Retired Ground
A Climber's Odyssey
by Michael J. Collins

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He went looking for adventure. The mountains gave him so much more. In Retired Ground, Michael J. Collins documents his fifty-year pilgrimage into wild places, braiding his lifelong travel journal together with poetry, history, philosophical musings, and hard-earned reflection. The book begins with a twenty-one-year-old hitchhiking through Ireland as The Troubles gather in the distance, then ranges outward to blizzards in Nova Scotia, volcanic slopes in Mexico, backcountry solitude on Isle Royale, cliff paths on Kauai, and, again and again, the knife-edge ridges and misty peaks of Scotland’s Isle of Skye. The climbing is intense, but the story is not only about ascending physical summits. With each trip, Mike’s search shifts from thrill seeking to solitude and from risk to beauty until a night beneath an astonishing sky forces a reckoning with what has been calling him all along. Honest, soulful, and vivid, Retired Ground is a climber’s odyssey about faith, family, and the pursuit of transcendence within the wilds of nature.

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Former construction laborer, cab driver, and dock worker, Michael Collins is also the former chief resident in orthopedic surgery at the Mayo Clinic. He is the author of two acclaimed medical memoirs, Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs, a chronicle of his journey from laborer to physician, and Hot Lights, Cold Steel, a description of his years as resident and moonlighter in rural Minnesota emergency rooms. Mike also has written three works of fiction: the Vietnam War-era novel, All Bleeding Stops, the medical mystery novel, The Shieling, and its sequel, The Least of Men. Mike is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the Loyola Stritch School of Medicine. He and his wife, Patti, were born, raised, and still live on the West Side of Chicago. Since his first book’s publication in 2005, Mike has lectured nationwide on medicine and writing. He has served as the Alpha Omega Alpha Visiting Professor at both the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he also delivered the 2016 medical school commencement address.

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Michael J. Collins