In this period between buckskin and billionaires, novelist Tim Sandlin, who died March 29, spun decades of living into 11 novels. Born in Oklahoma in 1950, Sandlin moved to Jackson Hole to build a life, and once there, he established a writers’ coalition and conference, raised a family and wrote regularly at the back table of Pearl Street Bagels on Pearl Avenue.

He plucked his characters’ eccentricities from the skiers, carpenters, cowboys, waitresses, motel maids and climbing and river guides he lived among. He worked more than 40 entry-level and service jobs, including elk skinner, dishwasher, cook at the Lame Duck restaurant, and copy editor and columnist at the Jackson Hole News.

The New York Times called his last novel, Lit, “slightly unhinged.” It’s about book burning, a coffee shop and a dead preacher. Readers shouldn’t be too bent on solving a murder, author Sarah Weinman wrote. “Spending time with the quirky, unforgettable characters is a lot more important.”

Sandlin fashioned many of his dramatis personae from real souls of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s West. He lived in the Glenwood Arms, an ageing warren of nine apartments originally built for nurses at St. John’s Hospital. Over time, the Arms morphed into a compound contained by the back wall of the Jackson Hole Guide and encompassing Teton Cyclery, plus the headquarters of Jackson Hole Mountain Guides.

Sandlin adopted the slopeside patoisof linguistic shortcuts and nicknames that became kind of a local code. “Every idea Sandlin had, he saw from his window at the Glenwood Arms,” said K.B., former co-owner of the Cyclery. The Arms’ residents included a master glassblower, a virtuoso luthier, artists, musicians, resort workers, and the astrologer and gemologist Janet Planet, whose window flower box fed the neighborhood moose.

From his perch at the Arms, Sandlin could witness the annual departure of the editor of the Jackson Hole Guide, which had a sack-happy publisher. He might also have seen two police actions at the compound, one with guns trained on a knife-wielding resident, who was perhaps the third part of a love triangle. The other raid responded to reports of illicit smoke.

Cyclery mechanic Marty lived nearby in a single-wide with walls covered by sarcastic artwork. Three bike riders—known locally as Hajji, the Emir and Peter—left through one door of the Cyclery in 1980, then came back through the other door six and a half years later. They’d ridden around the world.

Jim Stiles, then editor and publisher of Moab’s Canyon Country Zephyr, spent several desert summer interregnums at The Arms. Moseying to the Town Square one day, he caught sight of “the ugliest man I’d ever seen.” It was the villain of the nightly shootout melodrama, one-eyed Clover the Killer, who never wore an eye patch.

Other compound characters left their mark. Dr. Liu built the first machine to mass-produce Croakies, the neoprene strap that saves your spiffy sunglasses when rolling a kayak. Cyclery co-owner Wendell’s special quesadilla is still on the Merry Piglets menu. Flat Ed got his name after his ’69 VW bus slipped off its jack while he worked underneath.

Today, “The Glenwood” stands at the site of the razed Glenwood Arms. It offers three-bedroom townhomes for $6.5 million. Just across the street there’s the Browse ’n Buy thrift store. Second-hand Ralph Lauren button-downs are now up to $8.

Sandlin’s career tells of a just-gone era, reminding me that imagination and literature enrich us as we learn about the humanity just outside our windows. There’s more about him in the Jackson Hole News&Guide, where they drop the paywall for obituaries to allow the living to keep up with the dead. You can find a collection of his newspaper columns that reflect the valley’s weekly dramas in his book The Pyms.

Angus M. Thuermer Jr. is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a reporter at the nonprofit WyoFile and former editor of the Jackson Hole News. A decades-long Jackson Hole resident, he is also a graduate of Sandlin’s Write Your Novel class.Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about Western issues.

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At the county seat in Jackson, town council member and economic consultant Jonathan Schechter made the “wealthiest” calculation in his “cothrive” newsletter. He’d crunched the latest U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates from 3,244 counties, parishes and boroughs nationwide.

Schechter’s analysis made a small group of us—social critics with more than 100 collective years of Jackson Hole living—consider our new status in what Schechter called “the wealthiest county in the wealthiest country in the history of the world.” Our group of aging ski-bum, bicycle-riding gadflies wondered how the other 99.7% of America lived.

We needed to find out. We would start down the social ladder at a community that struggles to flop into second place. It’s Pitkin County, Colorado, site of the town of Aspen, a village about which we had only vague notions.

We would visit by bicycle over six days, observing Aspenites who would, we thought, represent more of the nation’s hoi polloi. Off we pedaled to cross the Income Gulf of America.

As we cycled up Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley toward Aspen, we ran into the first of the locals. He was a 70-year-old impresario with all the bona fides of a longtime resident—greying braided ponytail, tank top, beater rig and a long resume as a roadie with the Grateful Dead.

He elaborated on his curriculum vitae, which included pre-concert street deals. “Detroit was easy,” he said. “They used to give me $500. That was a lot of money in those days.”

We parried. “We’re from the wealthiest community in the country.”

“Aspen is the most expensive,” he replied.

Pitkin’s annual per-capita income is $255,839, we riposted, as we headed up-valley. How spendy could this place be, we wondered, if it names a top hotel after a Nabisco cracker?

We were somewhere around Basalt on the edge of Aspen when the prices started to kick up. Numbers on the tap-insert-swipe thingies increased alarmingly. Finally arriving in Aspen, we rattled to a stop at a downtown bar, where beer came in $9 pints.

“Martini?” the menu suggested. Coming from the wealthiest county, we were practiced.

“I’ll take two.” Federal data said we could afford it. “And a burger.”

Twenty-five bucks for a Saphire gin cocktail. Thirty bucks for a dead-cow patty so tall a mule would have to stretch its lips to take a bite of the towering brioche bun.

Perhaps we missed some of Schechter’s small print. A few billionaires must have skewed our lofty per-capita income figure. In fact, the median annual Teton County income is just $141,500, but still more than anyone in our peloton was making. And second-hand Ralph Lauren button-downs at Jackson’s Browse ’n’ Buy are up to $7.

We read local papers to dig deeper into the customs and culture of our Colorado subject. The papers said the sheriff was taking a trespasser to court who’d lived in a tree for 10 years. A humanitarian nonprofit was running out of money. The Chamber of Commerce was bragging about the coming tourist season.

The ads in glossy local magazines showed a population of the young, tan, fit and wealthy. Aspenites are polyglots, we realized, naming their stores in Italian —Gucci and Prada. In Jackson Hole we are glad to have Shirt off my Back and Lee’s Tees.

In Aspen, Louis Vuitton, which we deduced was French for “handbag,” offered the Aspen Platform Clog for $1,690. “We’ll take two!” we dreamed.

We went to a liquor store. A sharpie had marked $1,000 on one bottle of wine. We passed that up for a six pack—about what four dirtbags who fell out of the back pages of a 1980s Patagonia catalog could afford.

A ragged sign taped to the counter at the tap-insert-swipe thingie suggested that our communities were much more similar than we thought. We learned the sign had been there a year and a half but was still relevant.

“Jason needs a place to live,” it read.

Angus M. Thuermer Jr. is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a reporter who has lived and worked as a journalist in Jackson, Wyoming for more than four decades.

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Grizzly 399 wasn’t just another wild bear in northwestern Wyoming; she was a window into the secret lives of grizzlies. Over nearly three decades she raised 18 cubs amidst the millions of visitors and residents of Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park.

Her death speaks, as her life did, about the urgent need to better protect these intelligent, rare creatures from roads, human foods, farm animals and trophy hunters.

Grizzly 399’s life captivated millions of people. Attentive and patient, she worked hard to make sure her cubs had sufficient food and warm dens and were protected from male bears and other dangers.

The doings of her many families, the first in 2004 and the last in 2023, made her legendary, like the time she and her four cubs feasted on serviceberries right next to a road, gently picking berries among the leaves.

There was also the time she crossed the Snake River with four cubs following like the tail of a kite, while hundreds of people gathered to witness. These intimate glimpses inspired countless numbers of visitors to Wyoming’s wilderness and gave them a connection with the famous bear and her broods.

Grizzly 399 had always been careful around roads. She often waited at a highway’s edge until a photographer stopped traffic or she heard no vehicles coming her way. She frequently navigated busy highways and the streets around Jackson Hole.

In the end it was not enough.

Vehicle collisions, a leading cause of wildlife deaths, are just one more threat for grizzly bears. This year alone, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has seen record numbers of mortalities. By October 2024, at least 68 grizzlies had died—most killed because they came near humans or were shot by hunters.

With their habitats shrinking, their foods vanishing and more roads fragmenting their territories, grizzlies have become marooned on geographic islands for their survival. Their lands have been increasingly hemmed in by developments, energy projects and deadly highways.

Once 50,000 strong, fewer than 2,000 grizzly bears now survive in the Lower 48 states. Coexisting with them means addressing preventable conflicts by bear-proofing human-food sources or safeguarding livestock. Many of Grizzly 399’s cubs were killed by humans. Perhaps half of them survived to adulthood.

One Jackson Hole resident, for example, deliberately and defiantly fed them, despite the dangers of getting bears accustomed to human-provided meals. Teton County has since introduced tougher enforcement measures, including requiring bear-resistant garbage cans with self-locking mechanisms. The Wyoming Department of Game and Fish and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also required residents of Teton County to make garbage and bird feeders inaccessible to keep Grizzly 399 and her cubs safe.

One takeaway is that grizzly bears can be managed with compassion. This needs to be the norm, not the exception, and we need to shift practices to prioritize coexistence over killing.

In bear country, people can make human foods unavailable, ranchers can employ electric fencing and remove cattle and sheep carcasses, and hunters can carry bear spray and accurately identify their targets before shooting.

Grizzly 399’s last surviving cub, Spirit, has not been seen since its mother’s death. Nearly two years old, the cub was last reported as healthy and may have a chance at survival. Its future—indeed, the future of all grizzlies—depends on people’s willingness to change behaviors.

It is especially important that we resist calls to strip grizzly bears of their Endangered Species Act protections, certainly until grizzlies are truly recovered, with genetically diverse and connected populations across secure habitats.

This means creating safe passages, including highway crossings, between their populations. We must also hold the line against trophy hunting. Removing Endangered Species Act protections, which are now under attack in the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and elsewhere, could set back years of conservation work.

With Grizzly 399’s passing, it feels as though something is missing in the Tetons—something vivid and wild that moved us. Her legacy calls us to act, to create a future in which grizzly bears and people live together in safety.

The writers are contributors to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. Wendy Keefover works for the Humane Society of the United States; Kristin Combs is executive director of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates.

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