"Living in a Hostile Environment" by Marjane Ambler

For nine years, Marjane Ambler and Terry Wehrman lived near the north shore of Yellowstone Lake year round. While many Westerners dream of being able to live there, Marjane and Terry soon realized that Yellowstone has teeth. Mistakes matter.

Ambler will be giving a talk and reading from her book, Yellowstone Has Teeth, at the Pioneer Museum in Lander June 25, at 7 p.m.

The program is part of the Wyoming Community Bank Speakers Series at the museum. The series will feature speakers and programs on the area’s culture and history at all three county museums throughout the year. The programs are free and open to the public.

The book focuses on the isolated community of a dozen varied people – single men and women, married couples, families with small children – flung together by their jobs and surrounded by snow, wilderness, and wildlife. When they needed a gallon of milk or yearned for a restaurant meal, they had to snowmobile over the avalanche-prone Sylvan Pass to get to the East Entrance.

Her PowerPoint presentation (Forging Community in a Hostile Environment) explores what they learned from that experience. The book was published in 2013 by Riverbend Publishing and is now in its third printing.

Ambler moved to Lander in 1974 to work for the High Country News. In 1984, she followed her husband to his job in Yellowstone National Park where they lived until 1993. In 1990, the University Press of Kansas published her first book, Breaking the Iron Bonds: Indian Control of Energy Development. From 1995 until 2006, she served as the editor of Tribal College Journal (a national quarterly magazine).The couple now lives in Atlantic City, Wyoming. 

The next event at the Lander Museum will be on July 11 and will be a historic trek to the petroglyphs at Sinks Canyon. For more information call the museum and 307-332-3373, on Facebook at: Pioneer Museum Lander Wyoming