It started as just another interview. Young journalist Danielle Nadler agreed to call an old man who had lived 50 years in the wilderness of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Through their weekly conversations, the mountaineer boasts of his decades of outdoor survival only to eventually reveal his personal tragedies that drove him to life in the wild. Without a Trace drops readers into the California mountain town of Bishop alongside the man locals call Sierra Phantom just as he surrenders to life with an address, and searches for a renewed purpose and community with which to share it.