About Doug Peacock

Author and naturalist Doug Peacock, a disabled Vietnam veteran and Green Beret medic, was the real-life model for Edward Abbey’s George Washington Hayduke, and has published widely on wilderness issues.

His books include Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness, ¡Baja!, Walking It Off: A Veteran’s Chronicle of War and Wilderness, and The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears (co-authored with Andrea Peacock). His latest book, Was It Worth It: A Wilderness Warrior’s Long Trail Home, won the 2023 National Outdoor Book Award, and a 2022 award for literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

Peacock received Guggenheim and Lannan fellowships for his work on archaeology, climate change and the peopling of North America, published in 2013 as In the Shadow of the Sabertooth: Global Warming, the Origins of the First Americans, and the Terrible Beasts of the Pleistocene. Sabertooth won the 2014 High Plains Book Award in the Science category.

Doug co-founded the Wildlife Damage Review, Vital Ground, Round River Conservation Studies and Save the Yellowstone Grizzly. For more than 25 years, he served as chairman of the board of directors for Round River, which works with indigenous people and governments in Africa, North, South and Central America to develop region-wide conservation strategies protecting and enhancing intact ecosystems.

For his service in Vietnam, Doug was awarded the Soldier’s Medal, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and the Bronze Star. He lives in Emigrant, Montana, with his wife Andrea.