Robert Wehrman

Robert Wehrman, Ph.D., a.k.a. Dr. Bob, lives in Burp, a small town in California's Mojave Desert. He has been walking up and down in the world since he discovered the works of Colin Fletcher in the early 1970s. He’d returned from the Vietnam War—at the age of 20—a shattered, shaken, young man with no hope for the future and a taste for chemical refreshments. Fletcher’s writing opened his eyes and pointed him toward the green world where he met the management of the galaxy and learned the meaning of life (although this took a great many years longer than expected). In 2015 he made a solo, cross-country traverse of the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River to the Sierra. Other backpacking journeys have taken him through extremely remote desert canyons and through most of Death Valley. (He hopes some day to forget one crossing.) Dr. Bob has explored much of Grand Canyon’s backcountry, walked extensively in the major mountain ranges west of the Mississippi, and through some non-major ranges such as the Guadalupes in Texas (where they pronounce it Gwadaloop). He conversed with Earth’s oldest living inhabitants—the King Clone creosote, and sauntered through an awful lot of deserts including the Mojave, the Sonora, the Colorado, and the Chihuahua. He’s rambled aimlessly in the California Coastal Range, hoping to find the naked prancers, and along the Rio Grande through Big Bend National Park and beyond to Laredo, where he stopped for Mexican food. In Alaska he found Lost Lake on the Kenai Peninsula, and, struggling and weeping, made it cross-country to the head of the Resurrection Trail, where he died. Next day he discovered he was only half-dead, so he followed the trail to the aptly named village of Hope. Apparently learning little from his death, Dr. Bob trekked alone in the Lake Clark Wilderness where he traced Fletcher’s map-less route across the Mulchatna River to the sanctuary of pines Colin wrote about in The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher. Luckily, he did not suffer anything seriously fatal on that trip. Shamelessly emulating another of Fletcher’s walks, in a journey covering 150 miles in just under ten years, he stumbled from the low point east of Tule Spring in Death Valley, cross-country, to the summit of Mt. Whitney. He’s squatted in the summit craters of the largest dormant volcano on Earth (where, upon returning to his car he received a parking citation) and—equipped with only an M16, a tuba, a squad of Green Berets, and a helicopter—summated Phan Xi Pang (10,312 feet) near Pleiku, Vietnam. Trained as a musician and over-educated, he holds four degrees in music including the Ph.D. Dr. Bob has written four symphonies, many film scores, and, quite by accident, became an electronic music expert which allowed him to work with Bob Moog, other important pioneering electronic keyboard companies, and many major recording artists who, since they are famous and know who they are—if they’re still alive—do not need to be named here. The author of many articles and books, Dr. Bob’s most successful book, to date, is Walking Man: The Secret Life of Colin Fletcher. This followed his hilarious dark comedy, The Unnatural Act; a semi-autobiographical novel about a nineteen-year-old patriotic Presbyterian abstemious bumbling virginal tuba player who is sent to die for his country in Vietnam. Miraculously, he survives and returns home as none of the above—with one exception: he is still quite a bumbler. Everything in this highly abridged autobiography is absolutely true except for the parts he made up.