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I used to love wildlife as a kid and being outside in the garden and the woods and the field and that stuff.

I had one of the most outdoorsy childhoods you could imagine. I basically lived in the woods until I was 13. My dad and I built a huge treehouse in our backyard in Chesterfield, about 30 feet in the air. And we'd vacation on an island in Michigan, where I hunted a deer that we ate.

My father worked in agriculture, and I got to travel round remote rural areas with him and see a bit of the landscape and people.

I spent my childhood outdoors on my grandparents' farm. I learned to ride a motorbike when I was about six, a little PeeWee 50. I'd climb trees - there was a big weeping willow.

I grew up like Huck Finn, always outdoors, exploring, collecting frogs - there was space everywhere. I want my kids to experience that too. I love being outside.

Family trips to Yellowstone and to what are now national parks in Southern Utah, driving the primitive roads and cars of that day, were real adventures.

Growing up in a rural setting in Minnesota, I was raised with the outdoors and a sense of adventure.

I went to Alaska as a young man just looking for adventure. And like so many of us in the '70s, we found it.

My costar James Lafferty, and his little brother Stuart Lafferty, and another buddy of ours, Ian Shive, are working on this project called 'Generation Wild.' It's about getting people to realize that being outdoors is not scary - you can go on adventures like we do, in national parks, and practically in your own backyard.

Just about every weekend when I was growing up, we would throw rods and rifles and tents and shovels and pickaxes into the back of the truck and then head off to the side of a mountain or the bottom of a canyon. Hiking, fishing, hunting, rock-hounding: this is how my parents passed the time.