Cole LeFavour, naturalist and writer
WRITER ON IDAHO WILDERNESS
In spite of her young age, Cole LeFavour served for three years as the Challis national forest’s head lookout before becoming a wilderness ranger. Her previous experience working in Galena Alaska for the Bureau of Land Management gave her experience with radios, fire and communications. Cole’s essay “Listening to Voices in the Wilderness” is about solitude, the wild and her time on Little Soldier lookout in the Frank Church Wilderness. The essay is collected in Jackie Johnson Maughn’s anthology Go Tell it on the Mountain.
Cole was hired by the Middle Fork Ranger District to be the forest’s first Wilderness Ranger. She also worked for the district hydrologist, collecting water samples and documenting lake flora at remote high elevation lakes for the Middle Fork District and the federal Acid Lake Survey. She worked alone, backpacking for 8 days at a time across some of the most remote parts of the lower 48 states. Her experience in the wild is described in her essay “Sometimes it’s Just the Light.” The essay was commissioned by the Idaho Humanities Council and concludes their 2017 Idaho Book of the Year award winning anthology Idaho Wilderness Considered.
Landscape Photographer Mark Lisk commissioned Cole to write an essay and 14 short prose poems for his book on the central Idaho wilderness that surrounded the ranch where her mom and dad operated a restaurant and lodge in the mid 1970s. The newly designated White Cloud Wilderness sat out the back door of the old Ranch. The Sawtooth wilderness loomed over the elementary school where Cole and Cree studied when they were not home schooled on the ranch. Named a 2017 Idaho Book of the Year honorable mention, Lisk and LeFavour’s book Sawtooth – White Cloud is filled with Lisk’s striking photographs and their powerful sense of darkness and light. Together the essays and photos bring depth to the silence, stillness and solitude of the high alpine lakes and peaks of Idaho’s wild.
Cole in the Wild
Cole was born in Colorado but, at age 10, moved to a ranch at the foot of the White Cloud Mountains, now the White Cloud Wilderness, in rural Custer County. Cole’s mother, Patricia LeFavour, worked as an outfitter and guide from the ranch, and her father, Bruce LeFavour continued his career as a chef there, raising pigs, chickens cows, and planting organic gardens to feed guests. Cole spent years working in kitchens for her father, making butter, picking wild watercress, and, with her sister Cree, milking cows and raising geese and rabbits for the restaurant.
In May of 1986, after a stint working for the Bureau of Land management in Alaska, Cole was hired as a fire lookout for the Middle Fork District of what was then the Challis National Forest. After three years on Pinyon Peak and Little Soldier mountains, she began working seasonally as a hydrology technician and fire fighter and became the Challis National Forest’s first Wilderness Ranger, walking the south half of the Frank Church mostly alone for four summer seasons until 1992.
Cole’s experiences alone in the wild fueled her work at the University of California where she studied Anthropology and cognitive science and worked as an editor for the Berkeley Poetry Review. She earned a degree in the Evolution of Cognition in 1987. Later, at the University of Oregon, she studied literature and plant physiology and, in 1990, finished her MFA in fiction writing at University of Montana. While Cole only briefly sought publication of her fiction, her story “Sylvia” was published by the North American Review.
In 1992 Cole began work for the Snake River Alliance in Boise as an community organizer focused on stopping the Owyhee Bombing Range and educating Idahoans about radioactive waste and nuclear weapons issues. Out of her house on 11th Street, a short walk from the Boise Foothills in Boise’s North End, she helped found, wrote for, and, for two years, published the monthly Boise Green Reader magazine. From 1996 to 1998 Cole worked for the Boise Weekly as a writer and staff reporter and received Idaho Press Club Awards for her stories, “Flying at the Hands of Gravity” and her first investigative piece, “Where Have You Gone Joe Albertson?”
Watch for information on upcoming publications.
MORE WRITING:
Notes From the Floor – Senator LeFavour’s legislative BLOG
From the Far Margins – Cole’s 2017 editorial column for the Boise Weekly