Susan Marsh

I am a naturalist, lover of wild country, artist and writer. I retired from the U.S. Forest Service in 2010 after thirty years working as a planner, landscape architect and wild land steward. Drawn to the wild from an early age, animals were my primary conduit to the beauty and mystery of forests and mountains.

I have always associated animals with wilderness, even if the wild was only a 5-acre patch of second-growth forest, where I grew up. As a child when I looked out the window and saw quail or a fox I knew all was right with the world—there was still a place for these creatures. Not too many years later, the quail and foxes were gone.

This loss of the wild and affinity for animals has driven my lifelong path. When I was in high school I planned a career in marine biology. The ocean seemed to ask for my help and I knew it had to be saved. But I balked when the biology teacher wanted me to collect a moon snail off the beach and put it in a jar of formaldehyde. ‘You have to be hard-nosed if you’re going to be a scientist,’ he told me. That was the end of my career as a biologist. I chose geology for an undergraduate degree - you didn't have to kill things.

Books include:

1999 Beyond the Tetons, 230-page book, co-author. Guide to hiking trails and human/natural history. White Willow Publishing. In 2009 the book was expanded and revised to 314 pages for a second printing.

2001 Stories of the Wild, 264-page anthology. I wrote and received a grant to prepare this book which included previously unpublished work by members of the Murie family as well as contemporary authors. I was the primary editor and contributed work for the book. The Murie Center.

2012 Targhee Trails—expanded and revised. 320-page guide to hiking trails and human/natural history. Co-author, with Rebecca Woods. White Willow Publishing.

2013 The Wild Wyoming Range. Co-author/editor with Ronald Chilcote. 120-page photography coffee-table book with essays on a conservation theme. Laguna Wilderness Press.

Forthcoming in 2013 and 2014: War Creek - a novel (MP Publishing, fall 2013) and A Hunger for High Cuntry - memoir (Oregon State University Press, 2014)