WRITER ON IDAHO WILDERNESS
In 2016, Cole worked with photographer Mark Lisk to write an essay and 14 short prose poems for Sawtooth – White Cloud, a spectacular coffee table book on the rugged Sawtooth and White Cloud mountain ranges in central Idaho. The ranges jut from the land near the ranch where Cole spent years of childhood and Bruce and Pat LeFavour ran a restaurant and lodge on the Salmon River, hours from the nearest city. Named a 2017 Idaho Library Association Book of the Year honorable mention, Sawtooth – White Cloud is filled with images which celebrate the land and Lisk’s powerful sense of depth, reflection, and light. Together LeFavour’s essays the pages bring to life the silence, stillness, and solitude of the alpine lakes and peaks of Idaho’s remote wild.
In the mid 1980s Cole traveled to Galena, Alaska, fighting fire for the Bureau of Land Management and hitching rides on aircraft into the Arctic, to Barrow, Kotzebue, over frozen sea and across the tundra.
At age 20, Cole LeFavour served for three years living alone at almost 10,000 feet of elevations as the Challis National Forest’s head lookout. In 1988 they became the first wilderness ranger hired by that forest to walk the south half of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Cole’s essay “Listening to Voices in the Wilderness” celebrates solitude, the wild and life on Little Soldier lookout deep in the Frank Church. The essay is collected in Jackie Johnson Maughn’s anthology Go Tell it on the Mountain.
Cole 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. Hiking solo across one of the nation’s largest wilderness ares for 8 to 10 days at a time Cole speaks of being humbled by the vastness, raging streams, and the wildlife whose land the Frank Church encompasses. Cole’s experience in the wild shines in their essay “Sometimes it’s Just the Light.” The essay was commissioned by the Idaho Humanities Council and concludes their 2017 Idaho Library Association Book of the Year award winning anthology Idaho Wilderness Considered.
LOVE & PROTEST
a memoir
Love and Protest is a love story set against the rise of extremism and power of a queer protest movement deep in the rural American West. It is the story of how Idaho’s first openly LGBTQ State Senator spent a decade struggling for queer equality then left the Senate, only to return with hundreds to lead civil disobedience against it.
For ten years, Cole has worked to tell the story of their life of protest, the rise of extremism, and their years serving as a lone queer voice in Idaho’s Capitol. Love and Protest lays bare the conflicts of love, middle age and gender yet is the story of the rise of the Add the Words movement and it’s struggle to include gay and trans people in Idaho’s non-discrimination laws.
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Cole Writer and Activist
Cole was born in Colorado and, at age 10, moved to Robinson Bar Ranch at the foot of the White Cloud Mountains in rural Custer County. Cole’s mother, Patricia LeFavour, worked as an outfitter and guide from the ranch, and Bruce, Cole’s father continued his career as a celebrated chef there, raising pigs, chickens cows, and planting organic gardens to feed guests. Cole spent years working in kitchens for their dad, making butter, picking wild watercress, and, with their sister Cree, milking cows and raising geese and rabbits for the restaurant.
Cole’s experiences alone in the wild fueled their work at the University of California where they studied anthropology and cognitive science and worked as an editor for the Berkeley Poetry Review. Cole earned a degree in the Evolution of Cognition in 1987 and was arrested in October of 1984 with 38 others for blockading the university’s administration building trying to force the university to divest its holdings from South Africa’s racist apartheid government.
Later, at the University of Oregon, they studied literature and plant physiology and, in 1990, finished a Mater of Fine Arts in fiction writing at University of Montana. Cole only briefly sought publication of their short fiction. Their story “Sylvia” was published by the North American Review in 1989.
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. The short art film, Mercury is based on a story from this time where Cole and five hundred others broke into the Nevada Nuclear Test Site to protest the underground detonation of nuclear warheads there.
In 1992 and 1993 of their house on 11th Street, they 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 “Flying at the Hands of Gravity” and an 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