On the Dark Side of the Moon: A Journey to Recovery

In the spring of 2000, Mike Medberry, a longtime advocate of conservation with American Lands, the Wilderness Society, and the Idaho Conservation League, suffered a stroke in the remote wilderness of the Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. He was rescued after nearly a full day lying alone and contemplating death in one of the harshest yet most beautiful landscapes in the lower forty-eight states.

Medberry was flown to a nearby hospital about the same time that Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, on behalf of President Clinton, came to Craters of the Moon to support protecting three-quarters of a million acres as a unique national monument, a conservation effort in which Medberry himself had already been personally involved.

This story interweaves Medberry’s own struggle to speak, walk, and think with the struggle to protect this brutal, lava-bound, but for him gentle landscape. Medberry’s recovery from the stroke and his struggle to protect Craters of the Moon is a story of renewal, restoration, accommodation, and, ultimately, of finding workable compromises to some of life’s most difficult problems.