Trading Steel for Stone: Tales of a Rustbelt Refugee Turned Rocky Mountain Rescuer

When Tom Wood began his career as a non-paid professional mountain rescuer with the Alpine Rescue Team in Colorado eighteen years ago, he was a clueless Midwesterner fresh off the interstate from Ohio who couldn't rescue his own crumbling marriage and didn't know Gore-Tex from Tex Mex. With a lifetime of ridiculously dangerous pursuits and backcountry sins to atone for, he became a Rocky Mountain rescuer with the intention of repaying the massive karmic debt he had accumulated.

Trading Steel for Stone is a behind-the-scenes look into the exciting and rarely glimpsed world of one of America's busiest mountain rescue teams and a humorous and heartfelt memoir that lays bare the inner workings of a former journalist/Marine/roofer learning the hard way to balance his risk-taking personality and passion for rescue with his conflicting need for a sense of family and his search for religion.