Dick Person (1929 – 2006)

Dick Person was born in Duluth, Minnesota. He learned to hunt and canoe in the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area before moving west. He later obtained a degree in wildlife management and focused a master’s degree on the lemmings at Point Barrow [Nuvuk], Alaska. He was a conservation officer in Idaho before becoming disgusted with the US government during the Vietnam War. He and his young family moved to the Purcell and Bugaboo Mountains of southern British Columbia, and he worked as the recreation director for the Stony First Nation. He and his family lived year-round in tepees for seventeen years before he moved to the Yukon and married Sharon Chatterton. He spent summers in the mountains and waterways, and travelled in the winters when he would teach survival skills and lecture about respect for the wilderness. He started with small classes and ended talking to full auditoriums. He was in Mongolia in 2006 when he realized he was very sick, and he returned to Vancouver for treatment. He died peacefully at his cabin by Teslin Lake.¹⁾