John F. Ross was the Executive Editor of American Heritage and Invention & Technology magazines and a Senior Editor of Smithsonian magazine before that. On assignment, he has chased scorpions in Baja, dived 3,000 feet underwater in the Galapagos, dogsledded with the Polar Inuit in Greenland,
lived with the Khanty reindeer herders in Siberia, and launched the most northern canoe trip in the Canadian Arctic. He has published more than 200 articles and spoken at the Explorers Club of New York, the Smithsonian Institution, NASA's Ames Research Center, and BMW's Herbert Quandt
Foundation.
Ross is the author of War on the Run, a definitive biography of Robert Rogers, and The Polar Bear Strategy: Reflections on Risk in Modern Life (Perseus Books).