Jackson Hole News

Big Sky Bum Out

They’re not on the ski slopes. They’re not in the bars. Have all the ski bums left Big Sky?

“A lot of guys are skiing backcountry now because it’s free,” said John the physical therapist. “Also, a lot of them worked construction to support their skiing habits. Those jobs don’t exist any more.”

A footnote to the current recession is its effect on Big Sky’s ski bum culture—girls and guys who live to ski and will work for ski passes or at part-time jobs that permit time off on powder days.

New West Book Review

Ghosts of Wyoming
By Alyson Hagy
Graywolf Press, 192 pages, $15

Some places feel more haunted than others.  As Alyson Hagy explores in her new collection of short stories, Ghosts of Wyoming, Wyoming is one of those places where the past seems to overlap with the present, where the rough frontier that she writes of in “The Sin Eaters,” set in 1889, seems to have plenty in common with the oil rig-riddled Wyoming of today, in which Hagy sets the story “Oil & Gas.” Throughout many of the stories, details about the Arapaho and other tribes that settled the area first set a somber tone underneath the main narrative.  Some of these stories touch on issues that are also raised in the work of Annie Proulx, Alexandra Fuller, and other contemporary Wyoming writers, but as with all good fiction, Hagy isn’t trying to convey a message.  She’s just telling some first-rate ghost stories.

Only one of the eight stories, “Superstitions of the Indians,” is a ghost story in the classic sense, but they all have ghosts in them in the form of people who have died or characters haunted by the past.  One of the best stories is the lead-off, “Border,” which conceals its ghost until the very end in an effective twist that works as such endings should, not as a “gotcha!” moment but as a revelation that makes sense of and lends gravity to all the prior events.  In “Border,” a young man hitchhiking his way out of Wyoming, aiming for Denver or beyond, pauses in his journey to steal a collie pup in Meeker, Colo. 

Western Book Roundup

Narrative Magazine, a leading online literary journal, is currently offering some new work by prolific Montana author Rick Bass. Bass has published a number of stories and essays in Narrative, and currently you can hear Bass read his story “Eating” for free, or for twelve bucks you can order The Blue Horse, a new novella available only at Narrative.  It’s 56 pages long, and the price includes shipping.

Also in the Roundup: The “Literature and Landscape of the Horse” retreat in Wyoming, Denver novelist Carleen Brice holds a contest to benefit a local charity, and a new interview with Terry Tempest Williams.

Western Book Roundup

I’ll start the final Roundup of the year with a look ahead at some intriguing books by regional authors set to come out in 2010.

In January, Then Came The Evening, the debut novel by Idaho native Brian Hart, hits bookstores.  According to Hart’s bio, he “spent years working as a janitor, carpenter, welder, and commercial fisherman before earning his M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.” The now-defunct Kirkus Reviews described it in this way: “Hart’s evocative debut traces the long descent of a tragic Western figure straight out of a Sam Shepard play… Desiccated descriptions of a long-fallow landscape and the author’s ability to conjure up the ghosts of a low man’s past further enrich this heartbreaking, convicing drama. A haunting Western tale.”

Speaking of Sam Shepard, the playwright, actor, filmmaker, and fiction writer has a new short story collection out January 12, Day Out of Days.

Also in the Roundup: Forthcoming books by Alyson Hagy, Mark Spragg, and Aryn Kyle, a mysterious drunken Boulder author shoplifts his own books from the Boulder Book Store, and Denver drops in the annual Most Literate Cities ranking.

HERE, WE CAN REALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE

During a bout of insomnia last night, I watched CNBC to see if any of the talking financial heads thought my retirement funds might stop disappearing, and there it was. Perhaps the biggest environmental, wildlife habitat and water quality problem we don't like to discuss. Yes, it's touchy, but that has never stopped me, so why start now.

We all need to stop buying fool's gold. [more]

New West Book Review

No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life
by Linda M. Hasselstrom
University of Nevada Press, 211 pages

Linda Hasselstrom knows what you’ve been flushing because your sewage backed up into her basement.  She knows how long you’ve been in the shower, wasting precious western water resources.  She knows which punk kid lopped the tops off of all of the irises growing around her Cheyenne home.  She knows which subdivision-dwelling newcomer ignited that grassfire in the South Dakota prairie near her ranch because he failed to disable the catalytic converter on his pickup.  And she knows all about the shoddy planning for the new subdivision next door because a flood picked up one of the houses and set it down in her pasture.  In her new book, No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life, she has a few things to say about all of these issues. 

Linda M. Hasselstrom, the author of several books of nonfiction and poetry and the director of prairie writing retreats in her South Dakota home, is a passionate, entertaining, and cranky companion in the landscape of the evolving West, in which she finds more and more people who don’t think about the consequences of their actions.  She describes herself and a friend as “a couple of cynical old broads who never benefited from innocence even when we had it.”

LET'S GET OUR WORDS STRAIGHT

Have you ever heard somebody say they prefer "multiple use" over Wilderness? I have what seems like a thousand times, and every time I hear it, I say, silently, to myself, wrong!

So, it seems like a good time to say it out loud because the words, "multiple use" have been lost in the Wilderness. [more]

From Wyofile

Sweetwater Station, Wyo.—If you blink once or your attention drifts for an instant on the two-lane highway between Muddy Gap and the Lander, Wyoming, you may miss one of the world’s great road signs, a weathered, wooden square flanked by an American flag:  “Old Books Fresh Eggs For Sale.”

And if you don’t stop and go inside the two-story, structurally-reinforced, climate-controlled book barn stuffed with more than 75,000 hardback volumes ranging from leather-bound Balzac to first-edition Beatrix Potter, you will miss one of Wyoming’s and the Mountain West’s hidden treats.

Owners Lynda “Mad Dog” German and Polly “The Pilgrim” Hinds moved their Mad Dog and The Pilgrim Booksellers from Denver to Sweetwater Station in 2000 after an unpleasant encounter with the Aurora, Colorado, Police Department.

We're Winners

Away.com, a leading website for travel planning, has listed a Montana and a Wyoming destination on its latest list of top resorts. The “Best Resorts & Lodges Guide,” as described by the Away.com press release, offers “in-depth profiles of 200 of the world’s best destination resorts across ten popular travel categories,” chosen by a team of travel experts. And the experts liked what they saw out West.

Green Light for Wolf Hunts

The Montana and Idaho wolf hunts will not irreparably harm wolf populations and may proceed, according to a ruling filed last night by U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy.

Molloy on Aug. 31 heard arguments from environmental groups seeking to halt the fall wolf hunts—the first of their kind in the lower 48—on the grounds that the killings would irreparably harm the species, which was on the Endangered Species List until just this spring. The coalition of 13 environmental groups, which has sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in an attempt to restore federal protections for the gray wolf, asked Molloy to issue an injunction to stop the hunts, arguing that killing even a single wolf is a problem.

In a 14-page ruling, Molloy disagreed, and said the “low threshold” for irreparable harm—a single wolf death—was not supported by the law.