On the Loose is a chronicle of triumph and tragedy - the triumph of gaining an insight about oneself through an understanding of the natural world; the tragedy of seeing the splendor of that world increasingly threatened by people who don't know or don't care. The color and black-and-white photographs, all taken by the authors, capture Yosemite, Point Reyes, the High Sierra, the Great Basin, and Glen Canyon in the 1950s and 1960s. Terry Russell, the older of the two brothers who authored On the Loose, learned about wilderness early, especially about the Sierra Nevada, the Pacific Shore, and the Plateau province of Colorado and Utah. He was a brilliant student at the University of California, Berkeley, and a staunch advocate of free speech there and elsewhere. He died in 1965 on a rafting trip down the Green River, shortly before the original publication of On the Loose.