Teewinot
A Year in the Teton Range
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Jack Turner grew up with an image of the Tetons engraved in his mind. As a young man, he climbed the peaks of this singular range with basic climbing gear friends. Later in life, he led treks in India, Pakistan, Nepal, China, Tibet, and Peru, but he always returned to the mountains of his youth. He continues to climb the Tetons as a guide for Exum Mountain, Guides, the oldest and most prestigious guide service in America. Teewinot is his ode to forty years in the mountains that he loves.
Like Thoreau and Muir, Turner has contemplated the essential nature of a landscape. Teewinot is a book about a mountain range, its austere temper, its seasons, its flora and fauna, a few of its climbs, its weather, and the glory of the wildness. It is also about a small group of guides and rangers, nomads who inhabit the range each summer and know the mountains as intimately as they will ever be known. It is also a remarkable account of what it is like to live and work in a national park. Teewinot has something for everyone: spellbinding accounts of classic climbs, awe at the beauty of nature, and passion for some of the environmental issues facing America today. In this series of recollections, one of America's most beautiful national parks comes alive with beauty, mystery, and power.
The beauty, mystery, and power of the Grand Tetons come alive in Jack Turner's memoir of a year on America's most beautiful mountain range.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bursting with a sense of place, Turner's earnest journal of a year spent in Grand Teton National Park, where he works as a mountain guide, is a rewarding reading experience replete with ravishing observations of nature. From his Wyoming cabin, he looks out on majestic Mount Teewinot (the name comes from a Shoshone word meaning "many pinnacles"). He counts among his "Thoreauvian neighbors" deer, ospreys, great blue herons and porcupines, as well as moose that occasionally sleep on his porch. "We are a guild, our labor a craft," he declares, referring to fellow guides and park rangers who come together three or four months each year, united by a love of mountains and the West. Turner, a seasoned mountaineer who has led expeditions to India, Tibet and China, and has taught philosophy, takes us on exhilarating climbs, including one to the summit of the Grand Teton, as he casually drops apt references to Sartre, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Matthew Arnold, Chinese painting, Buddhist chants, Zen poems. But this is no Shangri-La. Illegal snowmobilers and poachers abound; "extreme skiers" and "extreme snowboarders" keep rescuers and medics busy. Turner himself lives on the edge--just half a mile from an active geologic fault capable of triggering a 7.5-magnitude earthquake tomorrow. A passionate conservationist, he bemoans the frazzled state of this "most compromised park in the national park system," a sanctuary littered with hunters, a major airport, motorboats with no speed limits. Highlighting the fate of the vanishing grizzly bear, he makes a compelling plea for preservation of "wild forms of being," and envisions a respectful covenant between people and wild animals such as mountain lions and wolves. Photos not seen by PW.
