The second edition of Thomas Turiano’s ‘Select Peaks of Greater Yellowstone’ is an update on the long out of print first edition, featuring an in-depth history of the region from a mountaineer’s perspective.
The second edition of Thomas Turiano’s ‘Select Peaks of Greater Yellowstone’ is an update on the long out of print first edition, featuring an in-depth history of the region from a mountaineer’s perspective.
The second edition of Thomas Turiano’s ‘Select Peaks of Greater Yellowstone’ is an update on the long out of print first edition, featuring an in-depth history of the region from a mountaineer’s perspective.
The first time I learned about “Select Peaks of Greater Yellowstone” was back in the spring of 2015, when some friends and I were looking at some ski mountaineering lines.
The book detailed 107 mountain peaks and skiing and mountaineering routes that dot some 13 ranges in the area, ranging from the Madisons just south of Bozeman to the Gros Ventre and Wind River mountains down in Wyoming. But what captured my imagination was less the routes and more the history contained in the pages. The author, Thomas Turiano, detailed first recorded ascents and descents, geology and early pioneers. Some came in the early 1900s but some around southwest Montana were only in the 1980s.
After leafing through the sections on the Beartooths, waffling between some lines in the southern and northern Madisons, we settled on a nearby line that had first been skied relatively recently: the Y couloir off Black Mountain in the North Absaorkas.
The second edition of Thomas Turiano’s ‘Select Peaks of Greater Yellowstone’ is an update on the long out of print first edition, featuring an in-depth history of the region from a mountaineer’s perspective.
Its description in “Select Peaks” showed the route as aesthetically pleasing, steep and easily doable in a day, seeing as how it’s a bit above Pine Creek Lake just south of Livingston. For me, the route held a bit of extra meaning thanks for Turiano’s historical research. Extreme skiing pioneer Doug Coombs, an early idol of mine, made the first descent in 1981. Skiing the line offered a way to connect with Coombs, which was otherwise impossible since he died in 2006 while skiing in France.
Every so often I’d look into buying my own copy of the book in the years since, but it had gone out of print in the mid-2000s and used copies went for hundreds of dollars.
Thankfully — at least for those curious to learn more about and explore nearby mountains — this month Turiano published a second edition of “Select Peaks,” 20 years after it first appeared. The revised and expanded 630-page second edition includes 16 new color maps and new deep dives into the history of mountain exploration in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
“I’ve always kind of wanted to go a little deeper,” Turiano said in a phone interview. “Like, to be able to experience this place and imagine what it was like for the pioneers who were here... it’s kind of trying to reconnect that feeling of the old days.”
The new edition also corrects a handful of mistakes from the initial version, Turiano said. For example, in the first edition he called the Absaroka mountains that line the eastern edge of the Paradise Valley the Western Beartooths. The new book lists them as the “North Absarokas,” which Turiano decided upon after researching primary documents around early explorations and surveys of the area.
“I actually prefer the name Beartooths for that mountain range, but here are the facts. It’s actually officially Absaroka and here’s why it evolved into North Absaroka,” Turiano explained, referring to the six-page section titled, “Deeper Dive: Story of the North Absaroka Placename.”
Thomas Turiano in Shoal Creek in the Gros Ventre Mountains.
Courtesy of Thomas Turiano
Beyond corrections to place names and some route information, Turiano had another reason to pen a new version of “Select Peaks” — climbing all of the book’s 107 peaks. When the initial version came out in 2003, he had only scaled 85 of them.
“I wanted to have some impetus to climb the remaining 22 peaks,” he said. “Having a revision out there dangling in front of me was sort of like, OK, that’s kind of motivating me to do these peaks.”
And Turiano did achieve that goal, notching the final one — Mount Helen in the Wind River Range — in August, just before he finished the revision.
Copies of the new “Select Peaks of Greater Yellowstone: A Mountaineering History & Guide” arrived at Turiano’s Wyoming home last week and he’s started shipping out pre-orders already. The book should be available at bookstores in Bozeman, Livingston, Billings and other locations around the region this week. People can also order a copy on the author’s website.
He said that the book seems to sell best in southwest Montana, even better than the Jackson Hole area where people seem to to skip over guidebooks that aren’t centered around the Tetons.
“I just feel like Montanans really have a great connection to the mountains up there and they appreciate this historical information,” Turiano said.
Alex Lennon visits a low tower on Lizard Head Peak, Turiano's second to last Select Peak.
Courtesy of Thomas Turiano
Turiano said that he’s mulled over perhaps writing a third edition of “Select Peaks,” but with all different peaks. He’s even started making a list of them, ones that aren’t necessarily as high as those covered in the first two editions but more rugged or a different type of challenge — there’s never a shortage of mountains to explore or write about.
After all, in the short time since he finished the new edition, Turiano said that he’s already spotted something he wishes he could change in a route description for Eagle Peak in Yellowstone National Park.
“But that’s OK. That’s part of mountaineering,” Turiano said. “There’s always going to be something new.”
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