Bozeman Magazine

At twenty years old, Pete Fromm heard of a job babysitting salmon eggs, seven winter months alone in a tent in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Leaping at this chance to be a mountain man, with no experience in the wilds, he left the world. Thirteen years later, he published his beloved memoir of the winter, Indian Creek Chronicles.

Twenty-five years later, he was asked to return to the wilderness to babysit more fish eggs. But no longer a footloose twenty year old, at forty-five, he was the father of two young sons. He left again, alone, straight into the heart of Montana's Bob Marshall wilderness, walking a daily ten mile loop to his fish eggs through deer and elk and the highest density of grizzly bears in the lower 48 states.

The Names of the Stars is not only a story of wilderness and bears but also a trek through a life lived at its edges, showing how an impulsive kid transformed into a father without losing his love for the wilds. From loon calls echoing across Northwood lakes to the grim realities of life guarding in the Nevada desert, through the isolation of Indian Creek and years spent running the Snake and Rio Grande as a river ranger, Pete seeks out the source of this passion for wilderness, as well as explores fatherhood and mortality and all the costs and risks and rewards of life lived on its own terms.

Pete Fromm is a five-time winner of the PNBA Award for his novels If Not for This, As Cool as I Am, How All this Started, Dry Rain, and the memoir Indian Creek Chronicles. The film of As Cool as I Am, starring Claire Daines, James Mardsen, and Sarah Bolger was released in 2013. He is the author of four 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.