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    Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter in the Bitterroot Wilderness
    Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter in the Bitterroot Wilderness
    Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter in the Bitterroot Wilderness
    Audiobook7 hours

    Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter in the Bitterroot Wilderness

    Written by Pete Fromm

    Narrated by Patrick Lawlor

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award, Indian Creek Chronicles is Pete Fromm's account of seven winter months spent alone in a tent in Idaho guarding salmon eggs and coming face to face with the blunt realities of life as a contemporary mountain man. A gripping story of adventure and a modern-day Walden, this contemporary classic established Fromm as one of the West's premier voices.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 28, 2017
    ISBN9781515989974
    Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter in the Bitterroot Wilderness
    Author

    Pete Fromm

    PETE FROMM is a five time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for his novels If Not For This, As Cool as I Am, and How All This Started, his story collection Dry Rain, and the memoir Indian Creek Chronicles. The film of As Cool as I Am was released in 2013. He is also the author of several other story collections and has published over two hundred stories in magazines. He is on the faculty of Oregon’s Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA Program and lives in Montana. His second memoir The Names of the Stars: A Life in the Wilds was named an Honor Book in the 2016 Montana Book Awards.

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    Reviews for Indian Creek Chronicles

    4/5

    103 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is an excellent true story of Fromm taking a year off college to spend the long Idaho winter alone, guarding salmon eggs. Mostly alone, although a lot of the narrative is actually about lots of visits from snowmobiling hunters, and others. It's pretty fascinating, and crazy. Lots of good stories, with some narrative arc. I think there's a lot that isn't on the page because he didn't want to wrestle with it. About his family, his dog, the environment… Some restraint is good, and thought provoking. But if Fromm had pushed himself a little bit harder, this could have been great.
    • 4/5
      This autobiographical tale is a bit like Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, except unlike Chris McCandless's case, this author clearly knew up front how much he didn't know. Plus, I would argue that going into this wilderness adventure, the author was nowhere near as solitary a personality as McCandless was. It also makes a difference in reading this that it is in the first-person, while Krakauer was obviously reporting on another person. But imagine if Chris McCandless had survived and later became a gifted writer and told his tale of his adventures. This may be something like that writing. Certainly, there are personality, family, friend, job differences that give a different slant, but I don't think there would be much difference on how a person reacts to living such an isolated life for a long time. It is that reaction that is at the very heart of this book. I encourage anyone wanting to read this book to get a copy that has an Afterword by the author. It does a fine job of explaining, extending, and enhancing the book, giving an otherwise fine book even more resonance.
    • 1/5
      Gauging by the author's early responses to shooting the head off a grousefollowed by the horrible death of a terrified raccoon in his trap,there was an expectation that Pete Fromm would somehow teach us how to survivea Montana "Winter Alone in the Wilderness" without glorifying hunting.Alas, not only does the book turn out to be a great story for hunters,with a stomach-wrenching horrendous killing of a mountain lion,but the author spends very little time alone.Not only that but Boone, the dog who faithfully accompanied him on this trek,is simply given away to people Fromm does not know anything about, nor does he even bother to get their names and address to contact them to learnanything about the dog's fate.Mostly he exists in his tent feeling sorry for himself, telling us little about his daily life with Boone (does he ever train him or just "cuff"?),and trying to get away from the jobof caring for salmon that he signed on for...so he can get drunker and drunker.Geez. Very disappointing and misleading.
    • 4/5
      What an adventure! Enjoyed this story of how a young college boy ended up in alone in the Bitterroot Wilderness for 7 months. Will be reading more of Fromm's work - just heard that there is a "sequel" to this book!
    • 1/5
      A very disappointing book. A tale (and seemingly, a tall one), of a young, immature, naïve boy who decides college is too difficult, and on a whim, takes a position with Idaho Fish and Game. His job is to spend a winter alone in the wilderness, protecting a bed of salmon eggs. Never mind that the author has absolutely no experience in anything other than swimming and heavy drinking. He has no clue of how to survive in the wild, other than having read a few “old mountain man” books. Never cut wood, never camped in the cold, never even cooked before. Despite being entrusted by Fish and Game, he manages to break almost every game law in the book with his trusty homemade black powder rifle, including poaching a moose, grouse, squirrels, raccoons, etc. He single-handedly kills a bobcat with a stick, and chases after a wounded bear, armed with only a hatchet. A more foolhardy person would be difficult to find. And, to top it all off, at the end of his “adventure”, he abandons, without a second glance, his dog, the only true friend he had to see him through the winter.
      It is said that God watches over and protects fools. Even He must have had his hands full with this character.
    • 5/5
      Pete Fromm was a 20-year-old college student in 1978 enamoured with the idea of being a modern day mountain man when he made a spur of the moment decision to spend the winter alone in the wilderness. A classmate at the University of Montana had just backed out of a job with Idaho Fish and Game to babysit two and a half million salmon eggs in Indian Creek and he made what he referred to as one of a “series of completely unconsidered decisions” that led to him spending October through May in a tent in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. As an example of how unprepared he was, when the wardens were getting ready to leave him at the site, they had this exchange: ”You’ll need about seven cords of firewood. Concentrate on that. You’ll have to get it all in before the snow grounds your truck.” Though I didn’t want to ask, it seemed important. “What’s a cord?”Luckily, Fromm is resourceful and even though he’s only brought six books(!) with him, they’re how-to books on outdoor survival. He teaches himself to cook the supplies he’s brought in, and eventually to trap and hunt, but his biggest challenge is loneliness and how to fill up all the time he has on his hands. Surprisingly, he’s not as alone as I expected. His dog is with him, the wardens come in monthly with his mail, his college buddies visit twice, and there are a good number of hunters who come through looking for elk, mountain lions and bears.The blurb on the back of the book refers to it as a “modern-day Walden” but I don’t think that’s apt. He’s more of a doer and an observer than a thinker. Here’s a description of what he sees on one of his hikes:“At one exposed bend of the river, where the wind had cleared the ice of all but the newest snow, I saw the trail of an elk that had run down the mountain and crossed the river. Its tracks showed how it leaped the last bit of riverbank, landing on what looked exactly like more snow. But on the ice, all hell had broken loose. The elk's front feet had shot to the left, while his back legs had done the splits. He held on for what must have been a long time, his feet making wild looping patterns on the ice, but then the snow had been wiped clean by the big broad side of the elk spinning over the ice.I laughed, translating what must have occurred, and I wished I'd been just a few minutes earlier, that I could have seen the mighty, majestic elk take such a pratfall. Walking on though, I thought of what a fragile thread held everything together out here. If the elk had broken something, dislocated a hip (which looked more probable than not), it would have been all over. There would have been nothing left but a ring of dirty snow and a pile of stomach grass centered in a haze of coyote tracks."That’s basically the extent of the discussion on the fragility of life in the wilderness. But although this book wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, it grew on me. Fromm is a good writer and his descriptions of his adventures were fascinating at times. Even though I spent most of the book thinking I would never have done what he did, I came to respect him. He includes an afterword that catches the reader up on the next 20 years of his life and some more “unconsidered decisions” that led him to become a writer. I, for one, am glad he did and I’ll be looking for more of his books.
    • 5/5
      Très beau. Les aventures contemplatives (mais pas que) d'un jeune homme fasciné par les aventuriers de la nature, sept mois durant seul dans la neige et la beauté. Sincérité, innocence, courage : il n'est pas un héros mais nous apparaît comme tel. L'histoire est aussi celle d'une initiation à l'âge adulte, et le retour à Indian Creek, décrit dans la postface, m'a ému, comme la dernière phrase de "Youth" de Conrad : "(...) our faces, lined, wrinkled; our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone - has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash - together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions."
    • 5/5
      I alternated between liking and disliking this book but in the end, I could not put it down and read it quite quickly. I seem to be on a fix for reading people living alone in wilderness situations. This book was appealing because it was well-written, and it was interesting to watch the transformation of Fromm who, at first, had quite an idealistic view of a "mountain man" lifestyle. After taking a job with Fish and Wildlife (I think) in Idaho, he quickly found out it's not ideal at all. I disliked the book at times because he talks about hunting and killing a lot, very mercilessly at times, and I can't take that stuff. There is a section where he steps on a raccoon to crush its ribs and I just can't handle that. What was the point? Couldn't he have let it go? I grew to respect Fromm a little bit, though, because at least it seemed like he used all the parts of everything he killed, even learning how to tan the hide. Seems like his winter at Indian Creek was pretty pointless, overall, considering so few of the salmon actually made it to adulthood. I liked reading the book because I couldn't imagine spending a winter in such a brutal place, yet it is an attractive thought. Perhaps I am being idealistic. At any rate, a fun, quick read.
    • 4/5
      Midway through his college career as a wildlife biology major at the University of Montana, Pete Fromm's life takes a little detour. Fueled by his love of exploring nature solo, and most of all, by his college roommate's books full of romanticized feats of mountain men, Fromm makes a spur of the moment decision to apply for a job guarding salmon eggs. For seven months. In an isolated wilderness. In the dead of winter. More than anything, Pete Fromm wanted some mountain man stories of his own to tell, and getting paid to guard a couple million salmon eggs seemed just the way to do it. So, after one thoughtless phone call, endless supply shopping, and a few too many booze-fueled going away parties, incredibly amateur mountain man Fromm found himself preparing for months of total isolation with nary a clue as to what surviving alone in the wilderness would entail. It's nearly mind-blowing that a tale that has at its core the unbelievable isolation and boredom of an Idaho wilderness winter would be so captivating a read. Fromm's stories and his descriptions of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness capture the rawness and cruel beauty of its winter that oft goes unobserved. With revealing descriptions of the scenery accompanied by powerful tales of wildlife surviving a hostile environment where survival seems impossible, Fromm reveals the dangerous magnificence of this wintry landscape in a way that few, if any, others ever could. Fromm himself is a sympathetic narrator as he seems to get on-the-job training in "mountain manhood." We go along with him as he learns hard lessons about what works and what doesn't, what it looks and feels like to hunt for food for survival, and, of course, that being a mountain man isn't nearly as fantastic as it seems in all the books, not to mention that he probably should have brought a few more than six books along when he agreed to spend 7 months virtually alone. Fromm's constant inner battle between loving and owning his untouched wilderness and his desperate desire to get out and see another human face is all too convincing. When spring comes and people start entering the place he has come to think of his own, it feels, even to us, like an invasion of sorts. Foolish though his endeavor may have seemed at the outset, in the end, Fromm certainly emerged with the great mountain man stories he was looking for and much more.
    • 5/5
      This is a really good well written book. Beautiful scenery. An adventure comparable to Mowat's NEVER CRY WOLF. Maybe even Krakauer's INTO THE WILD (but this one is much more upbeat; the college kid doesn't get killed).