Stephen Trimble

courtesy Stephen Trimble

Stephen Trimble’s writing and photography career grew from roaming the West with his geologist father, working as a park ranger in Utah and Colorado, studying at Colorado College and the University of Arizona, and serving as editor and publisher of the Museum of Northern Arizona Press. Trimble has published twenty-five award-winning books over nearly fifty years of paying attention to the landscapes and peoples of the Desert West. He has taught writing at the University of Utah, where he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. 

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Awards: The Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation; The National Cowboy Museum’s Western Heritage “Wrangler” Award; Utah Book Award; New Mexico Book Award; Southwest Books of the Year; Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Colorado College

Books:

The Sagebrush Ocean

35th Anniversary Edition
Nature / Environment
University of Nevada Press
July 2026
ISBN 9781647791575
paperback, 0 pages

New paperback edition coming Spring 2025! Noted writer and photographer Stephen Trimble mixes eloquent accounts of personal experiences with clear explication of natural history. His photographs capture some of the most spectacular but least-known scenery in the western states. The Great Basin Desert sweeps from the Sierra to the Rockies, from the Snake River Plain to the Mojave Desert. "Biogeography" would be one way to sum up Trimble's focus on the land: what lives where, and why. He introduces concepts of desert ecology and discusses living communities of animals and plants that band Great Basin mountains--from the exhilarating emptiness of dry lake-beds to alpine regions at the summits of the 13,000-foot Basin ranges. This is the best general introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin, a place where "the desert almost seems to mirror the sky in size," where mountains hold "ravens, bristlecone pines, winter stillness--and unseen, but satisfying, the possibility of bighorn sheep." Trimble's photographs come from the backcountry of this rugged land, from months of exploring and hiking the Great Basin wilderness in all seasons; and his well-chosen words come from a rare intimacy with the West. More/less

The Capitol Reef Reader

Nature / Environment
National Park Readers
January 2019
ISBN 9781607816829
Paperback, 448 pages

For 12,000 years, people have left a rich record of their experiences in Utah's Capitol Reef National Park. In The Capitol Reef Reader, award-winning author and photographer Stephen Trimble collects the best of this writing--160 years worth of words that capture the spirit of the park and its surrounding landscape in personal narratives, philosophical riffs, and historic and scientific records. The volume features nearly fifty writers who have anchored their attention and imagination in Utah's least-known national park. The bedrock elders of Colorado Plateau literature are here (Clarence Dutton, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey), as are generations of writers who love this land (including Ellen Meloy, Craig Childs, Charles Bowden, Renny Russell, Ann Zwinger, Gary Ferguson, and Rose Houk). Their pieces are a pleasure to read and each reveals a facet of Capitol Reef's story, creating a gem of a volume. Editor Stephen Trimble guides and orients with commentary and context. A visual survey of the park in almost 100 photographs adds another layer to our understanding of this place. Historic photos, pictures from Trimble's forty-five years of hiking the park, as well as images from master visual artists who have worked in Capitol Reef are included. No other book captures the essence of Capitol Reef like this one. Part of the National Park Reader series, edited by Lance Newman and David Stanley More/less