly cold day that by night would reach nearly forty degrees below zero, leading to a broken furnace, a frozen pipe, and a blown stove fuse, Sigurd cheerfully confessed the truth to his daughter-in-law Yvonne, who had urged him to send his essays to a publisher:

Yes I am working on a book and it will be finished sometime in 1954 and I AM NOT COPYING STUFF OUT OF A OTHER BOOK SEE. I am writing one of my own and next summer if you are here I want you to help me make a clean a perfect copies of the rough MSS so that we can submit it somewhere in the fall. It is a compilation of esseys I have written and now in the light of my mature knowledge (I hope) rather drastically rewritten. I have written some new ones and made a lot of additions to the old ones....I have been working on it steadily since I got home and have some 20 chapters taking shape.

Two years later, Sigurd would find a publisher for his first book, and The Singing Wilderness, published by Alfred A. Knopf in April 1956, would become a New York Times bestseller.

January 1969 (age 69)

Sigurd and Elizabeth are in Sarasota, Florida while Sigurd is recovering from his November 1968 heart attack. By early January, Sigurd is starting to lake long, slow walks on the beech, and as his health improves, he and Elizabeth discover a local culinary delight, shrimp rolled in flour and broiled in beer. Meanwhile, using a typewriter loaned by local friends, Sigurd completes his book manuscript, The Hidden Forest, and the January issue of Audubon includes his "Song of the North," a chapter from his other new book, Open Horizons.