Riding the Scalpel

Book excerpt: This is the incredible 20 year saga of a globe-trotting adventure traveler who rode for his life. Jim Doilney was a PhD in economics and university professor when he kicked academia away and moved to a small mountain town in Utah. Within a few years he had a successful resort business and made a promise to himself to make time every year for long treks ...to places nobody goes, to meet people nobody knows. Traveling by foot or by bike, he crossed faraway deserts, climbed mountain peaks, hiked through tropical jungles and over glacier passes. His plan was no plan and he deliberately set out with minimal equipment and comforts, testing himself against deprivation and physical limits. He skied down active volcanos, waded through crocodile-infested rivers, dodged angry grizzlies and great white sharks, spending hours in a company of unique characters--- never-give-up hippies, burned-out surfers, laid-back expats, remote farmers, cocaine cowboys, backwater entrepreneurs, and a host of fellow travelers who shared the road. From the beaches of Mexico to the coasts of Australia, from frigid Patagonia to steamy Cuba, from magical New Zealand to Kathmandu, from Alaska to Scotland, from Cape Town to Spain, from Hawaii to the Himalayas, from the Panama Canal to the mountains of Spain, he hiked and biked---until tragedy struck. Facing a fatal diagnosis of prostate cancer, he weighed the only treatments offered---radical surgery, chemo or radiation, along with the brutal life-changing after-effects---and rejected them all. 'Butcher me, bake me or burn me, he called them, and vowed to find the alternate path. Twenty years later, he has lived to write this journal. Not just to relate his adventures, but to tell the thousands of aging men who every year face death from prostate cancer that there is another way. He is still trekking.