Bourne: Well, yeah, this is my first time back in the Roaring Fork Valley in 33 years. Um, I was a reporter at the Daily News in Aspen from 1989 to 1992 and I'm back here for the first time to promote my book, which is set in a fictional Colorado Ski town, though, as a number of Aspenites have already told me, there are some things that people will recognize.
Hassig: There are two newspapers.
Bourne: Two newspapers and they're in the world's smallest newspaper war. And in this town of Franklin is an ecoterrorist group, and they're trying to stop a brand new ski resort in a wilderness area that's home to a wildcat called a lynx.
And the way the book works is that it's kind of a detective story in which the detectives, other reporters of the small town newspaper, one of the two big newspapers in town. And basically in the book, you watch them report the story. And sometimes this stuff gets in the paper, sometimes it doesn't. But as you watch them report the story, you figure out not only who's behind the ecoterrorist attacks, but also there's a much bigger crime going on in town having to do with this resort that they're trying to put in. And that becomes exposed as well. So yeah, one of the things I've been visiting.. I went to Telluride. I've stepped in some other ski towns and everybody tells me, yes, it's set in 1993, but this could totally happen in 2025.
Hassig: Yeah. I was only able to read maybe the first chapter or two, but I could tell you I was sucked right into it and I can't wait to finish it.
Bourne: There was a guy I used to work with in, in Aspen who said that, um, you in Aspen, you write the same story three times and then you have to leave. Um, uh, that, that I, you know, there's still the same story over and over again. Again, develop a new piece of land, but when I was here, the big story was the Ritz Carlton, which is now, I guess is called the St. Regis.
Hassig: Yeah. Yeah, but you know, I'm sure once that got built, that there was the next thing and the next thing and the next, exactly. Yeah. I recently found a newspaper in a time capsule from 1995 that was dealing with the airport expansion vote in '95, which has come back around in 2024 to be a vote study.
Bourne: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it's, I mean, it is the story of, I was just in Telluride, and they were, everyone there was telling me about there's a new development going on there. It is the story of these ski towns. And what I was trying to get at in my book was there's sort of a bunch of different parts of that.
One is a sort of environmental part of it that people are very sincere about and really fighting for. And then there's the people who want to build a new resort, and then there's business people, and then there's locals. And it's all this sort of, you know, roiling mess of of all these different competing things and it's always, the question always is what kind of town do we want to be? And that's the core question of the book is what kind of town does this place want to be? You know, they're locals, but what does that mean? They absolutely have to have the resort. You know, it's a company town. Aspen is a company town, they're one business. So you have to have it, but you also want to have a quality of life.
Hassig: And then yeah, one of the driving thing is has a lot to do with environmental issues as well. And yeah, I guess, I mean, that's obviously something you can't avoid talking about around here because it's so... the environment is so omnipresent. But I guess, is that an issue that has interested you as well?
Bourne: Oh, yeah. I was, I've always been really, I mean, when I was a reporter here I covered county politics, which meant that I covered, if you know Pitkin County, you know that it's like 80-85% federal land, which meant that I was dealing with a lot of resource management and a lot of wildlife, and I got endlessly fascinated by that. And I got fascinated, as I was writing the book, I got really interested in the ecoterror movement of what happened in the 80s and 90s to the environmentalist movement where it moved from non-violence to more violent, and they never attacked people. But they did start attacking infrastructure and structures. And I got really interested in that as you know, I the about the Earth First and the Earth Liberation Front and those groups.
And so I found myself fascinated by that question of, is there such a thing as ethical or morally justified terrorism? I mean, is that a thing? Can you do that? Is it, does it have something to do with the validity of the argument? Does it have something... you know, are there rules that you can set up?
I found that really fascinating as a question. Because I think that's got a lot of application today. We've got this real anger at Trump and politics and there comes a point in every movement where people just feel frustrated. And they move beyond just sitting in or signing petitions and is that justified? Is that right? And I found that really interesting in the context of environmentalism in the West where development just keeps coming. Just keeps coming. Just keeps coming. And these folks are frustrated. I knew when I, back when I worked in the Daily News, I knew someday I was going to write about this. It just was too great a world, you know, the newspaper itself, the newsroom, the people that I worked with there. I loved that newspaper and I loved working there.
Hassig: Well, thank you so much for coming in.
Bourne: Well, thank you for having me.
