My Adventurous Friend is based on accounts of my friend Hagen's life, as he related it to me, and of the adventures we enjoyed together in Alaska. We would reminisce while sitting around a campfire in some wilderness area during our hikes and gold prospecting ventures. We could be debating current events and somehow our talk would drift back to events of earlier times. Over the years, piece by piece, I learned almost everything there was to know about my friend. Hagen had a varied and adventurous life beginning in wartime Germany and, by a circuitous route, eventually migrated to Alaska in 1973. Hagen had a longing for adventure and was never satisfied with the status-quo. He was strong, tenacious and once his mind was made up he would seldom deviate. In his mind, if it wasn't difficult then it wasn't worth doing. He always said he was born one hundred years too late to be a real pioneer but he sure did his best to emulate them. Hiking to our gold claim—forty miles from the nearest gravel road—and making it there alone in the dead of the Alaska winter was almost enough to satisfy his craving for adventure.
