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If the "exploring youth" is a young medical doctor hiking in the Rockies, you could be describing The Winds of Time, a 1956 novel by Chad Oliver. Quoting from P. Schuyler Miller's review in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1957 (available at the Internet Archive):

The book starts as an adventure. Wes Chase, vacationing M.D., is caught in a storm high in the Rockies and holes up in a convenient cave to wait it out. But there's a door in the back of the cave, and through the door comes an alien from the stars, who has been sleeping there for fifteen thousand years . . .

Then, on p. 44, the focus shifts to this starman—Arvon of Lortas—and the crew of the ship in which they have been searching the Universe for other men like themselves. The Lortans, alone among the human kind who teem among the worlds, have reached an ultimate technological world-civilization without first destroying themselves in atomic or bacterial war. But they have reached a dead end; to rise higher they need the cross-fertilization of ideas shared with another human race as advanced and stable as their own. And they can't find one.

The Lortan ship is wrecked on Earth, somewhere in Siberia, late in the Wisconsin glacial period when the first roving hunters are crossing to America. There's a nice and regrettably brief bit devoted to the nameless, pragmatically friendly folk among whom they fall, but five of the ship's company decide to put themselves into a fifteen thousand-year sleep in the hope that when they emerge, Man will be ready to build them a new star-ship. Instead, they awake in our time, with the atomic issue still unsettled and human technology still too crude for a space-drive.

If the "exploring youth" is a young medical doctor hiking in the Rockies, you could be describing The Winds of Time, a 1956 novel by Chad Oliver. Quoting from P. Schuyler Miller's review in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1957 (available at the Internet Archive):

The book starts as an adventure. Wes Chase, vacationing M.D., is caught in a storm high in the Rockies and holes up in a convenient cave to wait it out. But there's a door in the back of the cave, and through the door comes an alien from the stars, who has been sleeping there for fifteen thousand years . . .

Then, on p. 44, the focus shifts to this starman—Arvon of Lortas—and the crew of the ship in which they have been searching the Universe for other men like themselves. The Lortans, alone among the human kind who teem among the worlds, have reached an ultimate technological world-civilization without first destroying themselves in atomic or bacterial war. But they have reached a dead end; to rise higher they need the cross-fertilization of ideas shared with another human race as advanced and stable as their own. And they can't find one.

The Lortan ship is wrecked on Earth, somewhere in Siberia, late in the Wisconsin glacial period when the first roving hunters are crossing to America. There's a nice and regrettably brief bit devoted to the nameless, pragmatically friendly folk among whom they fall, but five of the ship's company decide to put themselves into a fifteen thousand-year sleep in the hope that when they emerge, Man will be ready to build them a new star-ship. Instead, they awake in our time, with the atomic issue still unsettled and human technology still too crude for a space-drive.

If the "exploring youth" is a young medical doctor hiking in the Rockies, you could be describing The Winds of Time, a 1956 novel by Chad Oliver. Quoting from P. Schuyler Miller's review in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1957 (available at the Internet Archive):

The book starts as an adventure. Wes Chase, vacationing M.D., is caught in a storm high in the Rockies and holes up in a convenient cave to wait it out. But there's a door in the back of the cave, and through the door comes an alien from the stars, who has been sleeping there for fifteen thousand years . . .

Then, on p. 44, the focus shifts to this starman—Arvon of Lortas—and the crew of the ship in which they have been searching the Universe for other men like themselves. The Lortans, alone among the human kind who teem among the worlds, have reached an ultimate technological world-civilization without first destroying themselves in atomic or bacterial war. But they have reached a dead end; to rise higher they need the cross-fertilization of ideas shared with another human race as advanced and stable as their own. And they can't find one.

The Lortan ship is wrecked on Earth, somewhere in Siberia, late in the Wisconsin glacial period when the first roving hunters are crossing to America. There's a nice and regrettably brief bit devoted to the nameless, pragmatically friendly folk among whom they fall, but five of the ship's company decide to put themselves into a fifteen thousand-year sleep in the hope that when they emerge, Man will be ready to build them a new star-ship. Instead, they awake in our time, with the atomic issue still unsettled and human technology still too crude for a space-drive.

If the "exploring youth" is a young medical doctor hiking in the Rockies, you could be describing The Winds of Time, a 1956 novel by Chad Oliver. Quoting from P. Schuyler Miller's review in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1957 (available at the Internet Archive):

The book starts as an adventure. Wes Chase, vacationing M.D., is caught in a storm high in the Rockies and holes up in a convenient cave to wait it out. But there's a door in the back of the cave, and through the door comes an alien from the stars, who has been sleeping there for fifteen thousand years . . .

Then, on p. 44, the focus shifts to this starman—Arvon of Lortas—and the crew of the ship in which they have been searching the Universe for other men like themselves. The Lortans, alone among the human kind who teem among the worlds, have reached an ultimate technological world-civilization without first destroying themselves in atomic or bacterial war. But they have reached a dead end; to rise higher they need the cross-fertilization of ideas shared with another human race as advanced and stable as their own. And they can't find one.

The Lortan ship is wrecked on Earth, somewhere in Siberia, late in the Wisconsin glacial period when the first roving hunters are crossing to America. There's a nice and regrettably brief bit devoted to the nameless, pragmatically friendly folk among whom they fall, but five of the ship's company decide to put themselves into a fifteen thousand-year sleep in the hope that when they emerge, Man will be ready to build them a new star-ship. Instead, they awake in our time, with the atomic issue still unsettled and human technology still too crude for a space-drive.

If the "exploring youth" is a young medical doctor hiking in the Rockies, you could be describing The Winds of Time, a 1956 novel by Chad Oliver. Quoting from P. Schuyler Miller's review in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1957 (available at the Internet Archive):

The book starts as an adventure. Wes Chase, vacationing M.D., is caught in a storm high in the Rockies and holes up in a convenient cave to wait it out. But there's a door in the back of the cave, and through the door comes an alien from the stars, who has been sleeping there for fifteen thousand years . . .

Then, on p. 44, the focus shifts to this starman—Arvon of Lortas—and the crew of the ship in which they have been searching the Universe for other men like themselves. The Lortans, alone among the human kind who teem among the worlds, have reached an ultimate technological world-civilization without first destroying themselves in atomic or bacterial war. But they have reached a dead end; to rise higher they need the cross-fertilization of ideas shared with another human race as advanced and stable as their own. And they can't find one.

The Lortan ship is wrecked on Earth, somewhere in Siberia, late in the Wisconsin glacial period when the first roving hunters are crossing to America. There's a nice and regrettably brief bit devoted to the nameless, pragmatically friendly folk among whom they fall, but five of the ship's company decide to put themselves into a fifteen-thousand year sleep in the hope that when they emerge, Man will be ready to build them a new star-ship. Instead, they awake in our time, with the atomic issue still unsettled and human technology still too crude for a space-drive.

If the "exploring youth" is a young medical doctor hiking in the Rockies, you could be describing The Winds of Time, a 1956 novel by Chad Oliver. Quoting from P. Schuyler Miller's review in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1957 (available at the Internet Archive):

The book starts as an adventure. Wes Chase, vacationing M.D., is caught in a storm high in the Rockies and holes up in a convenient cave to wait it out. But there's a door in the back of the cave, and through the door comes an alien from the stars, who has been sleeping there for fifteen thousand years . . .

Then, on p. 44, the focus shifts to this starman—Arvon of Lortas—and the crew of the ship in which they have been searching the Universe for other men like themselves. The Lortans, alone among the human kind who teem among the worlds, have reached an ultimate technological world-civilization without first destroying themselves in atomic or bacterial war. But they have reached a dead end; to rise higher they need the cross-fertilization of ideas shared with another human race as advanced and stable as their own. And they can't find one.

The Lortan ship is wrecked on Earth, somewhere in Siberia, late in the Wisconsin glacial period when the first roving hunters are crossing to America. There's a nice and regrettably brief bit devoted to the nameless, pragmatically friendly folk among whom they fall, but five of the ship's company decide to put themselves into a fifteen thousand-year sleep in the hope that when they emerge, Man will be ready to build them a new star-ship. Instead, they awake in our time, with the atomic issue still unsettled and human technology still too crude for a space-drive.