Richard Proenneke retired from his job as an operator and mechanic at age fifty to live the next thirty years of his life in the wilds of Twin Lakes, Alaska. There he built a cabin, hunted and gathered his own food, educated himself as a naturalist, and recorded his activities and findings in journals and on film. His time was later made into the 2003 PBS documentary Alone in the Wilderness and written in the book One Man's Wilderness, published in 1973 by his friend Sam Keith. Proenneke returned to civilization in 1999 and died at the age of 82 in 2003 in Hemet, California.