Archives West Finding Aid

Stephen Trimble tells stories—in words and photographs—about the land and people of the West. Salt Lake City's Catalyst Magazine recognized Steve in 2013 as one of 100 "catalysts, inspirators—those who have made our Wasatch Front community a more sustainable, compassionate and vibrant place to live." Artists of Utah chose Steve as one of Utah's "15 Most Influential Artists" in 2019. As writer, photographer, and editor, he has published 25 books. A strong voice in regional conservation, he lobbies for the preservation and continuing vitality of western wildlands, especially the Colorado Plateau canyon country and the Great Basin Desert.

Stephen Trimble was born in Denver, Colorado on October 30, 1950. His father, Donald E. Trimble (1916-2011) had grown up in Toppenish, Washington and worked his way through college and graduate school as a hard rock miner at the tail end of the Depression. After serving in the Pacific theater in World War II, Don spent the rest of his career as a research field geologist in Denver for the U.S. Geological Survey. As a child, Steve's family crisscrossed the West while his father kept up a running monologue about the natural and human history revealed by the land passing by the windows of their vehicle. Don always wanted books as birthday presents, and after he read them, Steve eventually read them, too. Steve says he grew up with a "well-nourished sense of wonder."

Trimble's mother, Isabelle Virginia Brinig (1921-2002), grew up in one of only two Jewish families in Livingston, Montana. She transmitted her insatiable curiosity about people and fondness for storytelling to Steve. A brief first marriage brought her to Denver. Her five-year-old son, Michael David (1942-1976), came with her when she married Steve's father in 1948. Mike was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1957; committed to the Colorado State Hospital, he never lived at home again. The tragic arc of Mike's life was ever-present in the family but little talked about. Steve told Mike's story—and his own—in a 2021 memoir, The Mike File: A Story of Grief and Hope. The family accompanied Steve's father for summer field seasons in Oregon and Idaho, but Steve always attended school in Denver. He graduated from high school in 1968 as valedictorian and received a Boettcher Foundation Scholarship, a windfall that allowed him to attend Colorado College. While at CC, Steve became a mountaineer (with the help of two Outward Bound courses), forged lifelong friendships, and began exploring the West on his own. His poor eyesight—absolute lack of depth perception—granted 4-F draft status during the Vietnam War. He took more classes in biology and English than in his major, psychology, and came away with a true liberal arts education. Richard Beidleman, his charismatic ecology professor, helped to make him a naturalist; the first Earth Day in 1970 sparked his environmental activism.

Steve graduated in 1972 with a degree in psychology, Magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. He has been a stubborn generalist ever since—a choice honored by his alma mater, which awarded him a Doctor of Humane Letters in 1990 "for his efforts to make Western landscapes and people understandable and accessible to the public."

Childhood visits to national parks convinced Steve that park rangers were rock stars, and he spent his first summer after college as a Student Conservation Association volunteer on backcountry patrol at Olympic National Park.  He read Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire just two years after the book was published, and two years later was a park ranger himself at Arches National Park. Seasonal ranger/naturalist jobs followed at Great Sand Dunes National Park and Capitol Reef National Park. In these years, national parks hired resident rangers to create the park interpretive booklets, and Steve was lucky to be given his first such assignment by James Carrico, superintendent at Great Sand Dunes. His first book, the 32-page Great Sand Dunes: the shape of the wind (1974) became a benchmark of professionalism in park publishing. Fifty years later, it's still in print. Trimble went on to write and photograph award-winning pieces on national parks from California to North Dakota, mostly for park natural history associations. These included books, essays, posters, cards, a trail guide, a wildlife journal, and a road guide, notably Longs Peak: A Rocky Mountain Chronicle (1984) and five chapters in The Sierra Club Guides to the National Parks (1984). Trimble delivered the Student Conservation Association commencement address in 2007, on the 50th anniversary of SCA and the 35th anniversary of his SCA volunteer experience.

In one winter between seasons in the parks, Steve worked as a technical writer for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. His boss, the biologist John Crawford, more bureaucrat than writer, was nevertheless a fierce editor. "John was the first reader to rip to shreds my wordy and passive writing and ask me to reconstruct my paragraphs with action, concision, and clarity," Steve recalls. "His criticism was a real gift."

In 1976, seeking scholarly grounding for his writing, Trimble returned to school and in 1979 received an M.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona. He lived in Flagstaff for five years, where he was associated with the Museum of Northern Arizona. John F. ("Rick") Stetter, the astute editor and publisher of the Museum Press, mentored Trimble. When Stetter moved on, Trimble replaced him as press director, producing the quarterly magazine Plateau as well as books and reports dealing broadly with the Colorado Plateau.

This experience in publishing (editing, marketing, and design) crystallized Steve's commitment to a career in books and forged connections with the community of western writers, photographers, and researchers, from Wallace Stegner to Barry Lopez to Ann Zwinger. These relationships helped when Trimble edited Words From the Land: Encounters with Natural History Writing (1988), a pioneering anthology that included interviews with 20 master nature writers (tapes and transcripts now in the Marriott archive).

Steve defines the redrock wilderness of southern Utah as his spiritual homeland, and his work often revolves around this landscape. His regional understanding of the Plateau led to: The Bright Edge: A Guide to the National Parks of the Colorado Plateau (1979—his first book with a "spine"). Other canyon country books include Blessed By Light: Visions of the Colorado Plateau (1986) and Lasting Light: 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photography (2006), which won the The National Cowboy Museum's Western Heritage "Wrangler" Award. Trimble worked for The Nature Conservancy's Colorado Plateau Initiative as a consultant from 2011-2012, co-writing a final report submitted to The Packard Foundation. Decades of exploring Capitol Reef National Park made his 2019 anthology, The Capitol Reef Reader, deeply personal.

Trimble left the Museum of Northern Arizona in 1981 to free-lance full-time as a writer and photographer. His first major contract introduced him to Nevada. After fieldwork as primary photographer for the University of Nevada's Great Basin Natural History Series, Trimble wrote the series' flagship volume, The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin (1989). The High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon, awarded Trimble the 1990 Earle A. Chiles Award, for this work promoting "thoughtful management of the natural resources of the Intermountain West." The Sagebrush Ocean also won the Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation. The University of Nevada Press asked Trimble to update and revise The Sagebrush Ocean for a 35th anniversary edition (2025).

In 1983, Trimble moved to northern New Mexico and for five years lived near San Ildefonso Pueblo. He began listening to Southwest Native people—as a narrator rather than an anthropologist with an agenda. A friend and colleague from shared time at the museum in Flagstaff, Robert Breunig, hired Steve to work for The Heard Museum in Phoenix on a multi-image celebration (and book) about contemporary Native people, Our Voices, Our Land (1984). These intense travels through Southwest Indian Country, interviewing and photographing, gave Trimble a new dimension to his work—people, not just natural history. He used the same interview-based approach in Talking With the Clay: The Art of Pueblo Pottery (1987)—now a regional classic, with a 20th Anniversary edition (2007) extending his conversations to a new generation of potters.

Trimble's work in Native America culminated with The People: Indians of the American Southwest (1993). This sweeping introduction to 50 Southwest Indian nations includes quotes from almost 400 individual voices. Library Journal said the book "redefines American ethnography." Steve donated his photographs from Southwest Indian Country to the Arizona State Museum in 2022.

Trimble feels that the opportunity to listen to these members of 50 Native nations over many years was an honor. "They taught me about belonging to the land—our home—and added a spiritual dimension to my relationship with this home landscape." Many of the most important items in his archives are journal notes and interviews from his decade of research for these projects in Native America.

In 1987, Trimble met and married Salt Lake City lawyer and educator Joanne Carol Slotnik and moved from New Mexico to Salt Lake City. Their children, Dory Elizabeth Trimble and Jacob Douglas Trimble, were born in 1988 and 1991, respectively. When Steve and his friend, fellow writer Gary Paul Nabhan, did a joint reading at Utah State University in the early 1990s, they realized they both had chosen pieces about their children. This led to collaborating on a book, The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places (1994), that became a favorite of environmental educators.

Trimble has long been an environmental activist, writing op-eds, donating photographs to conservation organizations, protesting destructive development. In 1995, Steve and his co-collaborator, Terry Tempest Williams, created a landmark effort by writers hoping to sway public policy, Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness. Their idea: distribute a chapbook of passionate essays by notable writers to every member of the U.S. Congress to rally opposition to a destructive proposed wilderness bill.

On March 27, 1996, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) read Trimble's essay "Our Gardens, Our Canyons," from Testimony on the floor of the United States Senate during his plea to save Utah wilderness. He concluded with, "That short piece of writing is so powerful…because it is a timeless statement about how people feel about natural places." Senators Feingold and Bill Bradley (D-NJ) successfully killed the bill in filibuster. President Bill Clinton said that Testimony made a difference in his decision to create Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996.

Milkweed Editions published a trade edition of Testimony (1996). Many collections of writing-as-advocacy have followed the Testimony model, and Steve edited a second anthology distributed to Congress in 2016, Red Rock Testimony: Three Generations of Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah's Public Lands, with essays advocating for Bears Ears National Monument (published as a trade book, Red Rock Stories, in 2017).

As the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics approached, Steve asked the question, "what will it take to get a skier down the mountain in the Olympic downhill race at Snowbasin Ski Area?" He knew that the answer would be intriguing and complicated, enough for a book. He had no idea where this would lead. The result: Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America (2008), his most mature work of literary nonfiction. The book examines the tensions between community and development in the New West through the fierce capitalism of Snowbasin's owner, Earl Holding, and Trimble's new role as a landowner in Torrey, Utah. The book received support from the Utah Humanities Council and Utah Arts Council. It also won the 2008 Utah Book Award.

These book projects and travels led to a thriving stock photography business. Trimble's hundreds of credits include covers for Audubon magazine and INSIGHT travel guides, the interiors of LIFE and Newsweek, Marlboro ads, The Nepal Trekker's Handbook, a U.S. postage stamp, and National Geographic and Smithsonian books. For 20 years, Trimble's travel essays and photographs appeared nationally in newspapers (Universal Press Syndicate). The Marriott archive includes tear sheets of many of these publications.

Stock photo sales supported Steve for decades, buying him time and freedom to work on writing projects that required years of research. When the Internet flooded the world with pictures in the early years of the 21st Century, stock photography disappeared as a profession, and Steve had to reinvent himself.

Teaching became part of that re-invention. In 2008-2009, Trimble received one of two Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellowships at the University of Utah's Tanner Humanities Center. He led a statewide conversation about Stegner's work (www.stegner100.com) and co-taught two classes. Martha Bradley-Evans, Dean of the Honors College, asked Trimble to stay on as an adjunct professor, and he continued teaching until 2018, working with students in undergraduate writing classes and Praxis Lab seminars in the Honors College and teaching the writing component of the Environmental Humanities graduate program.

Trimble's other major contribution to the University came via his participation in the team creating exhibits for the new Utah Museum of Natural History (designed in 2011 by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, New York). In his distinctive voice as a humanities-based naturalist, Steve wrote much of the text for the exhibit labels and interviewed dozens of citizens, whose quotes are scattered throughout the museum.

Trimble's board service includes Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, the Sagebrush Collaborative and Utah Interfaith Power & Light. He participates in collaborative land management committees, lobbies as a citizen locally and nationally, and speaks and writes frequently as a conservation advocate. "The landscape interests me not as a research subject, but as home," he says. "With each project, I extend the boundaries of my home."

Steve and his wife divide their time between Salt Lake City and the redrock country of Torrey, Utah. They spent the 2020-2021 pandemic living full-time in Torrey at the home which figures prominently in Bargaining for Eden.

When Artists of Utah chose Steve as one of Utah's "15 Most Influential Artists" in 2019, what did they mean by "influential?" The artists "who make a difference in Utah." This emphasis on consequence rather than "art" matches Steve's conception of his work. "I don't use the word 'artist' to define myself," he says. "I don't use the word 'art' to describe what I make. It's up to the viewer or reader to decide if my writing or photography is art. My job is to write well, to photograph well, to do my best work as a craftsman striving to capture the spirit of a place or a people."

(Biographical sketch written by Stephen Trimble.)