NEW WEST BOOK REVIEW

Stephen Trimble’s “Bargaining for Eden”

By David Frey, 9-18-08

Bargaining for Eden
by Stephen Trimble
University of California Press
319 pages, $29.95

The contemporary story of the American West is being written in town halls across the region where neighbors stand at odds with one another over their vision for the prized landscapes that surround them.

Every area has its Eden besieged by developers, and each one inevitably becomes buried in controversy, and sometimes scandal.

For author Stephen Trimble, the Eden was northern Utah’s Snowbasin, and its controversies, complete with a billionaire developer, backroom Congressional deals and the Olympic scandals that would soon mar the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, outdo most.

Trimble, a writer, photographer and Wallace Stegner Fellow at the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center, chronicles the battles over Snowbasin in his book Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America.

It is a personal story for Trimble. He was among the legion of Ogden-area residents who loved the mountain the way it had been, before Earl Holding, the insulated sultan of Sinclair Oil, convinced the federal government to hand over Forest Service land and allow him to transform a no-frills ski hill into an Olympic venue and destination resort.

Trimble makes the tale even more personal, though. As he backs away from temptations to demonize Holding, the author discovers a little billionaire developer in himself as he eyes a piece of Utah canyon country and makes it his own. He builds himself a modest home, a speck compared to Holding’s redevelopment of Snowbasin, but as he draws survey lines and carves roads, he admits to a kinship that rankles the environmentalist in him.

“On some level I am Earl – we are all Earl,” Trimble writes.

The Snowbasin saga was more than a typical Western land use feud. Earl Holding was a larger-than-life character, an American success story who spun an Idaho truck stop into an energy powerhouse.

A billionaire who almost never spoke to the press, Holding didn’t just set out to transform the no-frills ski area on Mount Ogden. He wanted to own the public lands that surrounded it. The Forest Service balked. The Clinton administration resisted. The environmental community was aghast. So Holding orchestrated an end run, pulling strings in Utah’s power politics to make a massive land exchange happen without the sort of public process typically required.

The choice of Salt Lake City as the host of the Winter Games upped the ante, and Holding got his way, mostly, and the shouts of opponents were drowned out.

“Money and power equals influence in Washington, D.C. Snowbasin is a good example,” former Agriculture Undersecretary Jim Lyons, who oversaw the Forest Service, told Trimble. “You had people of influence, people with resources, and people with motive, who were going to make things happen. Their way. And they did.”

Lyons is among the players Trimble interviews in his well-researched book. (Holding didn’t speak to him.) Trimble devotes the first half to dissecting the passions and politics at play at Snowbasin. In the second half, he turns more personal.

In 2000, Trimble and his wife Joanne discover their own slice of paradise on a southern Utah mesa otherwise protected by a conservation easement. Despite their deep anti-consumerist tendencies, the Salt Lake City couple found themselves second-home owners in Torrey, a community suspicious of out-of-town interlopers like them.

Trimble writes:

No humans have ever before built a permanent structure on our share of the mesa. And now we’ve subdivided this wild land, increasing density by a factor of two; we have become accomplices in the domestication of the open space of the West. I mourn the loss while I celebrate what I’ve gained – a home. Drawn by the thrill of living so close to wild country, with every step toward the creation of our home here I add a wrinkle to the social fabric, tweak the economy, and nudge the environmental balance of the mesa and its surrounding communities. The changes bounce back, too, and I must reorder my self-image accordingly.

I’ve struck my deal with the devil.

Most would have trouble seeing Trimble’s modest mesa-top home as the equivalent of Holding’s megaresort, but for the author, it brings similar anguish. He finds himself uncomfortably blazing roads, ousting trespassers, wrangling over taxes and carving up the landscape with a track hoe.

Locals dub such newcomers “WOES”: Wealthy, Over-Educated, Spoiled brats. As Trimble advocated for environmental causes, he found himself on the outs with old-timers wary of environmentalists and public land agency bureaucrats. Meetings that gave locals their say ended up fostering “monologue,” he writes, not “dialog.”

“The West that Wallace Stegner described as the Geography of Hope seems to be evolving into the Geography of Hostility,” Trimble writes.

He ends the book with his own personal credo, the sort of thing any Westerner who wrestles with these issues ought to consider. His speaks to the importance of community, the environment and the need, sometimes, to speak out.

Bargaining for Eden is really two books. One is a journalistic account of Snowbasin. The other is Trimble’s memoir of buying up and carving up a bit of southern Utah. They don’t gel together easily, and unlike the book’s subtitle, it is not really the fight for the last open spaces in America as much as it is about one of those spaces.

It is a thoughtful telling, though, and the tale should resonate with Westerners everywhere who fight for others of those last open spaces. There are plenty of fights, but fewer open spaces all the time.

Stephen Trimble will present his book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on October 4 (2 p.m.) and at the Utah Humanities Book Festival at the Salt Lake City Main Library on October 25.

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