The Avalanche

(This is the fourth story in an album I am building. For more information please go to the website, homebrave.com.)

The Wasatch Mountains, just east of Salt Lake City, are known for having the best snow in the world for powder skiing. Powder is the kind of snow that flies over your head as you ski through it. The snow flakes are big and dry—they take up space but weigh almost nothing, so skiing through them can feel like flying.

When we were kids we learned to ski by riding the lifts at the resorts, but after high school, in our twenties, we realized we didn’t need the chair lifts—we could hike up and ski down the mountain, pretty much any mountain, on cross-country skis. We had the whole Wasatch range to ourselves.

This was a beautiful, but dangerous thing. We knew how to ski, very well, but we were just learning about the mountains, and what can happen in the mountains.

One day in April, 1979, seven young men went backcountry skiing in Big Cottonwood Canyon. Late in the day, after hiking up and skiing multiple shots, one of the slopes avalanched and swept away three of the skiers. One ended up on top of the debris, freaked out but uninjured. Another was buried for 20 minutes, but was dug out by his friends. The third, Greg McIntyre, was buried and didn’t make it out alive.

Years later, I interviewed five of the six survivors, asking them to tell me the story from beginning to end.

The Avalanche aired on “All Things Considered” in the winter of 1987.

Thanks to Dwight Butler, Dave Carter, Chris Larson, Alan Murphy and Larry Olsen.

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

The West Desert

(This is the third story in an album I am building. For more information, please go to the website homebrave.com.)

I think of this story as a cultural history of the Great Salt Lake Desert, the big landscape just west of my home in Salt Lake City. It used to be covered by an inland sea the size of Lake Michigan, but the climate changed and the water evaporated, leaving only salt.

The introduction is from “Roughing It,” by Mark Twain. He crossed this desert in a stagecoach in 1861.

The West Desert, edited by Art Silverman and Larry Massett, was broadcast in 1989 on “The Wild Room,” a weekly show out of WBEZ in Chicago, hosted by Gary Covino and Ira Glass.

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide if they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go to the website homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

The Neighborhood

(This is the second story in an album I am building. For more information, please go to homebrave.com.)

The Neighborhood was inspired by Suburbia, a photo-essay book by Bill Owens. The photos are of Owens’ neighbors in a suburb of Livermore, California, during the late sixties and early seventies. They pose in their garages, bedrooms, backyards… with their stuff— their tools and toys, the accoutrements of suburban lifestyle. With each photo there is a short quote from the person in the photo. This combination, the photo with the quote, is somewhat magical. It’s like you can hear the people talking, like you are there, in the moment.

The story aired in 1988 on the NPR program “Soundprint” (now defunct).

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go to homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

Running After Antelope

(This is the first story in a larger album I’m building. For more information please go to the website homebrave.com.)

Forty years ago, 1985, I was sitting in Art Silverman’s office at NPR in Washington, D.C. Art was a producer for All Things Considered. I was an independent producer, mainly for Weekend All Things Considered. We were working on something, I don’t remember what, and NPR Science Editor Anne Gudenkauf came by to talk to Art.

“Hey, tell Anne your idea for a science story,” Art said to me.

So I said, “My brother, Dave, is a graduate student in vertebrate morphology at the University of Utah, and he has a theory that human beings evolved as endurance predators, able to hunt without weapons by chasing large mammals until they collapse from heat exhaustion. This summer we’re going to test his theory by trying to run down a pronghorn antelope in Wyoming.”

I thought it was a good pitch, but as I spoke I saw Gudenkauf’s eyes cross and when I was done she turned and walked out of Art’s office without comment. It seemed I had insulted her intelligence.

A year later, Running After Antelope aired on All Things Considered and NPR started using it in training sessions as an example for how to produce a science story. Many people scoffed at my brother’s theory, back in the beginning, but now it’s become an accepted theory of human evolution.

Larry Massett edited the story and wrote the introduction, read by Noah Adams.

The music comes from Dire Straits (Why Worry) and Talking Heads (Television Man).

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go to homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.