At right, photo of Stewart Udall by Kurt Markus.

LIKE THE BEST AMERICAN SAGAS, this one begins on the Mississippi River.

David King Udall was born in St. Louis in 1851 to English immigrants venturing upriver from New Orleans. Mormon converts, they had been called to forge a holy civilization in the West, so they crossed the ungrazed grasses of Nebraska in wagons pulled by oxen. "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them," said the Book of Isaiah, "and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as a rose."

Baby David made the journey in swaddling clothes. The child who would one day sire a political dynasty peered out from his bonnet as the wagon train climbed the jagged Rockies and descended into Brigham Young's settlement on the Great Salt Lake. He would indeed make the desert blossom, ingrained as he was with a belief that the land's bounty was to be nurtured and shared. As a teenager, David caught a man drawing water from the town canal out of turn. "He and I had words and finally came to a hand-to-hand tussle," he wrote later, "in which it happened that I, being a husky youngster, threw the fellow into a deep hole in the ditch."

Read the rest here.

It’s fun being governor of Montana. Just watch Brian Schweitzer bouncing around the streets of Helena in the passenger seat of the state’s official S.U.V., fumbling with wires, trying to stick the flashing police light on the roof. When he spots some legislators on the sidewalk, he blasts them with the siren, then summons them by name on the loudspeaker. The men jump, and the governor tumbles out of the car, doubled in laughter, giving everyone a bear hug or a high-five or a soft slap on the cheek. Schweitzer, a Democrat in his first term, marches into a barroom in blue jeans and cowboy boots and a beaded bolo tie, and his border collie, Jag, leaps out of the vehicle and follows him in. The governor throws back a few pints of the local brew and introduces himself to everyone in the place, down to the servers and a small girl stuck there with her parents. He takes time from the backslapping to poach cubes of cheese from the snack platter and sneak them to the girl, who is now chasing his dog around the bar. “This is how you make friends with Jag,” he advises her. “Just hold it in your hand and let him take it.”

Schweitzer’s grandparents were homesteaders who immigrated to Montana from Ireland and Germany. His parents were ranchers who never completed high school. And until 2000, Schweitzer and his wife, Nancy, were farming in Whitefish and raising their three children. And then, despite the fact that he was a virtual unknown in politics, Schweitzer began a quixotic bid to oust Conrad Burns, a two-term incumbent Republican senator. To the surprise of Montana’s political class, he came within four percentage points of succeeding. Almost immediately, he began campaigning for what would be an open governor’s seat. Even after choosing a Republican as his running mate, he thumped his primary opponent by a 52-point margin, then won the general election by four points.

Within months of his election, bloggers were clamoring for a presidential run, and his popularity transcended the wonk journals to include coronation as “Hot Governor” by Rolling Stone magazine, while “60 Minutes” called him the Coal Cowboy. On camera he persuaded Lesley Stahl to take a whiff from a vial of diesel fuel synthesized from coal — a product that Schweitzer claims will not only fill Montana’s coffers but also help end the nation’s dependence on foreign oil peddled by “sheiks, rats, crooks, dictators.”

Schweitzer’s “Montana miracle,” in which Democrats took back the governor’s seat after 16 years and ended 12 years of Republican majorities in both state chambers, has been cited as evidence that the Republican bastions in the Western states are losing ground to a new, Democratic brand of libertarian-tinged prairie populism. No fewer than four recent books by Democratic strategists have mentioned Schweitzer as the kind of guy Democrats need to win back rural America. A fifth book, Tom Schaller’s “Whistling Past Dixie,” published earlier this month, also singles out Schweitzer and makes the previously heretical claim that the Democrats’ future lies in ignoring the South and embracing the West and Midwest, where voters are less evangelical and more independent.

“He’s one of the new stars in the party,” Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, chairman of the Democratic Governors’ Association, told me recently. “We’re highlighting him wherever we can.” Indeed, just 54 days into his term, Schweitzer was chosen to deliver the Democrats’ weekly radio address, and he has been attracting notice from the party faithful ever since — like when he compared the president to a shifty cattle auctioneer hawking lousy bulls to dubious ranchers.

Six-foot-two and a beefy 205 pounds, Schweitzer has seized the heartland imagery generally monopolized by Republicans. “Schweitzer is the antithesis of the Democrat stereotype,” Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, of dailykos.com, the partisan Democratic blog, told me. “Too many Democrats look like targets for the school bully. Schweitzer is a tough guy. And people like guys who will bar-fight their way across a state.”

Schweitzer veers right on many economic and social issues: he opposes gun control, favors the death penalty and preaches about lowering taxes and balancing budgets. At the same time, he leans left on some issues that matter to progressives: championing energy conservation and environmental regulation, opposing governmental restrictions on abortion and criticizing free-trade deals. “He’s as much a prairie centrist as he is a prairie populist,” Bruce Reed of the Democratic Leadership Council told me. Schweitzer has the ability to reduce a complicated issue to a few sharp lines, reframing it with themes of patriotism and underdog know-how. “I was a critic of Nafta, I was a critic of Cafta and I’ll be a critic of Shafta,” he says of free-trade agreements, long the hobgoblin of even the most articulate liberal politicians. “Why is it that America supposedly creates the best businessmen in the world, but when we go to the table with the third world, we come away losers?”

The Democrats’ enthusiasm for their new hero seemed to overlook the fact that the governor of a state as sparsely populated as Montana simply does not wield a lot of national clout. Schweitzer governs fewer than a million people, in a state with a single Congressional representative, only three electoral votes and a Legislature that meets for just 90 days, every other year. Indeed, Schweitzer’s national celebrity has less to do with the way he has governed and more to do with Democrats’ perception — or their hope — that he is leading a Western resurgence.

The elections next month will test that theory. Schweitzer has been campaigning for the two Western Democrats best poised to replace powerful Republicans. In Montana, a populist farmer named Jon Tester is posing a serious challenge to Senator Conrad Burns, whose close ties to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff have made him an attractive target for Democrats trying to paint the Republicans as corrupt insiders. A Tester victory would solidify Montana as a Democratic stronghold, marking the first time since 1989 that the state’s two senators and governor were all Democrats. (Montana’s other senator, Max Baucus, a Democrat, has held his seat since 1978.) In Colorado, meanwhile, Schweitzer has been stumping for Bill Ritter, the former Denver district attorney, who grew up on a farm with 11 brothers and sisters, began working construction at age 14 and is now running for governor. A Ritter win would complete what Schweitzer calls a “blue bridge from Alberta to Mexico,” a string of Democratic governorships stretching across Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona — states that all broke for Bush in 2004.

Some of this has to do with demographics. In the last three decades, professional and service jobs have boomed in the Rocky Mountain states, and farming and mining jobs have not; those two sectors, once the mainstay of the region, now make up just 5 percent of all jobs. In Nevada, Arizona and Colorado, a sharp rise in the Hispanic population in the last decade may also have helped tilt the voting base to the left. But Governor Schweitzer says he believes that his success points to something more significant. “Is it that the population in the West is trending toward the traditional Democratic Party?” Schweitzer asked. “Or is it possible that some leaders in the Rocky Mountains are on the vanguard of realigning what the Democrats stand for?”

The Interior West has long been seen by Democrats on election night as simply a disheartening wall of big red blocks. Idaho, Utah and Wyoming haven’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Montana, Colorado and Arizona have all gone Republican in 9 of the last 10 presidential elections. But below the surface, the map of the West is slowly becoming a little less red and a little more blue. In 2000, Democrats had not a single governor in the interior West states; now they have four. Democrats have gradually been picking up House seats, too. In 1996, they won 4 of 24 House seats in the region. But they’ve managed to pick up 1 or 2 seats in each of the last four elections and have now clawed their way up to 8 of 28. In 2004, the party’s only bright spot besides Montana was Colorado, where Ken Salazar won a Republican Senate seat; his brother, John, picked up a House seat; and the Democrats took control of both state chambers.

“The pan-Western states — in an arc from Ohio, west to Montana and south to Arizona — are where the low-hanging and most-ripe-for-the-plucking electoral fruit for Democrats is to be found,” writes Tom Schaller in “Whistling Past Dixie.” The midterm election outlook seems to support Schaller’s thesis. None of the region’s eight Democratic representatives — the so-called Coyote Caucus — are considered at serious risk in 2006. But 10 of the 20 Republican-held seats are included in the list of 56 potential Democratic pickups compiled by Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. The Democratic Senate candidate in Arizona is putting up a surprising fight against the Republican incumbent, and the race for Nevada governor, an open seat vacated by a Republican, is listed by the Cook Report, an influential Washington political newsletter, as a tossup.

Local Democrats portray this trend as a grass-roots, homegrown phenomenon. “These advances were not the results of any national organization,” Jim Farrell, executive director of the Montana Democratic Party, told me, “but of the emergence of great local leadership like Schweitzer and Salazar. The D.S.C.C.” — the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, led by Charles Schumer of New York — “and other national groups have recognized the potential for gain, but they’re chasing after a train that began rolling in the last two cycles here in the West.”

It would seem to be true that Democrats in Washington long ignored the mountain states. As Pat Williams, a Montana Democrat who served in the House from 1979 to 1996, told me, “In 2000 you literally couldn’t get an Al Gore button in Montana.” But in recent years, the national Democratic Party has made some small but significant organizational shifts to increase the West’s political brawn. In August, the Democratic National Committee inserted a Nevada caucus into the 2008 presidential primary schedule, between Iowa and New Hampshire, in recognition that the Southwest is the nation’s fastest-growing region. The West has also gained influence through the elevation of Senator Harry Reid, a pro-gun, pro-life Nevada Mormon, to Senate minority leader. Democrats have chosen Denver as one of two finalists to be host of their 2008 convention (the other is New York). If Denver is selected, it will mark the first time in a century that Democrats have held a convention in the interior West. The D.N.C. has hired as its Northwest political director Brad Martin, who as executive director of the Montana Democratic Party oversaw its 2004 gains, and Howard Dean has dispatched more than 30 staff members to the Western states as part of his “50-state strategy.”

Still, Democrats hasten to assure the region’s notoriously prickly and independent voters that the national party’s new Western focus doesn’t mean that Washington will exercise any control over candidates in the region. “We’re not trying to be a top-down organization like the Republicans,” says Karen Finney, spokeswoman of the D.N.C. In the West, of course, being seen as refusing to take orders is a way to demonstrate your frontier spirit. Williams offers this advice to any Western candidate wondering whether to employ a regional strategy: “If it doesn’t exist, create it. And then be against it.”

As fertile as the West may seem for Democrats, some in the party remain skeptical that it matters much. “The problem with the Democrats is that they can’t count,” Dave (Mudcat) Saunders, a Democratic campaign strategist, told me. Saunders’s book, “Foxes in the Henhouse,” argues that the party would be wrong to focus on the West and ignore the South. He notes that 30 percent of the country’s electoral votes come from the South, and that by 2025 that percentage will be 40. “Georgia and Florida have as many votes as all the West put together,” Saunders points out.

Montana Republicans don’t concede that the 2004 results show a Democratic trend in Montana — much less the rest of the West. Roy Brown, the leader of the Republican caucus in the statehouse, says that the Democrats’ pickup of seats in the Legislature was not due to a sea change in the electorate but a result of gerrymandering perpetrated by a Montana Supreme Court that is “in bed with the Democrats.” Although Montana does not require voters to identify party affiliation, Brown estimates that 40 percent are Republicans, 35 percent are Democrats and 25 percent are independents. He concedes that in recent years the independents have been leaning toward the Democrats, but he says that’s not a consequence of a true shift in voter attitudes but a result of a “filter-down” effect from unpopular Republican candidates at the top of the ticket. (Schweitzer’s Republican predecessor famously declared herself a “lap dog of industry.”) In any event, the Democrats’ success in 2004 was not an aberration; the party had been steadily gaining seats in the state chambers for the previous three elections.

Schweitzer agrees that Democrats should be careful about trying to extrapolate Montana’s political trends to other states. “Montana ought not serve as a metaphor for the entire West,” he told me. Indeed, Montana is the West’s answer to New Hampshire: independent, contrary and unpredictable. Its demographic trends do not match that of the Southwest. The state’s population is growing, but not skyrocketing the way it is in Arizona and Nevada, and with no city larger than 100,000 residents, Montana essentially does not have suburbs or exurbs like those spreading around Phoenix, Las Vegas and Denver. Hispanics account for less than 3 percent of the population; Montana’s most sizable ethnic minority is Native American, at 6 percent of the population. And the state’s voters have always been less conservative than their neighbors in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. While it’s true that Montanans voted for a Democratic president only twice in the past 50 years, they’ve often elected Democrats to the House and Senate. In fact, Max Baucus’s Senate seat has been held by a Democrat since 1913. The meaning of the 2004 race is further complicated by the fact that Schweitzer chose a Republican — albeit a moderate of the Jim Jeffords variety — as his running mate.

Within the state, politics have historically been split between east and west. Western Montana, with two college towns, Missoula and Bozeman; the unionized mining town Butte; and the capital, Helena, tends to vote more like the liberal Pacific Northwest. The east is more like the Great Plains, with vast ranches, farms, strip mines and oil fields. When the state had two Congressional districts (they were folded into one in 1993), the western one was consistently held by a Democrat and the eastern one by a Republican. According to David Sirota, who was a strategist for Schweitzer in both 2000 and 2004 and who now lives in Helena, the swing vote in the state is in and around Billings, the state’s largest city. (“It is Yellowstone County that is Montana’s own Ohio,” he says, “and Billings the state’s Columbus.”) But unlike the rest of the nation, where swing voters are generally characterized as socially conservative suburbanites, Sirota says that many Montana swing voters are rural and libertarian.

Marc Racicot, who served two terms as Montana’s governor before he went on to be chairman of the Republican National Committee and President Bush’s 2004 campaign committee, says his fellow Montanans are unpredictable voters. “You simply can’t classify them,” he told me, pointing out that in 2004 they simultaneously voted to ban gay marriage and to legalize medical marijuana. “They are conservative in some ways, but ruggedly independent and populist in others. Party affiliation isn’t necessarily the dominant characteristic they consider.” Montanans are more mistrustful of large institutions like government and corporations than their counterparts on the coasts, while less religious than the South. Fifty-three percent of Montanans say they are pro-abortion rights. In foreign policy they can be rather isolationist: a poll in September showed that Montanans break with the national trend and rank the economy as more important than national security or the Iraq war. They take a libertarian approach to homeland security that is rarely heard nationally; Jon Tester, in a recent debate, said, “With things like the Patriot Act, we’d damn well better keep our guns.” And, contrary to the myth that Westerners are opposed to all environmental regulation, they tend to be conservationists. About 60 percent of Montanans favored the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which protected land from logging; it was signed by Bill Clinton and overturned by George W. Bush. Bush’s recent plan to auction off public lands was so unpopular in Montana that even Conrad Burns opposed it.

Montana’s populist streak dates back more than a century to the mining labor movement, and it surfaced again in 1992, when Ross Perot captured more than a quarter of the vote, allowing Clinton to win the state. As the Republicans honed their populist message in the 1990’s, their fortunes improved in Montana. Now, some say, the tide is turning. “The appeal of populism never changed,” Sirota says. “The parties changed. The Republicans were the populists. Now the Democrats have learned that they can be populists, too.”

It was a sunny day in June, and Brian Schweitzer and Max Baucus were flanked by Cessnas and helicopters, rallying with Jon Tester. Political rallies in other states might take place in hotel ballrooms; here in Montana everyone was gathered in an aircraft hangar outside Missoula. The place smelled like jet fuel. Corralling the top-ticket Montana Democrats in one place can resemble a “Bonanza” cast reunion, albeit with two Hosses and no Little Joe. Tester is a third-generation wheat farmer, president of the State Senate and a lumbering tank of a guy with a big gut and a flattop haircut. You want prairie authenticity? Have Tester show you his hand with just a thumb and a pinkie; the other three fingers were chopped off in a meat grinder when he was a boy. Tester, a progressive type, ran in the primary against a better-financed centrist, a career politician supported by the Democratic Leadership Council, and as soon as he won, Schweitzer leapt in to claim him as a brother. Onstage at the airport, Schweitzer played the down-home card. “Jon’s grandparents homesteaded just 20 miles from my grandparents,” he hollered, to a roar of approval from the hangar. “He and I were born in the same tiny hospital, up in Havre!”

Other than the fact that they grew up on farms, it’s not immediately clear what unites Schweitzer and Tester, Ritter and the Salazars. With his outspoken criticism of the war in Iraq — “I was very public before we went in that it was a bad idea, and history has borne that out,” he told me — Schweitzer has become a hero to progressives, while Ken Salazar has infuriated liberals with his support of Alberto Gonzalez’s nomination for attorney general and his endorsement of Joe Lieberman’s independent re-election bid. Governor Richardson of New Mexico suggests that such differences are evidence that the movement has no overarching strategy. “It’s happening from the bottom up,” he told me. “This is a natural evolution. It’s no grand design.” Or maybe it’s that the region’s Democrats simply don’t have many core beliefs in common. Schweitzer remains an iconoclast; he says he supported John McCain’s presidential bid in 2000, though he has since soured on McCain because of the way he has courted the religious right, and he says he is now intrigued by the possibility of a presidential run by Mitt Romney, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, in 2008. “If he gets the nomination, I might support him,” Schweitzer told me.

Much of Schweitzer’s attraction to voters lies in the fact that he doesn’t seem like a politician. “I’m just a rancher who ended up governor of Montana,” he likes to say. But Schweitzer is not a politician only in the sense that the young Cassius Clay was not a boxer; by the time his opponent realized he’d been hit, he was already on the mat. And since it’s accepted in the West that politicians are generally not to be trusted, Schweitzer’s greatest talent may be his endless insistence that he’s not one, all the while winning your vote and changing your opinion to agree with his. Which is, of course, what a politician does. His success is not the happy accident of a novice or a rube or a cowpoke who happened to ride his donkey into the halls of power — but rather the work of an expert, a virtuoso or, perhaps, a natural.

Besides getting elected and getting on television, what has Schweitzer actually accomplished? Much of the attention he has received came from positions he has taken on national issues: writing an Op-Ed for The Times about the miracle of coal-to-gas liquefaction, or requesting that President Bush return the Montana National Guardsmen from Iraq to fight summer forest fires. His agenda for his first legislative session was hardly radical: it included an increase in education financing, setting a goal to produce more wind power and a tax-reform bill that favored small business over big by eliminating the tax on business equipment valued at less than $20,000, while withdrawing a pending cut on more expensive equipment. He introduced an ultimately unsuccessful plan to prevent government officials from moving directly into lobbying jobs. Still, Schweitzer bristles at the suggestion that he was not sufficiently tested by his first session. “I had 90 days to pass my agenda,” he told me. “It was my first day on the job, and I was working with lobbyists and legislators who’d been there for years. We had a State Assembly that was deadlocked. But I pushed through the most progressive legislative agenda in the country. It was not easy. I took on the lobbyists. I wrestled them to the ground, and now I’m kicking them in the ribs.”

Despite the boots and bluster, at his core Brian Schweitzer is something of a policy wonk and a science whiz. He says he sleeps no more than five hours a night, and he is at his computer well before dawn, consuming a host of newspapers and a string of political blogs. His true passion is energy independence. On his desk is a contraption of tubes and coils that, as he enthusiastically explains, convert sunlight into hydrogen. In addition to his horsemanship and riflery, Schweitzer likes to tinker with gadgets, and he holds degrees in both soil science and agronomy. He will preach to anyone who will listen about the Fischer-Tropsch process of coal liquefaction, or about his recent switch from a Tahoe S.U.V. to a biodiesel Volkswagen Jetta.

Schweitzer fancies that he will solve the energy crisis the Montana way, which is to say, with ethanol and syn-fuels and wind power, all readily available in a state that has more grain, coal and wind than it does people. He says he believes that he is setting an example for the rest of the world, and that tends to infuse even the most mundane details of his legislative work with a certain fervor.

When I was visiting with Schweitzer one day during the legislative session, an aide rushed into his office with news that a group of Democratic state representatives from the Great Falls area were threatening to withdraw their support from the governor’s ethanol bill. Schweitzer was leaning back in his chair, beneath an oil painting of a Native American woman playing a flute, beside a window opening onto a view of snow-covered mountains. If Schweitzer is, as his critics contend, mostly a showman, he has chosen the perfect stage. Helena’s domed State Capitol is a transcendent gallery of marble columns and stained-glass atria, a temple so sincere in its exultation of frontier democracy that, for the cynical, it may resemble a Frank Capra movie version of government more than it resembles the real thing. Citizens wander freely in the corridors of power and, from the Senate gallery, can observe their lawmakers beneath frescoes of Lewis and Clark meeting Sacagawea, and of General Custer about to take a dagger to the gut at Little Bighorn.

The Great Falls representatives refused to come meet Schweitzer in the governor’s office — located about 800 steps from their chamber — because they were upset that the governor canceled a meeting with them earlier that day. “That’s it,” Schweitzer said, leaping up. “I’m taking ’em to the woodshed.” In an instant he was stomping down the corridor to the rotunda, his dog at his heels, and charging up the staircase to the House chamber. The governor corralled the Great Falls representatives in a meeting room and listened to their grievances. He leaned forward intently, his head bobbing almost imperceptibly, his eyes wide open and blinking in a strict cadence, receiving and processing data as if it were an electrical current. He clutched the edge of the table, and I suspected that if he let go, the rotors spinning in his skull would have broken the pull of gravity and sent him spiraling into orbit.

Sufficiently charged, the governor whirred into action. His monologue combined pep talk and sales pitch, threats and promises, science lecture and economic briefing. He spoke at length on the difference between malt barley and high-protein wheat, and on the profit margin of ethanol refineries, pounding his finger on the tabletop for emphasis. He went on uninterrupted for seven minutes, and when the fusillade was over, one of the representatives voiced a small objection from an industry lobbyist that Montana wheat would make for low-grade ethanol.

“Now that,” said the governor, slapping the table in triumph, almost evangelically, as if the Republic itself depended on this vote, “that sounds like somebody who didn’t take a single class in agronomy!”

Later that day, everyone at the meeting voted yes on ethanol, and in the evenly split House, the bill passed 52-48.

Hungry and emboldened, Democrats are already looking past 2006. A few stalwart Western Republicans who have been in the Senate since the Nixon years are rumored to be contemplating retirement in 2008. Pete Domenici of New Mexico will be 76, and Ted Stevens of Alaska will be 84. In Colorado, Democrats are so eager to oust Senator Wayne Allard that Representative Mark Udall has declared his candidacy a full three years before the election. Udall comes from the political dynasty that has spawned an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a handful of Democratic congressmen, and as a world-class mountaineer who says he is the only member of Congress to have made an attempt on Mount Everest, he fits the bill of an iconic Westerner.

As Democrats look to Montana to try to figure out how to replicate Governor Schweitzer’s success, they can’t help noticing one recent poll number: in August, 66 percent of Montana Republicans said they approved of Schweitzer, the same portion who said they approved of Conrad Burns, their own party’s incumbent senator. It may be that this sort of popularity comes only to a larger-than-life personality like Schweitzer.

Democrats will be wise not to try to replicate Schweitzer himself. When non-Schweitzers try to act like Schweitzer, it usually doesn’t work. In his book, Schaller recalls “campaign images of Al Gore wearing cowboy boots with his belt-clipped Blackberry, or a barn-jacket-clad John Kerry buying a goose-hunting license.” Schaller goes on to write that these gestures force “liberals to avert their eyes in horror, while conservatives look on from afar with a mixture of disdain and disbelief.”

As for Schweitzer’s own future plans, he dismisses questions about further political ambitions with one of his trademark similes — something about having spent more days in a saddle than having been governor. Nonetheless, the scope of his battle is larger than Montana. In addition to campaigning for Jon Tester in Montana and Bill Ritter in Colorado, he also stumped recently at a fund-raiser in Jackson Hole, Wyo., for a singularly non-Western candidate: Eliot Spitzer of New York.

From the New York Times, Sunday November 19.

"ARE you skiers?” asked the desk clerk at the Best Western. When we said yes, she explained that they had certain rules: no skis in the rooms, no beer bottles in the pool area, no bare feet anywhere in the hotel. Lastly, and this one she stressed with the weariness particular to a service employee required to enforce such a rule: lastly, there will be no cooking in the rooms.

My friend Jason Munzke and I had come a long way for this, a couple hundred miles up Highway 95 from Idaho to Rogers Pass in Glacier National Park in British Columbia, looking for what some call the best backcountry ski terrain in North America. “Anything past Kicking Horse, that’s new territory for me,” said Munzke as we sped toward the Kicking Horse Mountain Resort.

We climbed the big valleys of the Canadian Rockies, steep white peaks rising up on either side and creamy puffs of smoke drifting up from the pulp mill at Skookumchuck.

A fellow of Norwegian descent with a toothy smile, he has a dangerous combination of lifelong mountaineering skills and a masters in psychology (he’s a clinical therapist at a high school). You’ve heard of those wilderness programs for youths so wayward that a staff member must come to your door to haul bodily the little hell-raiser out to the woods. Well, that guy at the door: that’s Munzke.

Over the years, he has been pushing up across the border looking for new spots, and this time we’d decided to head up to Rogers Pass. Only a small portion of the ski terrain in British Columbia is served by chairlifts. The heli-ski industry is booming, but for us, with smaller budgets, Glacier was one of the best places to get to the backcountry on our own two feet.

From the small burg of Golden, British Columbia, we wound up to the pass on the Trans-Canada Highway (Route 1), as the April rain solidified into a snowstorm. As the windshield wipers slapped, mountains rose dramatically from each side of the highway. We craned our necks at the peaks, but they were hidden in clouds, and all we could see were the flanks ripped bare of timber by avalanches.

What makes the skiing there great is also what makes it foreboding: its annual snowfall of 567 inches — over 47 feet — one of the deepest in Canada. Never had I felt so close to avalanches, and we were still in the car. We passed through a series of tunnels built to shelter drivers from the inevitable slides.

Rogers Pass itself had a desolate feel. This outpost in this wintry valley consists of a gas station, a visitor’s center, an avalanche forecast center and the Best Western Glacier Park Lodge. The roofs were steep and pointed to shed the yearly load, and the parking lots walled in by heaps of plowed snow.

It was the middle of the week, late in the season, and the hotel seemed abandoned. The lobby bar, a rustic affair with plump leatherish seats and a small zoo mounted on the walls, was empty except for an employee forking noodles from an institutional-style steel tray. She and the clerk wore the same costume, a slightly Victorian frock with a cameo brooch at the neck. It was a bit creepy.

By the look of it, they were trying to re-create those glory days of the early 1900s when Rogers Pass was a grand stopping point for passengers on Canada’s first transcontinental railroad. It seemed they were hoping for pipe-smoking chaps in velvet coats massaging snifters of brandy while recalling a wildebeest hunt in Africa, or regretting good-naturedly that it’s hard to hire a good sherpa anymore. Instead, they got unshaven tramps like Munzke and me, hauling in rations of granola bars and noodle dinners.

At dinnertime, we decided to join the gentleman’s club and ordered entrees from the menu in the bar. The few signs of Old World sophistication — the Quebecers were speaking French — were quickly offset by the intrusion of modernity.

Tinny pop songs like Olivia Newton-John’s “Xanadu” were piped in unsettlingly loud and in the corner, a teenager pumped loonies into the Internet machine to update her MySpace page.

We poked at our fish platters (20 Canadian dollars, or $17.70 at $1.15 Canadian to the U.S. dollar). The wine had turned to vinegar and their best Scotch wasn’t as good as the 16-year-old Lagavulin that Munzke had waiting in a plastic bottle in his backpack in our room. The cook wandered into the lounge with a cast on his arm. By the time the check came, I was yearning gently for the quiet of my own room, a camp stove and a box of Rice-A-Roni.

The storm dumped snow all night, and in the morning the Rogers Pass Discovery Center listed the avalanche danger as high, which meant that natural and skier-triggered slides were likely. The museumlike displays did nothing to assuage my fears. There was a diorama of the 1910 disaster in which 62 train workers were killed by an avalanche that buried the railroad. Inside the glass case I could see little rescuer figures digging in the snow for survivors beside knocked-down three-inch-tall pine trees and power lines. They all looked so helpless in there.

On the wall above, a reprint of the local newspaper from that day screamed with its headline: Death Stalks Rogers Pass.

So Munzke and I decided to skip the backcountry altogether, and drove down to Golden, spending the day riding the gondola and skiing the avalanche-controlled slopes of the Kicking Horse resort. The place even had a sushi bar, a big step up from the dining room at the pass.

By the time we got back to the Best Western a few more skiers had arrived, and we drank beer with them in the hot tub. The pool and tub sat behind the lodge in the parking lot, covered by a plastic canopy whose several tears let in occasional snow squalls from the storm that hadn’t really stopped for 30 hours or so.

In the tub were a dozen or so Canadians and a pair of New Zealanders. We swapped ski stories while our fingers pruned and the storm blew. The Canadians chugged down a couple of cases of canned beer — respecting the prohibition against glass bottles. Resourceful mountaineers, they also massaged the motel rules to solve the culinary dilemma on Rogers Pass: smuggling a microwave oven into a room.

“We’re not actually cooking in the room, eh?” said one. “We’re just reheating.”

Back in our room, Munzke and I flicked on the TV, but the only channel we got was the hotel’s security cameras, lonesome black and white still shots of empty hallways and vacant tables in the dining room. Suddenly, I missed my dog.

Hot tubs and sushi notwithstanding, for someone who likes the backcountry, skiing at resorts and sleeping in motels is ultimately a bummer. So the next day, we pasted climbing skins to our skis, tested our beacons and skied into the woods, where we would spend the next two nights at the A. O. Wheeler Hut, a rustic log cabin about half an hour from the road.

Upstairs on foam pads under its pitched ceiling the cabin sleeps up to 24 in winter, and this being a Saturday, with the routes to the huts at higher elevation considered too risky in these conditions, the place was chock-full of friendly Canadians. Icicles clung to the eaves, and after breaking them into slivers, they mixed well in a tin mug with the Lagavulin.

The cabin sits at the bottom of a steep forested valley. With the stormy skies, we were buried in clouds. I knew there were peaks and glaciers above the trees but could not see them.

THE next morning, with the avalanche danger ratcheted down to moderate for slopes beneath the treeline, we started climbing. A wet snow fell steadily and soon I was soaked to the skin. The trees were thick and so were the clouds, and we couldn’t make out anything across the valley.

We followed the switchbacks up the mountain, sometimes so steep that my skins wouldn’t stick and I’d slide backward in my tracks. When we finally emerged from the old growth, we were on a ridge of thin timber — evidence of past slides.

Now might be a good time to explain how avalanche beacons work. They are a little bigger than an iPod, and each skier straps one to his chest. When he’s buried under snow, his buddy (assuming that he is not buried too) will be able to flick his gizmo from “send” to “receive” and then follow the beeps to the vicinity of the buried person. The rescuer then unfolds a skinny pole and probes the snow until he connects with flesh, then whips out his shovel and starts digging. All of this must transpire in fewer minutes than it takes a person to suffocate.

I didn’t feel particularly safe. Munzke predicted that our ridge would very likely split an avalanche from above onto the flanks on either side, and assured me if I just breathed a bit more slowly everything would be fine. So we dug a pit to analyze the stability of the snow, which Munzke declared to be favorable, then sat on our packs and ate salami and cheese and pieces of chocolate.

For brief moments, the clouds above cleared and we got our first glimpse of what Rogers Pass is famous for: big, sharp peaks looming high above, jagged pyramids too steep to hold snow, their bases wrapped in white blankets of glaciers, wild and dramatic and more like Alaskan mountains than anything I’ve seen in the lower 48.

And then we dropped into a bowl, a brief shot of bare snow in the thick woods. Everything was just right. The snow was fluff that heaped on my thighs and blasted over my head, the mist peeled back and a mountain looked down, and those 10 weightless turns, floating off the ridge and soaring into the valley, now that was something.

JUST AFTER DAWN one morning, Fletcher and I are bouncing down a dirt road in a big rented Chevy truck, looking for waves. The windshield is a web of cracks, and the heater doesn't work, so we roll down the windows to defog.

As I drive, he doesn't talk about his family, his surfing, his sponsors, or anything else. We establish that we both live in trailers, his a double-wide in Orange County and mine a single-wide in Utah, and then we drive in silence, bumping across rocks and puddles to the slap-slap of the windshield wipers.

"How thick is that wetsuit?" I say.

"Thick."

Nathan Fletcher is 30, but by the lines on his weathered face you'd think he was older. He has a hardened yet innocent look, like a mug shot of a teen idol. He retreats into his hood. Maybe he's asleep. After a while he stirs and fumbles for his smokes.

"Want a cigarette?" he says.

"Sure."

We emerge from the forest and follow a sandy two-track out onto the beach. There on a gnarled stump is perched a bald eagle, its head the size of a softball. We watch it. We're on a glassy bay, mist rising from the evergreens and glaciers off in the distance inching toward the sea.

"Eagle," he says.

Read the whole thing at Outside.

MY FRIEND NATE CROSS was turning 40 and wanted to take a river trip. The months leading up to his birthday had been tough. After 15 years his dog had died. That was five years longer than he'd been married. For a few weeks, Nate had carried photos of Junction in his shirt pocket and showed them to bartenders and waiters and cashiers. He told me that when he added up all the miles he'd walked with that Lab, it was about the same distance as circumnavigating the globe.

Read the rest here.

DISCUSSED: Literary Impersonators, Beauty Ranch, Four-Legged Weepers, The Freedom-Seeking Individualist, Jack London Square, Lenin, The Razzle Dazzle, Wolf House, Suicide Rumors, “The Noseless One,” Socialism, “Academians,” Hiking Backwards, The New Criticism, America’s Greatest World Novelist, H. L. Mencken, The Yoke of Responsibility, An Indifferent Natural Order, Biblical Dreams, Dog-Heroes

1.
I parked at the visitor’s center of Jack London State Historic Park, awaiting the arrival of America’s—and the world’s—preeminent Jack London impersonator. We’d been telephoning and exchanging emails for six months, and I’d finally flown to San Francisco, rented a car, and driven up to Sonoma County, site of London’s Beauty Ranch and the place where in 1916 the author succumbed to a life of smoking, drinking, and hard living—and died at age forty. When a slick pickup glided into the lot, I saw a frame around the license plate that said Mike Wilson as Jack London. I knew I had my man.

In the months preceding my trip to Sonoma’s Valley of the Moon, I’d been gulping up his books—most of which, I’d learned, were not regularly stocked at the local bookstore. In them I was finding the origins of three strands of twentieth-century writing. In his stylization of action and pitiless depictions of death and violence, I heard the quintessentially American voice that would come to be called Hemingwayesque and that a century later echoes in the novels of Cormac McCarthy. London’s pugnacious political essays and gloomy futuristic fables seem the blueprint for anti-totalitarian works like 1984, Brave New World, and It Can’t Happen Here. And his loose tales of countrywide rambling, freight-hopping, and bohemian freedom surely inspired the Beats.

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, E. L. Doctorow pronounced London “the most widely read American author in the world.” That’s right. More than Twain or Hemingway or Melville. Something of a literary footnote in his own country, Jack London is considered an emblematic American author in Japan, Russia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. The Call of the Wild has been translated into eighty languages, more than any other American work. An Albanian anthology of American literature pictures Jack London along with Mark Twain on its cover. A collection of London stories in Russian sold 200,000 copies in the first printing. On his deathbed, Lenin asked his wife to read him a Jack London story.

To read more, get the August 2006 issue of The Believer.

I have a new story in the New York Times about driving around Iceland during the summer solstice. It also includes my first-ever audio slide show. The photo above is of Mel Gilles (right) slipping into Viking-period regalia at the historic home of Erik the Red. Photo by Jehad Nga.

The week ahead promises us 168 hours of uninterrupted daylight in which to drive the Ring Road around Iceland. Though it's not a particularly long distance, I already sense that seven days will be about half as long as I would have hoped for. And so we have bolted straight from the airport to the nearby Blue Lagoon.

Here, the phosphorescent saltwater, the bright and flat Atlantic sky and the backdrop of industrial smokestacks give the place an otherworldly feel, which is as it should be: the lagoon is entirely man-made. Icelanders generate power geothermally, boring into the ground for the steam that spins the turbines as it blasts toward the surface; then they recapture that steam as water, pump it to a soaking pond, and charge 20 bucks a head. We are the first to arrive, in the early morning, and by noon the place is packed with Europeans, Japanese and Americans. We crawl between steam cave and hot pot, smeared in a gray silica mud bath.

On this trip last summer, I was traveling with my friends Mathew Gross and Melony Gilles. We lived for many years in a remote nook of the Utah desert where we developed a taste for isolated places and geological oddities. So Iceland was the perfect place for us.

Speeding across the black rock desert in our rented Corolla, we would occasionally pull to the shoulder, running fingers across the bulbous lava figurines or testing the sponginess of the mossy tundra. Iceland's Highway 1 — the roughly 830-mile Ring Road — is the only route that circles the island, and it feels like someone put the American West in a blender: California's poetic central coast, the Nevada desert's barren expanses, Alaska's glaciers and Yellowstone's geysers. They're all crammed onto this island, and if you don't like one natural phenomenon you're just a few hours from the next.

After an afternoon of poking around dirt roads and sulfur pits and making our way to a lonely lighthouse atop windy sea cliffs, we checked into a guesthouse in Reykjavik and went straight to bed. Two-thirds of the country's nearly 300,000 people live in and around this harbor city, and with its famous night life we figured we should rest up before our first drinking binge.

I'd read somewhere — the in-flight magazine perhaps — that during the solstice partying lasts all night. After dinner we wound out way through the hilly cobblestone streets and settled into a bar filled with velvet couches, where a D.J. was mixing a combination of old soul and hypnotic space music. But after a few rounds of Viking — Iceland's answer to Pabst Blue Ribbon, though in this soberingly expensive country it sells for $9 dollars a pint — we realized that, forget about daybreak, on our budget we'd barely make it to sunset.

Around midnight, as the sun settled into the horizon, the streets were still empty. The bar filled up, and cigarette smoke hung in the daylight streaming through the windows, but it still was nothing like the bacchanalia we were expecting. It felt like any other Monday night. Later we learned that the natives do indeed celebrate the solstice, but not until the nearest weekend.

Nothing, we discovered, cures a hangover like an afternoon in Viking costume. Heading north from Reykjavik, the buildings fell away and we found ourselves crossing green farmland backed by flat-topped snow-covered mountains. After a few wrong turns through sheep-dotted valleys we bumped along a dirt road to Eriksstadir, home of Erik the Red, founder of Greenland and father of Leif Eriksson, believed to be the first European to set foot on America.

As we got out of the car, a woman in Viking-period regalia — a coarsely woven tunic, hair in braids and a container like a powder horn lashed to her waist — emerged from a canvas tent where she had been sitting behind a laptop. She asked if we were there for the tour, and Mel could not contain herself: "Do we get to dress in Viking clothes too?"

THE woman considered the question, then smiled, inviting us to a little hut where her daughter was tending a fox pup. After producing a flowing yellow dress for Mel she led us up to a sod-roof hut, a historically accurate re-creation of Erik's home. Inside, a Viking hunkered over a fire, whittling at a spear with a long, gleaming knife. Draped around his shoulders was an entire wolf pelt, head and legs included.

Speaking perfect English, the Viking delivered a brief biography of Erik the Red while his mate fried a pancake on a cast-iron skillet. Shortly she and Mel coupled up and began cooking, weaving on the loom, and doting over the fox pup. We men talked of warfare and navigation, handled broadswords and donned battle helmets. "If you're fighting British or Scandinavian, headshots are not allowed," the Viking said, explaining the rules for mock battles. "But with the Poles or Russians, anything goes."

The Viking turned out to be an Englishman, who had lived for 15 years in Norway, teaching lore and technique to school groups and organizing Viking festivals. This summer he'd loaded his collapsible linen tent into his EuroVan and taken the ferry to Iceland. He is a professional Viking.

This time travel seemed oddly in keeping with the drive itself. Driving in Iceland is not for the efficient. Highway 1 is a narrow affair that doubles back into the fiords, like driving up and down each tooth of a comb. Most bridges have just one lane, and many stretches are unpaved.

We wound toward Lake Myvatn in the northeast, finally approaching a landscape straight from Middle Earth: a volcanic crater ringed in moss; outcroppings of lava dotted across the hills. Here we were even closer to the Arctic Circle, and the sun shone an extra hour. At a guesthouse in the tiny village of Vogar, we encountered the same sorts of pilgrims I've met in the American Southwest, drawn to a bizarre and inhospitable landscape.

"We've been here five days already," a Dutch woman said. "We can't seem to leave."

A gray-haired German woman in the guesthouse said she had relocated full time to Iceland and spent much of her summers up in these geothermal badlands.

A short walk from the house is Grotagia, a giant fissure splitting the shelf of volcanic rock. I scrambled down into the chasm and found a clear pool steaming at about 120 degrees, then followed a footpath for a mile across a field of tundra and lava. The trail leads up one flank of a symmetrical volcanic crater called Hverfell before dropping off the other side into Dimmuborgir, a hobbit's paradise of towering lava castles, natural arches and countless unexplored grottos. Next we hurried to the gurgling purple and yellow sulfur cauldrons at Namafjall and to the steaming lava heap at Leirhnjukur, an active volcano itching to blow at any minute.

Across the highway from our guesthouse was Vogar's single cafe, where breakfasters were granted the odd privilege of watching the proprietors milk the cows. Here on the rocky shores of Lake Myvatn, Olof Hallgrimsdottir and her brother, Leifur Hallgrimsson, run this dairy farm, settled by their family over a century before. Ms. Hallgrimsdottir is blonde and pretty with the high cheekbones and upturned nose that are the norm in this country, and when I met her at the cafe she was wearing a red-and-blue jumpsuit and rubber boots.

While her teenage daughter poured coffee at the counter, Ms. Hallgrimsdottir was on the other side of a window, amid four cows and the hoses and tubes of a 16-udder milking contraption. Hanging on the cafe walls was a row of award certificates from the dairy board. Ms. Hallgrimsdottir invited me into the milking room and squirted a half-pint of warm, sweet milk directly from a cow into a glass, and I drank it down. Remarking that, "Cows can't eat rocks," she told me that a few years back she converted the dairy shed into the cafe to increase revenue on their boulder-strewn acres. An old German couple took a seat by the window and, spooning up their yogurt, watched the milking spectacle through the glass.

After a long stretch through gray, barren desert, we regained the green hills on the approach to the western fiords. The road turned to dirt, and topped out over a pass into a stunning valley of tundra, yellow and purple wildflowers bursting from its flanks, waterfalls pouring off the rim and a stream at the floor draining toward the sea. At the coast, towering moss-covered cliffs crowded the sea, leaving room only for the narrow road and an occasional red-roofed farmhouse on a carpet of green grass where sheep grazed. Rain fell as a thick mist gathered over the Atlantic, and for many miles we snaked along between a wall of rock and a wall of ocean.

I imagined this was how it felt to drive California's coast 75 years ago, downshifting on the sharp bends in the gravel road, idling before a one-lane bridge while an oncoming car made its crossing. Cold waves lapped over black beaches, lonely crags jutted up from the water, and with the sea fading from gray to green as the sun peeked through the clouds, the landscape was sublime and melancholy.

And just when I thought I'd traveled to Edward Weston's Big Sur, we hit the glaciers. A big chunk of southeastern Iceland lies beneath the vast ice field of Vatnajokull, which crept toward the ocean down a series of fingerlike canyons. Off in the distance the cracked sheets of ice were motionless and menacing. At Jokulsarlon a glacial snout calved into an aquamarine lagoon, and the icebergs drifted almost imperceptibly toward open water, penned in like zoo animals where the busloads of tourists could gawk at their beauty.

Occasionally an iceberg floated beneath the highway bridge, was carried to sea, then was dashed on the beach by the windswept waves. We walked along the gray strand where the blocks of glacier rocked gently in the tide, and we gathered in our hands the cocktail-size ice cubes that had washed up on shore and flung them back to the sea.

On the final day around the Ring, we steered our rental car up the steep switchbacks near the coastal town of Vik. We wanted to reach the top of the seaside cliffs, overlooking a jumble of rock towers jutting from the sea, and then find a trail down to a beach. But the little car was scraping bottom before the first turn, so we left it on the shoulder and continued on foot.

The rain clouds had passed, and as we topped out on the bluff, the sun was dazzling and the wind was fierce. The grass spread out far beyond a radio tower toward an abandoned building on the promontory. We walked along the cliff, leaning away from the edge, feeling that the wind could chuck you over. After an hour of forging against the headwind, we realized that there was no trail to the beach. We were treed, here on this towering bluff.

And that's when we saw the birds. Dozens, hundreds of little white gulls' heads poked out of the rock wall below. We belly-crawled to the edge and peer over.

The gulls danced in the wind. They banked off a howling gust, almost bowled over backward, then straightened their wings and dived forward. They surfed back and forth, now and then catching an updraft and careening a hundred yards over the sea. The sun glistened on the whitecaps and waves surged in slow motion around the rock towers. A pair of puffins emerged from the rookery and braved the winds, looking a bit unsure of their skills, their goofy legs dangling below like parts of a puppet. We clutched the grass where we lay. The wind was going to blow like this all day long. I could have stayed there forever.

Wenders shot much of the movie in this mining town whose population has declined steadily since the 1920s, and which, these days, with its grand “Historic Uptown District” of largely vacant Victorian and early-century brick hotels and storefronts, resembles, well, a movie set. The gala screening was held at the Mother Lode Theatre, an opulent 1200-seat palace built in 1923 as a Masonic Temple. For the event, one of those devices with the rotating spotlights was parked out by the curb, sending up shafts of light visible from Interstate 90. Tickets were distributed free to local residents, many of whom arrived in the town’s fleet of trolley buses to the theatre on what was once known as “the richest hill in America.” The house was packed.

“People ask why I chose to film in Butte, Montana,” he said. “And I tell them it’s my favorite city in America.”

When the applause subsided, Wenders thanked the town for its help with the filming, but warned them that they might not want too many more movies filmed there. “Wait till they block off your street. Wait till they throw furniture out of your window.” He finished by reading the inscription of his belt buckle. “This is the film’s full title: If this trailer’s rocking, don’t come knocking.”

Despite projector malfunctions that caused blurriness and muffled sound, the audience settled down for the two-hour film, erupting at the first sight of their town, a still shot of the lonely main drag and the M & M Café, which Jack Kerouac heralded as “the end of my quest for an ideal bar.” After that, the loudest cheers came for cameos by a locally-known mirror-plated sedan, and a dog.

Reviews of Don’t Come Knocking have faulted Wenders for indulging in Western cliches—vintage cars, cowboys, smoky bars and twangy music. But the critics have praised the photography, particularly the way Butte evokes a lonely rural America well past its prime. An anomaly in the Rocky Mountain West, Butte remains a largely industrial city with a significant Irish-Catholic population, strong labor unions, and fervently Democratic politics. But since the decline of mining in the middle of the century, Butte has been economically depressed, and its most recent sources of reknown are as hometown of daredevil Evel Knievil, and as site of the Berkeley Pit, the nation’s largest Superfund toxic waste site.

After the show, some locals were discussing the movie at Maloney’s Bar. Shamrocks hung on the wall beside a mounted jackelope. A young woman said, “I was glad to see Rita,” referring to a Butte woman who had won a one-line role. When the gray-haired woman beside her wanted to know who Rita was, the younger said, “You know her, she comes in here and pours her beer into a plastic cup, and gets drunk, then comes out of the bathroom with pink lipstick all over her teeth.”

A bearded, barrel-chested man named Tom Malloy was drinking Irish whiskey and telling a story about his job for the County, which involved evaluating any large hole discovered beneath the town. “We never know if it’s an old outhouse, or a Chinatown tunnel, or a mineshaft,”he said. He told how a construction crew from Billings recently poked drilled into such a mysterious hole while excavating for a new playground structure.

“They didn’t know what to think,” said Malloy’s companion, a woman named Julie who said her father and grandfather were Butte miners and union activists. “But we see that sort of thing all the time. It’s so Butte.”

Julie enjoyed the movie but didn’t see why the director needed to insert ranch decor into the interior of the M & M, with its 1940s-style stainless steel paneling and chrome barstools. “Sure it’s a Western town,” she said, “but not cowboys. Miners!”

Also at the bar was a graduate student in English at the University of Montana who had driven some 120 miles from Missoula to catch the screening. Julie asked what had inspired the trip.

“I’m a big fan of Sam Shepard’s,” said the student.

“What?” Julie said.

“I said I really like Sam Shepard’s work,” the student repeated. Then she said, “The playwright. The actor. He wrote the screenplay.”

“Oh,” Julie said.

Malloy, who grew up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and moved to Butte in 1975 to play football for Montana Tech, described what it was like to drop 5000 feet in a caged elevator to the bottom of the mine, where he worked a stint in the late seventies. “The wind was blasting up through the grate, and you kept falling for fifteen minutes or so.”

He thought the movie was okay, but complained that parts of it were out of focus, and that the music sounded fuzzy. “Some of the things seemed like screwups to me, but maybe that was just his way of being creative,” he said. “Who am I to say? Maybe it was art, or maybe it just sucked.”

I also cut the subtitle, introductory note and the back jacket salescopy, none of which I ever wanted. This version is the way I intended it. The book was originally published by HarperCollins in 2000, based on a series of columns I wrote for Great God Pan magazine.

Here's my story about the Ostrander Hut in the Yosemite high country from the New York Times. There's also a slide show.

I AM skiing uphill in the dark. It's been raining for six hours. I am following a pair of tracks threading between pine trees. Now and then, the beam of my headlamp catches a reflective marker high on a trunk, so I guess I'm going the right way.

My destination is the Ostrander Ski Hut, a cabin in the backcountry of Yosemite National Park, nine miles from the nearest road. Since leaving the Badger Pass parking lot just before noon with my friends Tim, Jeff and Nettie, except for an hour on a groomed trail, I've been climbing steadily through forest.

The trek into the Ostrander Hut is legendary for its difficulty, and I had determined to pack only the essentials for a two-night stay. These included a quart of lobster bisque, a chunk of Stilton, slabs of prime rib, a pint of cream, half a pound of butter, a dozen eggs, a tin of English toffee and a bottle of zinfandel. For the last hour, with the pack digging into my hips as I climb what's known as Heart Attack Hill, I've considered pitching the denser items into the snow.

Finally, I crest the hill and coast blindly down through the forest. Faint lights emerge up ahead, filtering through the windows of a pitched roof outline. I click out of my skis, and as I pull open the heavy wooden door, a blast of heat escapes.

Inside, triple bunks line both walls, and picnic tables run end-to-end down the center to a glowing wood stove. A foursome in long johns and knit hats look up from a card game.

"Welcome," one says, slapping down a card. "Grab a bunk."

Yosemite Valley, with its courthouse and auto garage, grocery store and acres of asphalt, has for decades looked like the sprawl that many visitors seek to escape. Traffic is jammed, and armed law enforcers hover like chaperones at the prom.

Within a park that is such a monument to accessibility, the Ostrander Hut is an anomaly — a destination recalling the days when a park visit required a modest expedition. And while it's tempting to call the hut a throwback, it's more accurately a holdover from an era that never quite happened.

Before the introduction of the chairlift, skiing was not today's billion-dollar industry of slick outfits and slopeside condos. It was the daring realm of eccentric Bavarians and Scandinavians who climbed their local mountains by fastening strips of seal skin to their wooden skis. The purpose of the sport was to get to the backcountry, and to stay out there as long as possible.

In the 1930's, Yosemite was poised to become the West Coast's first major ski center. At the helm of the Yosemite Park and Curry Company, the park's longtime concessionaire, were two skiers: Don Tresidder, a future president of Stanford University, and his wife, Mary Curry Tresidder. In hope of drawing visitors year round, they retained a crew of European experts to teach the arcane sport and envisioned a village and a series of huts modeled after places they had visited in the Alps.

When the Tresidders brought the first chairlift in the West to Badger Pass in 1935, "running downhill only" was considered an exercise for novices to develop the skills to tour in the backcountry. Along with the National Park Service and conservation groups like the Sierra Club, the Curry Company predicted that the future of skiing in Yosemite was not in the graceless mobs of downhillers, but in the sublime adventure of multiday backcountry touring.

Plans for an expansion of the Badger Pass ski area were scrapped. The first of three proposed huts was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1941, nine miles from the Badger Pass chairlift.

It was an exquisite lodge. The walls are two-foot-thick granite, cut from nearby blocks of glacial moraine. The rafters and beams are local lodgepole, joined with heavy iron bolts. Even in the fiercest of storms the place doesn't creak or sway.

But the maxim "If you build it, they will come" did not hold true. In its first winter, the hut drew 154 skiers. Meanwhile, more than 70,000 rode the lifts at Badger Pass. When the war ended, downhill skiing boomed, and resorts on Lake Tahoe and in the Rocky Mountains dwarfed the Yosemite ski hill. No more huts were built.

Ostrander continued to draw a thousand or so hearty skiers yearly, and was maintained by husband-and-wife couples who served meals and split firewood. But the place was unprofitable and difficult to maintain. In 1968, Curry pulled its caretakers, and the hut seemed doomed.

Thirty-eight years later, Ostrander feels distinctly unmodern. There is no telephone or running water. Drinking water is hauled in plastic buckets from a hole chopped in the frozen lake, then stored in a 30-gallon barrel. A propane stove burns in the kitchen, but the only source of heat is that wood stove.

A few light bulbs hang from the ceiling — recent additions powered by solar panels on the deck. The outhouses shelter portable toilets that along with the propane and firewood, are hauled in each fall by mule teams.

After my welcome, I unpacked the lobster bisque and cheese and wine and shared it with the caretaker, Kelsey Ripple. Kelsey, 33, has been a part-time hutkeeper for five years, usually working 5-to-10-day shifts, and he was happy to have some fresh food. In fleece pants and sheepskin slippers, he wandered out to the porch where he gets cellphone coverage and called his wife. She was supposed to ski in the next day, but the rain was brewing into a big snowstorm, and she said she would wait it out.

In the morning, we sat by the wood stove drinking tea and playing dominoes while the storm wailed. Joining us in the game were a couple who had been coming to this hut for more than a decade, and another who were first-timers. The two couples had skied in the day before, cutting the tracks in the fresh snow that we followed in. Storm forecasts continued on the radio, but we had everything we needed in the hut and cooked up a skillet of eggs and sausage and cheese. After the previous day's trek, we were content to take it easy.

The radio scanner crackled. There had been a report of marijuana smoke from a campground in Yosemite Valley. Within seconds, two law enforcement units were in motion, surrounding the campsite, whispering into their radios.

We became restless and changed into bibs and coats, and skied out of the hut to a nearby bowl. It was still raining lightly, but the snow wasn't bad. We made telemark turns through the trees to a flat spot in a draw, then skinned back to the top and did it again. After two runs we were tired enough to head back to the hut, break out the wine and dominoes and listen to the wind the rest of the day.

Enjoying the hut might not be possible without one man's effort. In the early 1970's, with cross-country skiing in a brief resurgence, the park service began to assign rangers to the hut. One visitor was Howard Weamer, a graduate student wandering the Yosemite wilderness for a doctoral dissertation on "geology and aesthetics."

He fell in love with the hut and the surrounding forested ridges, granite peaks and domes, and in 1974 took the seasonal position of caretaker. He never finished the Ph.D., but this year, he unrolled his climbing skins and skied out for his 33rd winter at Ostrander.

With a trademark gray beard, Mr. Weamer looks the part of a mountain hermit. But he speaks with the weariness and occasional outrage of a veteran of three decades of squabbling with the federal bureaucracy.

"I'd just shimmy out the roof peak," he told me, describing how over the years he has cleaned and repaired the chimney. "That is totally illegal now. You have to belay someone up there."

FOR the park's managers, saddled with accommodating three to four million annual visitors, Ostrander — with fewer than 1,500 visitors a winter — is a nuisance and has never escaped the threat of closure. Since the early 80's, when the park once again abandoned Ostrander, the hut has been operated by the nonprofit Yosemite Association.

So Mr. Weamer holds a unique place: while he's not technically a National Park Service employee, in his tenure at Yosemite fighting to keep the hut open, he has outlasted nine superintendents, as well as countless rangers, bureaucrats and inspectors.

"They'd literally have me carrying a gun," Mr. Weamer said, listing just one reason he is not an actual ranger. "I do what I do exactly because I don't want that stuff in my life."

These days, Mr. Weamer spends more time on photography and splits the hutkeeping shifts with Kelsey and another caretaker. In 1995, he published a history of the Ostrander Hut, "The Perfect Art: The Ostrander Hut and Ski Touring in Yosemite," featuring his photographs.

Mr. Weamer's advocacy has earned him some unlikely allies. The Ostrander is a cause that both liberals and conservatives can support: on one hand, a triumph of natural values over development; on the other, an example of citizens besting the government in managing a national treasure.

Representative George Radanovich, a Republican whose district includes much of Yosemite, has often sparred with environmentalists, but he has lobbied to keep the hut open. Mr. Radonovich even made the trek to the hut in 2004, eschewing the high-tech garb of so many skiers and arriving, as Kelsey recalled, in blue jeans and a flannel shirt.

That night, the congressman and the park superintendent, Mike Tollefson, sat around the wood stove swapping stories, an especially unusual occurrence considering that rangers — to say nothing of administrators — rarely go this far out. And like all visitors, the congressman apparently found the ski-out quite a challenge on skinny cross-country skis. "I heard he got a bit schooled on the downhill," Kelsey told me.

All Mr. Radanovich would admit to in a recent interview was, "I found the downhill harder than the up."

But he added, "I am in complete love with the high country, and any way to get up there, I'm open to it." The congressman said he would even support the original idea of creating a string of huts to allow longer ski trips.

Afternoons and evenings, the prime entertainment at Ostrander Hut is making bets on when the new arrivals will show. Just before dark, a young couple pushed through the door, soaked with rain and sweat, cheeks flushed and jaws slack. They climbed upstairs to change clothes and a few minutes later were out cold, wrapped up in sleeping bags on a cot.

Later, a lone skier arrived. His group of eight was moving slowly up Horizon Hill, three miles away. He dropped his pack and went back out to help them find the way.

As darkness fell, Kelsey was pacing. The skiers had not arrived. It got to be 7 o'clock, then 8, then 9. The caretakers frequently spend evenings skiing in the dark, looking for visitors who've not yet arrived, although, Kelsey said, "I've found that as soon as you get dressed, they always show up."

Finally, he buckled up his ski boots and packed up a radio and a couple of bottles of hot soup. Sure enough, as he was knocking the ice off his skis, we saw dots of light out in the woods.

Over the next 45 minutes, the eight skiers straggled in, wide-eyed, panting, relieved. They left Badger Pass about 12 hours earlier. That night, the hut had 22 visitors — just three short of capacity.

Skiing out early the next morning, I was a bit schooled on the downhill myself. Overnight, the temperature had dropped, and the slushy snow had frozen. I rattled down the ice and, when I dropped a knee to turn, broke through the crust and face-planted.

It's not a very steep slope, but we were all falling down. Tim broke a pole and bound it together with duct tape.

It was a brilliant day, with the flank of Half Dome shimmering and the Clark Range jagged on the horizon. Down the hill, we ran into Kelsey's wife, Adonia, working her way up the trail. The next storm was a day away, and this was her window.

We talked weather and snow conditions for a minute, but she wanted to get to the hut while the light lasted. Rolling up her sleeves, she pushed off and glided up into the hills.

The magazine is apparently a bit awkwardly packaged and, as a result, is not being carried by the chain stores. So if you want a copy you might want to order one directly from McSweeney's or Amazon.

A short outtake follows:

Over the next 47 days, Roosevelt would kill 170 animals and birds: elk, bear, buck, rabbit, and grouse. But even a novice marksmen can tell you that such firepower is far more than a bear hunt requires. For Roosevelt, hunting was more than simple sport. "Walking on silent, moccasined feet down a luminous nave of pines," reports biographer Edmund Morris, "he came close to religious rapture." Later in life Roosevelt extolled the adventurer's journey to "the border-land between savagery and civilization," where, "the veil of the past has been lifted so that he can dimly see how, in time immeasurably remote, his ancestors—no less remote—led furtive lives among uncouth and terrible beasts." Perhaps most telling, on this safari to the American Midwest, the future president carried with him a Royal Society publication including new anatomy charts for the recently discovered African Gorilla.

And so began a two-decade quest to discover the line between man and beast, a saga as haunting as the obsessions of Melville and Conrad. Traditional history reports that Roosevelt was hunting buck and grizzly—of course he was—but, as we shall see, convincing new scholarship demands consideration that his true quarry was a specimen that has yet to see the glass confines of a museum diorama: the monster of the Minnesota North Woods, the Wendigo.

Here's my story about rafting the East Glacial River in Iceland from the the New York Times. There's also a slide show of the trip with photos by Jehad Nga

IN Reykjavik, where the late-night bars hum with hypnotic beats piped in at a low volume and the women are lithe with high cheekbones and upturned noses, a visitor to Iceland might for a moment forget his proximity to the trolls of Middle Earth. But venture out of the city and you'll find a hinterland of geysers and volcanoes and steamy pits of gurgling sulfur. Cross into the lava desert or the geothermic badlands and you'll understand why the island's people - descendants of Vikings, most of them - talk freely of elves and the "invisible people."

I love summers in the far north, when the never-ending light frees up remote, foreboding places for aimless explorers like me who don't know where we'll be sleeping next but would prefer not to figure it out in the dark. I'd been a river guide in Utah and Alaska, but was as surprised as anyone to learn that Iceland - plunked mid-Atlantic between Greenland and Scandinavia - produced runnable rivers at all. While there is better white water closer to home, I was drawn to the sheer unlikeliness of riding a surge of glacial melt toward the ocean. Technically all rivers are the same: whether you're in the Grand Canyon or on the Bronx River, water simply flows downhill and pours over rocks. But every river has its own personality, and I keep combing wild places looking for enough juice to float me downstream.

So it was that a friend and I drove north out of Reykjavik toward the East Glacial River. It was the day after the summer solstice, and along the island's western flank, summer was in green glory: patches of fireweed exploded on the hills, and newly shorn sheep sunned themselves in the grass beside red-roofed farmhouses. After a day of poking around dirt roads, we coasted into a stunning valley of farms hemmed by mountains, with the tiny village of Varmahlid on its floor. We spent the night in log bungalows circling a geothermal soaking pool, watching the sun set down the valley at, according to my clock, 20 minutes past midnight.

Our group assembled the next morning, and 10 of us - a local farmer who was driving, guides from Nepal and Finland and seven paddlers from the United States - rattled up the river valley in a little van, a rubber raft lashed to a trailer behind. The road to the river had lost its snowpack just two weeks before, so we wound out of the valley along a bumpy two-track with puddles in its ruts. Above us a layer of fog was lifting off the green and treeless slopes.

At the river's banks, we pulled dry suits over our necks and waded out into the current. The water numbed my hands, but lapped harmlessly over my feet, which were sealed in the rubber suit. And then we were floating, spinning in the current, glancing off gravel bars. In just a few minutes the walls of a canyon rose up sharply and we were swallowed into a series of steep gorges.

I've been down a lot of rivers but never one quite like this. The water was sky blue and luminescent and otherworldly. Mossy springs dripped from the canyon walls, where an occasional scrappy tree or shrub pushed up between from cracks in the rock. Overhead the cliff walls leaned toward the center, threatening to close up and seal out the narrow strip of sky. We passed gnarled, dark caves from which I was sure an elf might an any moment emerge. At times the gorge narrowed to about 10 feet wide, and the brilliant water surged and swirled in whirlpools as it rushed along, without beaches or slack water. That day, we were alone on the river.

The rapids came quickly and our guide, a 23-year-old Nepalese named Anup, barked out orders - "Back Paddle," "Forward," "Right Back" - as we plunged our paddles into the froth. I thought I heard a trace of Kiwi accent from the New Zealanders who had taught him to raft.

"It's been cold," he said, "and the water's lower than usual."

As if to prove this, on the next falls our boat scraped over a barely concealed rock before dropping off. The canyon continued to narrow, its walls a mix of sheer rock and grassy steps. Anup pointed to a lone sheep perched on a steep piece of grass. The animal had climbed down past a band of rock to feed, but had been unable to scale back out. Our guide said the sheep had been trapped in the pen for almost a month now.

"One of these days I'm going to go rescue it," he said.

The key rapid was the Green Room, a triple falls rated Class IV that plunged into a churning pool of phosphorescent green. We beached the boat in an eddy above the rapid and walked along the rocks to scout, then watched the kayakers make their runs and get tossed upside-down at each drop. After we took our places and pushed off from shore, Anup drove us through the first drop toward the larger falls, a 10-foot falls beside a pyramid of rock blocking half the channel.

"Hit the deck!" he called, and we crouched in the bilge, dropped off the falls, bounced up sideways, stalled in the recirculating water, then surged free. Anup called a turn and we straightened up to run the last drop, splashing to the bottom with the crew intact and the boat upright.

We rounded a bend and came upon our driver and another old farmer hunched over a table at the side of the river. We pulled to the shore and tied off, and at first it was not clear how the two men had gotten there. I saw a steel cable running down a steep and loose gorge. Neither of them young, the men had braved injury and lowered themselves into the gorge armed with thermoses of hot chocolate, two dozen fresh waffles, a jar of homemade rhubarb jam and a tub of hand-whipped cream. They had spread the provisions out over a wooden table that they kept stored at this spot.

We gladly accepted the chocolate and lathered cream over the waffles. The second farmer was the quintessential Scandinavian, with wisps of blond hair over a high forehead, a knit sweater and ditch boots.

"Did you make these waffles yourself?" I asked him. He averted his eyes and smiled a bit nervously. Almost everyone in Iceland speaks English, but older farmers out in the countryside are generally an exception.

"His wife makes them," the driver told me. "But today she was sick and couldn't come."

I asked the farmer if his wife had an easy time climbing down the gorge, adding some pantomime for effect, and he nodded without much enthusiasm. He gave the impression that high-angle waffle delivery into the netherworld was not his idea of a morning well spent.

As the canyon began to open, the rapids diminished, and the claustrophobic confines became less unfriendly. Sun broke through the clouds, and a clear waterfall poured in from above. I hadn't expected to be swimming in the river, but Anup pulled into an eddy with good jumping possibilities. So I, along with a 15-year-old boy, scaled a 20-foot buttress and leapt into the river. The cold water bit my hands and face, but snug in the dry suit, the rest of my body was oddly comfortable as I dog paddled back to shore in the glacial melt.

We drifted into the confluence with the West Glacial River, and from there the walls widened and the current slackened. In half an hour we reached a tiny dock on the bank, beside a homemade trolley track with a sled, onto which we hoisted the raft and kayaks. We climbed a flight of wooden stairs, and just as quickly as we'd dropped into Middle Earth, we emerged into a scene of picture-book pastoral quaintness. Sheep dotted the green hills, and a farmhouse stood neatly on the flats.

Our laconic driver sat at the controls of an old International tractor, which had been converted into a winch to hoist the raft up on the trolley. He pulled a lever, and up came the raft with our guide riding on top. Back in the recognizable world of open skies, you could look right across the top of the gorge without knowing it was there. The earth's churning mystery was hidden beneath the surface, and this green outcropping, surrounded by sea and perched above the carving waters, was a warm and welcoming place.