"Whoever created the world went to a lot of trouble,” Edward Readicker-Henderson, a longtime contributor to Sierra, once wrote. “It would be downright rude not to go out and see as much of it as possible.” The iconic travel writer lived those words as well, even when doctors said he had only a year left on the clock. Perhaps he'd just gotten jaded about that prognosis—after all, he'd heard it six times over 17 years. "I have been to more than 50 countries since I was told to stop traveling," he confessed during his 2014 TEDxMaui talk, Kill Your Bucket List. "I've met kings and shamans, and I've fallen in love, and I've fallen back in love, and I have been pecked by penguins."

This miracle run ended on June 15, 2016. The waves of three illnesses coincided and amplified: Crohn's disease, impaired kidneys, and congestive heart failure. He was still planning a trip to Japan—where he once lived and wrote a guidebook on Buddhist pilgrimages—when the end came on little cat feet, quick and quiet.

Readicker-Henderson learned to write by typing poems on a bookstore cash register, just to impress a girl. He grew into one of travel-writing's legends: the ornery, silly, snarky, profoundly deep-thinking, giant-hearted hermit of Bellingham, Washington. He once turned down an appearance on Oprah ("I would have sold a ton of books, but the show's premise was flawed!") but would drop everything for a friend in need. He grew up in Southeast Alaska and breathed easiest there amid "the ocean and fish and cedar and salt and boat oil and rain and the wet-dog scent of bears." His work for Sierra included “In Beringia”and “The End of the World.”

He loved zombie flicks and Hobnob cookies, tomes on Arctic exploration and Polynesian voyaging, his "macho" Winnie the Pooh tattoo, and walks around the lake with his stripy dog Bert. He often fell down the rabbit hole, as when researching quiet and writing about why we need more of it: "Out in the Marshall Islands, I was on this tiny little atoll when a storm hit at night, and I could hear a difference between the waves in the lagoon and the waves in ocean," he revealed at TEDx. "So I ran outside—pouring rain, palm trees thrashing around, coconuts dropping like cannonballs—and I'm listening to this duet of lagoon and ocean, and the world is singing just for me." He reminded us to cherish the beauty that can unfurl, even when moments are not momentous.

"Isn’t it wonderful to know, beyond any doubt and with infinite, unearned grace, that the world holds so much?" he wrote, “and that it can change according to how we’re willing to see it, to greet it?"

Edward Readicker-Henderson is survived by his parents, Donald and Jean Henderson, and his siblings Don Henderson, Terri McCook, and Laurie Owens. A memorial will be held on the first anniversary of his death in Wrangell, Alaska, mid-June 2017.