Profiles of a “writer & photographer in the Desert West”

In the backcountry West, the road goes on forever…

This summer, VoyageUtah Magazine and Shoutout LA invited me to participate in their mission: “to promote mom and pops, artists, creatives, makers and small businesses by providing a platform for these hidden gems to tell their stories in their own words.”

They highlight “inspiring entrepreneurs and creatives.” I’m not sure if I qualify, but they asked really interesting questions. I was delighted with the published profiles, which you can read here in VoyageUtah and here in ShoutOut LA. I’ll also post my responses here, with some of the photos that ran in the magazines. Many thanks to the Voyager group for the chance to tell these stories!

Hi Stephen, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
When I was in my twenties, I began photographing and writing about people and landscapes across the West while working as a seasonal park ranger. When I famously took a wrong turn leading my first nature walk through the Fiery Furnace at Arches, the senior ranger at the end of the line had to rush up and get us back on track. The next season, camping on my days off at Capitol Reef, I searched for picnic tables to sleep on because I was afraid of scorpions. This was a long time ago. I quickly learned not to worry about bugs and started glorying in fluted sandstone walls and gnarled juniper and raucous Pinyon Jays. The slickrock canyons of the Colorado Plateau have been my spiritual home ever since. 

I’ve had amazing, unforgettable experiences while working on 25 books as a writer, editor, or photographer. I floated the Colorado River in Grand Canyon with musicians from the Paul Winter Consort, listening as they recorded in side canyons. I walked pristine tundra and forest at Snowbasin with the Swiss course designer as he imagined the jumps and turns that would become the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic downhill racecourse. A San Carlos Apache medicine man invited me to photograph during the three days of a young Apache woman’s coming-of-age ritual, the most powerful community ceremony I’ve ever witnessed. I’ve listened to Pueblo potters tell me stories about how they dream of their designs. And I’ve seen the Northern Lights from the Black Rock Desert long before Burning Man discovered the place.

Tumbleweed tracks, Great Basin Desert, Nevada

My books became more personal over time. I started out writing straight natural history, then added people—Native people, first. When I had kids, I wrote about how we make our connections with nature when we are young. My more recent books focus on conservation and advocacy. And finally, I’ve come around to writing about myself, which leads me to your next question…

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
My buddies in my writing groups and my family members have pushed me for years, saying, “You’ve got this story of your brother. That’s the biggest emotional story you have to tell. You’ve got to do something with it.”

I wasn’t ready. It was too incendiary, too emotional.

So I lived with this unfinished business, both as a person and as a writer.

I waited until everyone had died. My brother, my mother, and my father, all gone. Finally, a year after my father died, I was ready to open “the Mike file,” the envelope that preserved the few documents, clippings, and letters that constituted the record of my brother’s life. I knew that I needed to grapple with Mike’s story. And that decision quickly led to writing, and the writing led to a book.

When I was little, Mike was my big brother, who I adored—just as every little boy adores his big brother, right? But as he headed into adolescence, he turned into a volcano of anger, more and more unpredictable. Diagnosed as a “paranoid schizophrenic, capable of violence,” Mike was committed to the Colorado State Hospital. He never spent a night at home again.

I was six when Mike left, and so I have few memories of him in our home. I never had an ongoing relationship with my brother. His difficult life and death at 33 parallel the tragedy of our continuing failures in effective mental health treatment.

In writing this memoir about Mike, in trying to recreate his life, I learned that he had an enormously powerful influence on me and my life, as well. For the first time, I now realize that I defined myself as “not Mike.”

When the book was finally published last year as “The Mike File,” I felt I had not only created a worthy memorial to my long-lost brother, but I’d reached a level of understanding of myself that I didn’t even know I was looking for.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I think of myself as a messenger, going out into the world and listening—to the folks I interview, to the landscapes I pay attention to—bringing back stories in words and photographs for everyone who hasn’t been there.

I’m most proud of my book about Southwestern Native nations, “The People: Indians of the American Southwest.” I visited all 50 Southwestern tribes and interviewed dozens of people. Their voices fill the book.

Danny Soliz, Ak-Chin O’odham boy, Casa Grande, Arizona

My favorite book? “Talking with the Clay: the Art of Pueblo Pottery in the 21st Century.” Having the chance to interview Pueblo potters from Taos to Hopi was a privilege and an honor.

I also feel pretty darn good about my two books to defend Utah public lands with the power of writing. Terry Tempest Williams and I co-compiled “Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on behalf of Utah Wilderness,” a book of essays we distributed in Washington D.C. that helped convince President Bill Clinton to declare the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. How do we know? He told us! I followed that book two decades later with another collection of “art as advocacy” as editor of “Red Rock Stories: Three Generations of Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah Public Lands.” This book became part of the conversation leading to President Barack Obama’s declaration of Bears Ears National Monument.

Why did you decide to pursue a creative path?

I have always wanted to tell stories that matter because I love books so much. I never really made a decision to be a writer, and I never really made a decision to be a photographer. I simply wrote and I took pictures—and eventually people paid me to do these things.

I studied ecology for a time in grad school, but I left that formal track to pursue writing and photography. That’s where I thought I could make my contribution—and where I would find the greatest engagement, the most joy.

I came to photography as a pilgrim. In my twenties, I was solitary, a seeker, and I spent considerable time camping alone, wandering the Utah Canyon Country, looking through the viewfinder of my Nikon for patterns, for color, for epiphanies.

What was I really looking for? Relationship—with the world, with people, with myself. I began to learn how to look, how to see, how to find, while wriggling through prickly grass and warm sand in the Escalante wilderness, peering at ferns and cross-bedded sandstone and reflections in potholes.

I could never choose between writing and photography. I love them both, for different reasons. Writing engages my brain—it takes everything I can muster—over a long, long period of concentrated work. Taking pictures is a release, an outlet for reacting directly to the land and to people, a way to reap the instant emotional gratification that writing cannot grant.

Under the stars—and the glow from 29 Palms, Mojave Desert, California

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.

Let’s head north on a road trip from L.A. toward my home in Utah, through the backcountry heart of the Mojave Desert. You all know about Joshua Tree National Park. Keep going, across the desert into Mojave National Preserve. Over many generations, we’ve managed to preserve huge swaths of our California deserts, and these open spaces are thrilling, exhilarating. Wait until the heat eases in the fall, so you can roll down the windows and blast the music loud.

Next stop, Spirit Mountain. This sacred place sits along the Colorado River in southernmost Nevada just west of the Colorado River. The striking peak, called Avi Kwa Ame (Ah-VEE kwa-meh) by the Mojave Tribe, will be the centerpiece of a new national monument proposed by the twelve Native nations who hold this landscape sacred.

Avi Kwa Ame tumbles down from a great cream-colored double crest, its sharp ridges contrasting with rounded outcrops of granite boulders. On the canyon walls, petroglyphs tell stories of mystery, ritual, and migration. On the canyon floor, the rusty olive-green of creosote bush hazes the dry air with color just above the desert pavement.

Back on the road, you can bypass Las Vegas and stay as close as you can to the west bank of the Colorado River as you drive north through Lake Mead National Recreation Area and Valley of Fire State Park. You’ll hit the Interstate at Moapa, Nevada, but you can veer off again on back roads into Gold Butte National Monument—last stop before Utah and another little-known corner of Nevada rich with cultural significance to Native people.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?

Page Stegner wrote of his father, Wallace: “My father could never just look at scenery.”

Neither could mine.

Page: “If we happened to be driving across the Colorado Plateau through southern Utah, say from Cisco to Price along the Book Cliffs, he’d offer up an anecdote about Powell being rescued by Bradley in Desolation Canyon, and then explain to his slightly annoyed eight-year-old boy (me), who was trying to concentrate on his Batman comic, who Powell was and why he was important.”

I grew up with the same commentary levelled at me from the driver’s seat. My father, Don Trimble, worked for the U.S. Geological Survey for more than thirty years. He was a field geologist, mapping his way across big pieces of the West, quadrangle by quadrangle. He loved history as much as geology. He knew much of what Page’s father, the great western writer Wallace Stegner, knew. Younger geologists described my dad to me as “a latter-day John Wesley Powell”—the famous scientist who was first to document a river trip through the Grand Canyon in 1869—a trip vividly described in Wallace Stegner’s writing.

Back in 2009, I drove my father along this same route below Utah’s Book Cliffs that Page remembered. Dad was 92 years old, his eyesight deteriorating, but he reveled in watching the parade of peaks and ridges roll past the window, greeting each grand feature on the Earth’s surface like he was running into an old friend in a bar.

Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, Utah (of course!)

Page Stegner said of his father, Wallace: “He had a kind of holistic relationship with the land, and he couldn’t look at it without remembering its geological history, its exploration, its social development, its contemporary problems, and its prognosis for the future.” Page described his father pretty much exactly the way I would describe mine—and both men served as models for me.

I grew up with a sense of wonder nurtured by my father, who taught me that we’re surrounded by landscape with content, to be seen, to teach us, to revel in. Wallace Stegner’s books taught me to take the next step—turn that wonder into stories.

I would have loved to make that drive with both Wallace Stegner and Don Trimble in the vehicle with me. What a trip that would have been!

What matters most to you? And why?
The well-being of my family. The survival of democracy in America—real democracy, which means majority rule by a functional government that takes care of all of us equally. Empathy, kindness, laughter. A robust war-effort response to the cataclysm of climate change and the loss of biodiversity. Time in wild places. The thrill of seeing (and reading) great art. Delicious food and drink, shared with friends. The satisfaction of crafting good stories in words and photographs.

 I think the “why” is built into these answers, which pretty much describe how I define a good life. The poet Mary Oliver says it best. “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”