New book captures "What is Wild"

SEELEY LAKE - Carleen Gonder said if she ever writes a memoir, she wants to include a chapter about her time as the crazy lady up Bird Creek.  She commandeered the nickname while living in a small cabin in the wilderness of the Ninemile valley. The cabin had no running water or electricity and Gonder and her son relied on kerosene lamps, a wood-burning stove and a nearby river to fetch water. 

Because they were roughly a mile and a half from any dirt or paved road, her son would hike and cross country ski to the bus stop. The first time she attended one of his school functions, her rancher neighbors referred to her as "that crazy lady who lives up Bird Crick." 

"If I do write my life story, that's going to be one of the chapters about that crazy lady from Bird Crick," Gonder said. "In fact, I've already written several pages about that." 

While Gonder has yet to write and publish her memoir, she has self-published her first book "What is Wild." The short book includes essays she's written throughout the year and photographs from her many hikes in the wilderness around Seeley Lake and Ovando with her Karelian Bear Dog named Arrow. 

After Arrow died in June, she decided it was time to put her work together and publish "What is Wild." She dedicated the book to Arrow. 

"I had bits and pieces together but after her death, that really just kicked me into high gear and really got this done," Gonder said. 

The book includes several different sections with essays and photos of areas of wilderness and recreational areas, including the Blackfoot River and the Swan Range.  The cover features a photo of grizzly bear tracks near Boy Scout Road. As someone who has worked in bear management in Yellowstone National Park, Gonder said she harbors an interest in bears, even after shooting beanbags at their butts for years. 

"Grizzlies are one of my primary wildlife interests and always have been," Gonder said. 

Gonder said she's always lived close to nature. Growing up on a ranch on the Nevada side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Gonder spent a lot of her childhood riding horses in wild country. Eventually, she attended the University of Nevada. After graduating with her bachelor's in wildlife biology, Gonder moved up to Montana to work as a wildland firefighter for the US Forest Service for 10 years. 

After she attended graduate school at the University of Montana, she went on to work several government jobs with Idaho Fish and Game, Yellowstone and Glacier National Park and U.S. Fish and Wildlife. When Gonder became what she called an "Old Lady" she conducted graduate research to benefit wildlife law enforcement crime scene investigators and directed a wildlife officer program named Wildlife Field Forensics. 

During her career, she developed a keen interest in photography after buying her first camera, an old single lens reflex in the early 1970's. 

"I used to drive up to Lake Tahoe, sometimes on the Nevada side and sometimes on the California side, when the sun was rising," Gonder said. "It was nice, kind of isolated with a camera, taking pictures of the sunrise." 

While she kept journals at most at her jobs, she said she did not get into publishing her writing until a few years ago, when she was asked to contribute to the Seeley Swan Pathfinder newspaper's Place for All column. She said a lot of her essays come from her work for the Pathfinder. 

"I've always had an interest in writing," Gonder said, "At the university I had technical, biological writing that I put into layman language so anybody could understand it." 

She said out of all the essays in her book, she finds the section "Pockets Full of Wild" the most meaningful. In the book, she explains how as more and more humans squeeze into pockets of wild, wildlife-human conflict increases. Some of this is due to the changing social landscape, including fewer hunters, the massive growth of recreation and "folks loving the wild to death." 

"As I was growing up I always thought it to be pockets of humans surrounded by wild," she said. "Now it's pockets of wild surrounded by humans." 

Gonder hopes "What is Wild" will shine some light on habitat fragmentation, along with providing resources for people living and recreating in the Clearwater and the Blackfoot River areas of Montana. In the Appendix, she includes a list of these resources, including the Blackfoot Challenge, the Clearwater Resource Council, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Region 2, USFS and Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. 

Gonder said she currently has 80 copies of "What is Wild" to sell, with 30 people already interested to buy. There are also 20 copies online at Riverfeet Press, a company based in Livingston that helped her print her book. 

Gonder said she hopes to publish more books, especially because she's now hiking with her recently adopted Karelian Bear Dog named Suvi. 

"People continually tell me, you got to write a book," Gonder said. "I think this is a start." 

Images in "What is Wild" are available as notecards in both regular invitation sizes and panorama. To order notecards and copies of "What is Wild" contact Gonder at fcgonder@gmail.com.