Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich was born on a horse ranch near Santa Barbara, California. She worked in film for ten years, then began writing fulltime in 1978 after the death of a loved one. She had been filming on a 250,000 acre sheep and cattle ranch in northern Wyoming at the time, and there she stayed. 1991 was the year Ehrlich was hit by lightning while taking a walk on her ranch. She was hospitalized and severly debilitated for several years. Having recovered from her lightning injuries, Ehrlich began traveling. In 1993, she went to the foothills of the Himalayas in western China. Intending to write a book on the four sacred Buddhist in China, she was so appalled by the stripping away of culture and humanity during the Cultural Revolution, that she found herself writing something altogether different. That same year, Ehrlich also began traveling north to Greenland. “I wanted to get above treeline, to see nothing but horizons. Once there, she fell in love with the Inuit people and traveled with subsistence hunters by dogsled for months at a time out on the sea ice.