This year brought a handful of new books written by guides and outfitters. Collectively, they reflect the river community—funny, heartfelt, and shaped by years spent guiding in wild places.
Attitude at Altitude: The People’s Guide to Park City and Summit County, by Michael O’Malley
If you’ve floated the Middle Fork of the Salmon or Rogue River with Michael O’Malley as your guide, you have experienced his humor, knowledge and friendliness. He has written a guide to Park City that encompasses all those traits. Chock full of recommendations, funny asides, historical references, and lots of stuff only a local insider, with lots of curiosity, would know about. Makes you want to visit Park City and just roam around checking out Michael’s favorite places.
Stories of a Western Wildhood, by Dick Linford
This collection of gritty, personal, and often funny stories is Dick Linford’s tales of growing up in a Morman family in Wyoming and New Mexico and eventually getting to California, where he and Joe Daly launched Echo River Trips, an early whitewater rafting company. Being a teenager in the old west brought an abundance of chaos. There are scuffles, guns, romance, some jail time, booze, and other challenges. What could be more western than that? It’s fun to read about the exploits of a long-time friend who became one of the most important leaders in outfitting and a lifelong advocate for protecting western rivers.
Beartooth: A Novel, by Callan Wink
One of our favorite novels of the year. It’s about two survivalist brothers in desperate straits, who are lured into committing a crime in Yellowstone National Park. Thad and Hazen, long ago abandoned by their wayward mother, are drowning in medical bills and notices about back taxes. They live alone in an aging, dilapidated timber house and make ends meet the same way their father did: splitting wood and selling the cords door-to-door. Their prospects seemingly change when they are lured into a crime spree of finding and selling artifacts out of Yellowstone National Park. Author Callan Wink lives in Livingston, Montana where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River when not writing wonderful stories.
The Organic Treadmill: And Other Great Powers of Wilderness, by Steve Zettel
Entranced by the recollections of a co-worker who had once been an Idaho hunting guide, 20-year-old Steve Zettel boarded a Greyhound Bus in Philadelphia and three days later stepped off in Boise, Idaho, hoping to land a job with a hunting outfit. That was 45 years ago. This entertaining collection of stories reflects Steve’s career as a hunting and rafting outfitter in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness while raising a family in the small town of Challis, Idaho. His stories and opinions are told with humor and an appreciation of the importance of wilderness lands and how their future existence is threatened by modern-day technology. Proceeds from the sale of Steve’s book go to the Not In Wilderness Coalition.
