Category Archives: Ski History

A True Hero of the Old West

Posted on by
1

“We have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.” Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Skiing is as crucial to the vitality of many mountain towns of the modern west as, say, mining and logging and ranching once were and, in some places, still are. It is arguable whether the cattle, mining and logging barons (some of them robbers, some not), and the gunmen who did their bidding, of the west’s 19th and early 20th centuries could be viewed as heroes, but they certainly were powerful icons of undisputed influence who have, for the most part, left environmental and therefore social devastation in their clear-cut, open-pit, over-grazed, violent wake. Skiing, however, has some genuine heroes who, as Joseph Campbell points out, have left a thread to guide us to the center of our own existence where it is possible to see more clearly what we do and why and what it might mean.
Each year there are more and more skiers venturing into the backcountry. They seek different rewards—nature, solitude, untracked skiing, a relief from the congestion, pretension and effortless convenience of modern ski resorts and a better workout than can be found on their lifts, and adventure with consequences for lapses in judgment, knowledge or respect—traveling out to find “the center of our own existence.”
And in western America the first great hero of backcountry skiing must surely be the Norwegian immigrant known as Snowshoe Thompson. Born Jon Torsteinson-Rue (later changed to John A. Thompson) April 30, 1827 in a small town in the Telemark region of Norway he came to America at age 10, living in Illinois, Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin before moving to Placerville, California in 1851 to join the gold rush. In 1855 he saw an ad in the Sacramento Union newspaper: “People lost to the world; Uncle Sam needs a mail carrier” to carry mail from Placerville east across the snow of wintertime in the Sierra Nevada to Mormon Station, Utah which later became Genoa, Nevada.
Like most Norwegians of Telemark he had learned to ski as a child and brought those skills to the New World. He was the only applicant for the mail job, and in January 1856 a crowd in Placerville watched him leave on his first 90 mile journey across the Sierra. His homemade skis (called ‘snowshoes’, thus the nickname) were 10 feet long, made of oak and weighed 25 pounds, though in later years he got them down to about 9’4” and a bit lighter. Few in the crowd thought he would make it, but five days later he returned, having delivered the mail going east and bringing back the mail going west. Thus began the career of a true hero of the old west, the father of California skiing, and a truly legendary postman.
Two to four times a month for the next 20 winters Thompson made the trip, 3 days east, 2 days coming back west, covering between 25 and 40 miles a day. Because his sack of mail weighed between 60 and 100 pounds he carried minimal personal equipment: a few crackers, some bread and dried meat to eat; a heavy Mackinaw and a wide rimmed hat for shelter and sleep. He didn’t use a compass and once said, “There is no danger of getting lost in a narrow range of mountains like the Sierra, if a man has his wits about him.” Every modern day backcountry skier—with lightweight tent and sleeping bag and insulated mattress, compact stove, skis, boots, poles, gloves and layered system of clothing weighing less that one of Thompson’s skis, GPS, cell phone, transceiver, shovel and probe—can appreciate the simplicity and austerity of Snowshoe’s tours across the Sierra.
The Sacramento Union wrote of Thompson, “His reliability, kindness and physical prowess quickly earned the admiration and respect of the Sierra residents.”
He was never paid for his efforts and service. He continued to do it for reasons that are speculative; but every skier can appreciate that skiing is something other than the economics of skiing, especially in the backcountry. Ron Watters wrote of Thompson, paraphrasing Dan DeQuille “The mountains were his sanctuary, and storms were just another part of its raw beauty. On his skis, he could freely move across the snow covered landscape. The feeling of freedom must have been never more real to Thompson than when gliding downhill, holding his balance pole out in front of him, dipping it one direction and then the other, his wide-brimmed hat flapping in the wind and the Sierras spread out in front of him. At times like that, he must have felt like a soaring eagle.”
And S.A. Kinsey, the postmaster of Genoa, where Thompson is buried, said, “Most remarkable man I ever knew, that Snowshoe Thompson. He must be made of iron. Besides, he never thinks of himself, but he’d give his last breath for anyone else—even a total stranger.” A true hero of the old west, at the center of our own existence.

A Sun Valley Musing

Posted on by
1

I first saw Sun Valley in 1953 after an all-night drive from Reno, Nevada. I have written elsewhere of that first encounter: “When we woke…the first thing we saw were the 1953 moguls on Exhibition, the most beautiful, exciting sight I’d ever seen. It was love at first vision, me and Bald Mountain, a long-standing love affair that persists to this day.” ….As a skier that was an important moment in life.
All these years later I am a writer who writes about skiing and other things and that writing is influenced, colored, perhaps even determined by my life long relationship with skiing. While skiing, like everything including writing, changes, evolves, grows and sometimes shrinks, the basics never change. Sooner or later we always get back to basics. Seeing the moguls on Exhibition in 1953 sold me on Sun Valley because I wanted to ski, and Exhibition and Bald Mountain revealed to my young mind another dimension of what that might mean. In addition, within a week I had actually watched Stein Eriksen, Christian Pravda and Jack Reddish, among others, skiing on Baldy. No one has ever skied quite like Stein, and to see him in 1953 as a boy in love with ski racing was pure magic, a revelation. I still associate Stein with Sun Valley.
Stein was a world and Olympic champion and the first great ski racer who was also an astute businessman. He made huge contributions to skiing as a racer, businessman and spokesman, but his most enduring impact on skiing was a stylish gymnastic stunt—a full layout front flip on skis—he routinely performed like no one else. It was great athleticism and show business but had nothing to do with ski racing and little to do with mainstream skiing of the time. It can be argued that Stein’s graceful flip would have a bigger impact on skiing than his unique giant slalom turn. Such acrobatics on skis were standard fare in Stein’s native Norway, but they were rare in the U.S. and it took Stein’s assurance and grace to get America’s attention.
Ten years later in 1963 I was living in the Sun Valley dorms and one of my friends and roommate at the time was the irrepressible Bob Burns, also known as Bobbie. He was a phenomenal athlete, a great guy, and he skied like no one we’d ever seen. He did everything wrong according to the technical standards of all we thought we knew about skiing, particularly ski racing. Bob sat back on his heels, locked his feet together, held his hands way too high, swiveled his skis like windshield wipers and violated every basic (as we understood them) tenet of traditional skiing. And, unlike us serious, even grim, ski racers, he smiled the entire time as if he was really having fun. Nobody skied the bumps of Exhibition like Bobbie Burns and none of us could keep up with him and, in truth, we didn’t try. We viewed Bobbie as an anomaly instead of the revolutionary if not prophet of the ski world that he really was. We couldn’t see Bobbie for who he was because what he was doing didn’t fit into our seriously traditional perspective and historical knowledge of skiing. Though few readers of my work today would perceive it as ‘conservative’ that perspective was conservative, one akin to the far more significant and consequential climate change denial perspective of today.
There were a few skiers who responded to Stein’s flip and Bob’s bump technique with the kind of excitement and recognition of possibilities that came to me the first time I saw Bald Mountain. But there were a few, and that was enough. By the early ‘70s aerials and bump skiing were a big part of skiing. Today, from the Olympic games to terrain parks on ski hills all over the world, aerialists and acrobatic bumpsters are integral to and, some would say, the most exciting and vital part of skiing and, of course, snowboarding. In more than just spirit, Shaun White is a direct descendant of the athleticism and spirit (and exhibitionism) of Stein Eriksen’s full layout flips and Bobbie Burns’ flamboyant bump skiing on Exhibition, something neither of them would have imagined in the early 1950s and 1960s. As a writer, I try to monitor my own perceptions of skiing and everything else and not put those observations into the box of my own limited perspectives. Like every writer (and every person), I have had my fair share of both success and failure in this effort.
At the same time that there is evolution, growth and change there is a pull (back?) to the basics. Backcountry skiing—not to be confused with extreme skiing, para-skiing or cliff jumping—has grown in popularity an enormous amount in the past 20 or so years. Part of this growth is the price of a lift pass, prohibitive for much of the community. But there is something else, as many avid backcountry skiers can afford a lift pass and either choose not to have one or split their skiing time between backcounty and the lift serviced ski hill. This something was perhaps best summed up by Pepi Stiegler, who won the Olympic slalom in 1964, ran the Jackson Hole Ski School for many years, is a lifetime alpine skier and who has spent most of his time on skis for the past several years in the backcountry. A few years ago Pepi commented that many long time alpine skiers are turning to the backcountry because “It’s like it was in the beginning. It’s like it was in the beginning.”
That is, back to the basics.

Downhill Slide

Posted on by

Every person who lives in or near or who visits any ski town in America has cause to read “Downhill Slide” by Hal Clifford. Every person interested in the effects of the corporate bottom line on the daily life of common people and the larger (and common) environment has cause to read this book. Every American mountain town citizen who has not been disconnected from the world around him or her by greed or become brain-dead and frozen-hearted from the cumulative effects of looking at life from the ostrich position has cause to read this book. Even the latter have cause to read “Downhill Slide,” but their reaction to it will be different than those whose love of skiing, mountains, elk, deer, lynx, wolves, eagles, clear running streams, authentic experience, the natural world, and community as something more, and more valuable, than political and economic power is deeper than, say, a latte topping, a copper roof on a 50,000 square foot house lived in two weeks a year, or the relationship between, say, the President of Vail Resorts and the Latino population of the trailer parks of Leadville, described by Clifford as, “hardworking, foreign-born, often semiliterate laborers, many of them illegal, who commute long distances to work the menial jobs that keep four-season ski resorts functioning.”

This book is properly described as “an impassioned expose” of how America’s ski corporations “are gutting ski towns, the natural environment, and skiing itself in a largely futile search for short term profits.” Most people who have spent their lives in ski towns know this at some level, but “Downhill Slide” is the first time that all the relevant history, the pertinent facts, the well researched documentation and such an informed insight has been gathered in one place so that the big picture can be seen by the little people. Clifford has done a masterful job of journalism, and the ski towns of America and everyone who loves skiing and the mountains should be (and, I believe, will be) grateful to him. For he not only describes the uninviting, destructive and inauthentic social and environmental landscape of corporate American skiing, he suggests a genuine option to the predominant theme park culture and business of today’s Ski Town USA. That alternative is nothing more radical or complicated than shifting control of local businesses away from absentee and usually corporate ownership to local control. It is a concept as authentic and American as Mom, apple pie, the town hall meeting, self reliance and self determination.

“Downhill Slide” is full of lines like “One does not have to be a hard-core environmental activist to question the wisdom of letting corporations develop public land in order to service their debt and boost shareholders’ profits without materially advancing the public good.” Clifford dispels any illusion the uninformed or the naïve may have that the U.S. Forest Service is able to protect publicly owned lands for the public good. He writes, “There are plenty of individuals in the forest Service who recognize their agency is falling down on the job and who wish things were different. But so long as the agency is obliged by Congress to find its funding in places beyond Capitol Hill, it is going to be compromised in its stewardship of America’s public lands. Those who pay the highest price for this co-opting reside in the communities, both natural and human, situated near ski resorts.” The key phrase is “both natural and human.”

It is evident and well documented, but not well enough publicized that Clifford is accurate when he writes, “The development and expansion of large ski resorts on public lands degrades the natural environment in ways that are as pervasive, far reaching, and difficult to remediate as those caused by excessive logging, grazing and mining. Around ski resorts, these consequences are effectively permanent.”

Clifford describes several instances of the impact of ski resorts, directly or indirectly, on the migration paths and calving habitat and, therefore, survival of elk, including a herd in the Roaring Fork Valley of Aspen and Snowmass. Local residents have long been critical of the Aspen Skiing Company, the U.S. Forest Service and local government’s ineffectiveness in protecting these elk. Many years ago a high ranking official of the Aspen Skiing Company (which today has the best environmental policies and record of any American ski resort) said to me in reference to this very herd, “Fuck the elk. They’re going to die anyway. We might as well get it over with and get on with it.” By “it” he meant progress, development, the fattening of the bottom line. Though this particular official would publicly and hypocritically deny his own statement, just as corporate ski executives and ski town developers all over America would distance themselves from the attitude behind it, “Fuck the elk” (and the water, and the environment, and the people who commute 100 miles a day and more to work for less than $10 an hour) is the modus operandi of the corporate ski world of America. Clifford describes this world with insight, facts, and unflinching honesty.

He touches on the philosophical/theological schism in western consciousness about the proper use of land, particularly public land. He asks, with a touch of irony, “Is nature a warehouse or a temple? (Albeit perhaps a temple with a gym attached.)”

And Clifford does not leave unscathed the warehousers and the novus rex of Ski Town USA. “The conceit,” he writes, “Is that money can get for you what you gave up. The implicit message in the marketing of the modern skiing lifestyle, and especially of the real estate associated with it, is that although the buyer chose at an early age not to drop out and live an alternative life on the edge, but instead to stay on track with his or her nose to the grindstone—that despite this fact, with enough money, the buyer supposedly can go and purchase the alternative life he or she did not choose. Stated like that, such as assertion seems patently false.”

Yes it does because it is, but there is nothing false about “Downhill Slide” or the assertion behind it. Hal Clifford has performed an invaluable service for the ski towns of America. His book is a cautionary tale, and, more, what it describes can be viewed as a microcosm of the effects of corporate ownership on mountain communities, their citizens, wildlife, and the environment throughout the world. “Downhill Slide” is a reminder of some of the consequences of ignoring John Muir’s insight of 1869: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

“Downhill Slide” is hitched to all our lives and is a great read.

 

Emile Allais

Posted on by

On October 17, 2012 Emile Allais died at the age of 100. The following is from my essay “Europe: Fourth Time Around” about a trip to Europe in 1973 with Pat Bauman and Jon Reveal to make a film for Warren Miller. The essay appears in my book “Night Driving.”

 

Emile Allais. A magic name in different times and places of the skiing world. Emile was world champion before I was born. He was the leading French skier of the 1930’s. During World War II he belonged to the French underground. After that war he went to Sun Valley to teach skiing. In accordance with the mentality of that Austrian dominated place, Emile, one of the best skiers who have ever lived, was relegated to teaching beginners on Dollar Mountain. He took this in stride and taught his pupils quietly and well. In those days, as today, the Exhibition Run on Baldy was one of the most serious ski runs in America, and it had never been skied without several turns. One day, during his lunch break, Allais took the bus over to Baldy, rode the lifts up to Round House, skied down to the top of Exhibition, stopped to check it out, and then skated four or five times into the first schuss of Exhibition. When he finished, he skied down River Run, took the bus back to Dollar, and taught his afternoon beginning classes in skiing. His point had been made on all but the emptiest of heads, but he left Sun Valley the next year.
Allais then became the first Director of the Squaw Valley Ski School. When I was a young boy I used to watch Emile every chance I got to ski at Squaw. It was amazing that a man could ski that well, that fast and with such assurance. He was one of my first boyhood heroes. He was the coach of the 1952 U.S. Olympic Ski Team and Brooks Dodge later said Allais was the best coach he had ever known. It is worth remembering that Bill Beck’s 5th place finish in the 1952 Olympic downhill was until 1984 the best U.S. result in that event.
Now Allais is Director of Skiing at Flaine, and he owns a large ski shop there: He is 61 years old, has a beautiful mane of white hair, and is a gentle, soft spoken, reflective man. He has a three-year-old daughter, a thirty-year-old wife, and he wants to have another child.
Warren used to teach skiing for Emile at Squaw Valley in the early 1950’s and he holds high esteem for Allais. The grand old man of skiing was very receptive to Warren’s request to ski with us.
And early one morning all of us were on the first telepherique up the mountain. We were going skiing with this fine, grey-haired old gentleman who used to be a champion. We would have to slow down, take it easy; and in the privacy of our own minds, all three of us were condescending; and that attitude is a mistake in any situation. We knew that Emile sets his bindings so loose that none of us would be able to make two turns without coming out; and how, we thought, could anyone ski hard, fast or in difficult terrain with bindings so loose? With feeling, with feeling.
None of us will forget that day. That evening I wrote in my notebook: “Emile really blew us out today. He was leading, and we were honored, however condescendingly, to be skiing with him. After all, he is 61, and his mane perfectly white. On the first take he just smoked down the mountain doing fast, short turns in marginal snow, jumping off small cliffs and, in short, gettin’ it on. I was grinning (skiing last) and thinking, ‘you sly old fox, Emile.’ And we had to ski to keep up. I loved it.”
After the take, Warren said to Jon, “Now that he’s got your attention, what shall we do next?” Later, Warren mentioned that everything in life depends on your attitude. “Emile still skis the hardest runs. He works only during the winter. In the summer he goes sailing in the Mediterranean. He has enormous amounts of energy that some would mistake for enthusiasm; but he covers it with a quiet, almost reserved dignity. He must have been a hard competitor, and a ferocious fighter for the underground. I have noticed that he spends a lot of time looking quietly at the mountain. He has a lot of years’ experience and living to reflect upon.
From my notebook: “Emile gives me great joy and confidence. I can look forward to, with luck, 30 more years of good skiing. At least.”
When the light got too bad for filming we went skiing with Emile. Headed off into untracked snow, full of trees, gullies and steep, rolling terrain. We were cruising along at a moderately high speed when Emile disappeared into a gully, losing it just as he went out of sight. I stopped at the edge, more than a little concerned, and looked down to see Emile sitting in the snow, both skis off, snow all over him, and laughing like Chaplin makes you laugh. He laughed and laughed, and I couldn’t help but laugh with him. “Oh,” he said with gentle firmness, “it’s good for us to fall down every now and then,” and he laughed some more.

 

Finding Friendship in Snow

Posted on by

A big winter with an unusually heavy snowpack leads to a big spring’s runoff which will be a benign wetness or a destructive flood, depending on a variety of factors. Among them are location, how fast the snowpack melts, when it melts, how full (or not) are key reservoirs at crucial times, the strength of levees and what progress and hubris has developed within historic floodplains. Big snow years, periods of drought, times of flood, and other natural occurrences like forest fires, tsunamis and earthquakes are as natural, recurring and predictable as……well……big snow years, periods of drought, etc.
It was only a hundred years ago that the beginning of a reliable method of measuring the water content of a snowpack in order to estimate the size of the springtime runoff was developed. This was almost entirely through the efforts, ingenuity and imagination of one man, Dr. James Edward Church, Jr., known as “Ward” to his friends. Church was born in Michigan in 1869 and was a professor at the University of Nevada in Reno from 1899 until his retirement in 1939, teaching courses in Latin, German and the appreciation of literature and beauty in art and nature. The Church Fine Arts Building on the University of Nevada campus in Reno is named after him, and his and his wife’s ashes are interred in its cornerstone.
One description of Church reads, “Quiet and unassuming, he was the essence of the Renaissance man, with his interests in science, the classics and art. Dr. Church died in Reno on August 5, 1959 at the age of 90.”
Church, the accomplished Renaissance man, became fascinated with the Sierra Nevada, a completely different landscape from his native Michigan, particularly Mt. Rose which rises above Reno like a sentinel. In 1895, on a dare, he made the first known mid-winter ascent of the 10,776 foot peak. Church and his wife, Florence, made many winter ascents of Sierra peaks, including Whitney and Shasta, and they wrote about their adventures in the Sierra Club Bulletin. Though their backcountry gear was rustic and heavy by modern standards, it is reported that Florence lined their sleeping bag with rabbit furs.
His attraction to mountains was intellectual as well as adventurous, as befits a Renaissance man. In 1906 Church and Sam Doten of the University’s Agricultural Experiment Station built by hand a weather observatory on the summit of Mt. Rose, ferrying all material either by backpack or horseback. The observatory recorded data on snow deposits, wind velocities and runoff, and its remnants are still in place. Church developed the Mt. Rose snow sampler, a hollow metal tube with a serrated collar which removed a core of the snow pack which could then be weighed to calculate the water content.
Church developed the first system for accurately comparing snow and water content against the subsequent flow of streams in the Lake Tahoe area which allowed people to forecast water availability and to plan accordingly, in the case of Tahoe by knowing how much water to let into the Truckee River at what time of year. This system became known as the percentage or Nevada system and became the standard one used in the west. It is in use today throughout the world.
Though Church was a fine professor and popular with students, he was world famous because of his expertise with snow surveying which had nothing to do with his chosen profession. He became a world traveler as a snow survey consultant, visiting and working in Russia, Europe, Greenland, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Argentina, all of which used the Nevada system to provide runoff forecasts and regulate reservoirs.
After an eleven month study in Argentina, Church, described as a peace-loving man, noted that in both the Andes and the Himalayas water sources were in one country and their outlets in another. He wrote, “Thus, barrier ranges and trunk streams merge national interests like children in a family. My wanderings have become adventures in international peace. At the end of the rainbow I sought snow and found friendship.”
How very many people who live in the mountains and mountain towns of western America can identify with that statement, “At the end of the rainbow I sought snow and found friendship.”
In this time when the snows of winter are changing patterns and moving north and the leaders of our nation continue to seek oil and power and wealth and continue to find enemies, it is good to remember Ward Church, the Renaissance man who sought snow and found friends and adventures in peace.

 

Bargaining for Eden

Posted on by

“Greed is all right, by the way… I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
Ivan Boesky
“Money doesn’t talk, it swears…”
Bob Dylan

Every so often a book is published that brings the larger world into clear focus through a well-polished, high-quality lens directed at one small part of that world. “Bargaining for Eden” is such a book, and everyone who is interested in the human condition and the natural environment and their connections to and effects on each other will be well served by reading it. Stephen Trimble’s skills and perseverance as an investigative reporter honors the craft of writing and serves its readers by bringing integrity, honesty, intelligence, humility and hope to a story that is about their antonyms.
The larger story here is that of the diminishing and degraded landscape and environment of the American west and the reasons it has gotten that way. The smaller part of the world Trimble focuses upon is the Snowbasin Ski Area in Utah and the machinations by which its owner, Earl Holding, used the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, political influence, obscene amounts of money, abuse of public trust, ruthless and imperious determination and implacable secrecy to expand his financial empire at the expense of the common good and the environmental health of the landscape.
Holding, who is 81 years old and worth approximately $4.6 billion and listed as the 59th wealthiest American by Forbes, also owns Sinclair Oil, Grand America Hotel, Westgate Hotel, Little America, 400,000 acres of ‘working cattle’ land in Wyoming and Montana, as well as Sun Valley. He is a self made man whose financial success in life is the stuff of capitalist legend, material excess and human shortcoming. The ski lodges at Holding’s resorts are unrivaled anywhere in the world for luxurious fixtures and expensive décor, including marble selected personally by Holding and his wife from the “finest materials from around the world” for the bathrooms. One long-time Holding employee who for obvious reasons must remain anonymous said, “If Earl Holding treated his employees half as well as he treats his bathrooms this would be a better world.” As America is a capitalist country and as each of us represents its value systems, “Bargaining for Eden” can be viewed as a morality play and, perhaps, an object lesson for each citizen. Greed, like its companions, lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy and pride, are part of the human condition and no human is exempt from them. Trimble certainly does not spare himself and he makes the case (a weak one in my opinion because Earl’s transgressions against the ideals of perfect morality, environmental consciousness and the common good deserve more weight than Trimble gives them) that his own empire-building, self-serving maneuvers in constructing a small house in the desert of southern Utah makes him not so different from Holding.
As metaphor, however, by connecting his own abuse in developing, owning and thereby unalterably changing the landscape to the demonstrably much larger abuse of Earl Holding’s, Trimble encourages the reader to examine what former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson terms “…our values, our commitment to action, and our sense of connection with place, community, and the essence of who we are as inhabitants of this wondrous planet.”
As metaphor, the development of Snowbasin from local ski area to luxurious development spun behind the smoke and mirrors of hosting a couple of the Olympic events on Ogden Mountain above the “idyllic Ogden Valley” which contains a Trappist monastery and its fastest growing community, Eden, could not be better. Trimble writes, “The seven thousand citizens of the valley, monastic and nonmonastic alike, relish a sense of living in a private paradise. They harbor a fierce love for the place, and the names they give to their towns capture these feelings: just down the road from Eden is its satellite village, Liberty.”
As the title, “Bargaining for Eden: The fight for the last open spaces in America,” indicates this is a sordid tale with a few bright spots (and people) of integrity and hope, most notably (perhaps heroically) in the persons of Greg Parrish and Mac Livingston who own a business called the Flower Patch in Salt Lake City on property Holding wanted for his Grand America Hotel. The Flower Patch wasn’t for sale and, despite his best efforts, political influence, wealth and imperious persistence, perhaps for the first time in his business career Holding couldn’t buy what he wanted. Trimble describes the final negotiation: “On March 20 Mac and his allies had their one and only meeting with Earl….Earl was ten minutes late. When he arrived, everyone rose to greet him except Mac, who remained seated…Earl answered most questions himself. A query about cost led him off into a long monologue about engineering, earthquake protection, and Salt Lake Valley geology…As he left, all once again stood—all except Mac Livingston. He wanted to force Earl Holding to reach far across the conference table to shake his hand, and he told me that he had never seen quite so much hatred in anyone’s eyes as in the glare Earl turned on him.”
If the fight for the last open spaces in America uses hatred as a weapon, it will, like its nuclear counterpart, destroy the landscape and all that live upon it. Stephen Trimble has offered us a way beyond hatred with a great and shocking story of the past and a template for the future in “Credo: The People’s West” which ends the book. The last paragraph reads, “We call it paradise, this land of ours. We call it home. Like our nation, the West is in the middle of its arc. We must remain both vigilant and tender if we wish to preserve its authenticity. We can do this. We are not yet too old, too greedy, or too cynical to take wise action together.”
The first action to take is to buy Trimble’s book, read it, study the credo and act accordingly.