Dudeville

Imagine Huck Finn "lighting out for the territories" 150 years later, this time as a late-30s corporate dropout turned backcountry snowboarder and mountain climber. Dudeville is a coming-of-middle-age adventure novel, set in and all around small-town Colorado during the outdoor sports explosion of the 1990s. Inspired by a wide and wild range of influences-from Thoreau, Whitman, Muir and Twain, to Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey and Warren Miller-Dudeville is equal parts extreme sports tale, male bonding romp, and reluctant love story, a sensuous, lyrical, exuberant exploration of the American West.

Dudeville's author, Jonah Das, is the editor of Illahee Rising, a non-profit geographic information service that identifies lost and neglected Native American historic and cultural sites for inclusion on maps and in the historic record. He wrote Dudeville after fleeing a corporate job "back East" for a small town in Colorado, and a life of mountaineering, backcountry snowboarding & skiing, hang-gliding, and river running. He currently lives and works with his wife on a native tree and plant farm on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state.

From Dudeville: "From this summit, the horizon seesaws open into an electric blue dream of Colorado sky. The adolescent swagger and brawn of the Rockies is nothing like the stooped and rounded hills back east. Spiked with mammoth formations of rock and ice, this vast, continental cacophony is the very roof of the world, pushed skyward by geologic time while collapsing under its own weight. I drop in, and surf off the wind-scoured edge, working the margin between transcendent bliss and utter catastrophe, a controlled fury exploding from my core into arcing snowboard turns as I crisscross the fall-line and dissolve into gravity..."