Author David Stanley featured at signing event at Bookshelf

The Bookshelf is hosting guest author David Stanley for a presentation and reading from “The Glacier Park Reader” at 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 15.

As the first anthology of key writings about Glacier National Park, “The Glacier Park Reader” is a comprehensive collection ranging from Native American myths to early exploration narratives to contemporary journeys, from investigations of the park’s geology and biology to hair-raising encounters with wild animals, fires and mountain peaks.

Soon after the park was established in 1910, visitors began to arrive, often with pen in hand. They included such well-known authors as mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, historian Agnes C. Laut, fiction writer Dorothy Johnson, humorist Irvin S. Cobb, poet Vachel Lindsay, and artist Maynard Dixon — all featured in the book. Readers will encounter colorful characters who lived in and around the park in its early days, including railroad magnate and conservationist Louis Hill, renegade ranger and poacher Joe Cosley, bootlegger Josephine Doody, and old-time cowboy guide Jim Whilt. Blackfeet and Kalispel myths and legends, descriptions by early explorers such as John Muir and George Bird Grinnell, and full-color reproductions of the illustrated letters of cowboy artist and Glacier resident Charles M. Russell are also included.

Stanley is a former trail-crew laborer in Glacier National Park, where he worked for six summers during the 1960s. In those years, he worked at St. Mary, Red Eagle, Gunsight, Many Glacier, West Glacier and the North Fork. Before he retired from teaching, he was an English professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where he specialized in American literature and folklore and also chaired the college’s Environmental Studies Program. There he taught many classes on environmental literature and writing, focusing on works pertaining to the natural world, wilderness, the preservation movement, and the national parks. He also initiated the National Park Readers series being published by the University of Utah Press, which includes the newly released Glacier Park Reader.

He is now retired from teaching and spends his time hiking, camping and traveling with his wife Nan, as well as continuing with research, writing and editing. He and Nan live in Salt Lake City and — like all former Glacier Park Trail Crew — he returns to Glacier Park often.