By Richard Anderson / Contributor
Originally Published in Jackson Hole News & Guide
Porter Fox got his start writing in the mid to late 1990s as the sports editor for the Jackson Hole News. In the 30 years since, he has worked for Powder magazine, earned an MFA from the New School in New York City, co-founded and edited the award-winning literary travel journal Nowhere, and had his work published in Outside, The New Yorker, The New York Times and New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, National Geographic Adventure and many other magazines and journals.
He also attended Harvard’s esteemed Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism five times, which he credits for hooking him on the form that combines hard reporting with vivid storytelling. That education served his well as he reported and wrote his four books: “Deep: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow” (Rink House, 2013), “Northland: A 4,000-mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border” (W.W. Norton, 2018), “The Last Winter: The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World” (Little Brown, 2021) and “Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans that Feed Them” (Little Brown, 2024).
A lifelong skier, Fox’s athletic pursuits led him to writing about the future of his sport and the alpine environment in the face of climate change. But Fox also is a sailor from way back, growing up on the Maine coast where he learned the ropes of open-ocean sailing, in part under the tutelage of his father Crozier Fox, who also built several dozen sailboats during his life.
The Jackson Hole Book Festival welcomes Fox this year to participate in a panel with Luther Probst, a Teton County Commissioner, land-use lawyer, Sonoran Institute founder and former director, and co-editor of “A Watershed Moment: The American West in the Age of Limits” (University of Utah Press, 2024). Their conversation, “The Fragile Earth,” will be moderated by James Speyer, a Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs board member who has worked in energy and conservation since 1972, including under William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Richard Nixon, and James Schlesinger, the first Secretary of Energy under President Jimmy Carter.