Winter Count by Barry Lopez

About This Life .)
    Although he rarely teaches, Barry Lopez has been, the distinguished visiting scholar at Texas Tech University since 2003, where his papers are archived in the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World. He works regularly with graduate and undergraduate students there, both in class and on field trips. In 1989, he was the W. Harold and Martha Welch visiting chair in American studies at the University of Notre Dame, and in 2006, he was the Glenn distinguished professor at Washington and Lee University.
    In recent years, Lopez has turned his attention increasingly toward the plight of humanity in various parts of the world and to the impact of globalization, war, and climate change on the spiritual and social lives of both modern and traditional peoples. He is currently at work on a book about his travel experiences.
    Learn more about the author at www.barrylopez.com .

Lopez in 1948 in California’s San Fernando Valley. The rider third from left is his mother, Mary, who, incidentally, made the shirt he is wearing.

Lopez at Christmas circa 1951. From left: family friend Grace Van Sheck; Lopez’s younger brother, Dennis; their mother, Mary; and Lopez. Grace’s husband was Sidney Van Sheck, who had been Mary’s first husband. The Van Shecks befriended Mary and her sons after Mary divorced the boys’ father. (Photo courtesy of Sidney Van Sheck.)

Lopez as a junior at Loyola School, a Jesuit preparatory school in New York City, in 1961.

Lopez as a junior at the University of Notre Dame, having dinner at the home of Odey and Nettie Cassell with his roommate Pete Lewis in February 1965. This was one of several visits Lopez made to the Cassells’ farm near Cass, West Virginia, which he later wrote about. (Photo courtesy of Pete Lewis.)

Lopez (right) with Alaska Department of Fish and Game wolf biologist Robert Stephenson, radio-collaring sedated wolves in Nelchina Basin, Alaska, in March 1976. (Photo courtesy of Craig Lofstedt.)

Lopez carrying a sedated eight-year-old female wolf in Nelchina Basin, Alaska, in March 1976. Field biologist Robert Stephenson is behind Lopez, who is conducting research for Of Wolves and Men . (Photo courtesy of Craig Lofstedt.)

Lopez at an undisturbed Anasazi ruin on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon while on a 1982 expedition with anthropologists Robert Euler and Trinkle Jones. (Photo courtesy of Robert Euler.)

Lopez on the upper Boro River in Botswana in 1987. The group of seven with whom he was traveling was attacked by this wounded male hippo. While others attempted to maneuver their boats around the highly territorial animal, Lopez (left) and his friend Ben (right) kept the hippo distracted on the opposite side of the river. (Photo courtesy of Michele Chapman and Margaret Stemp.)

Lopez (left) in a sterile clean suit, with then-Senator Al Gore (right) at a drilling site for ice cores at 6,000 feet on Newell Glacier in the Transantarctic Mountains, Antarctica, in November 1988. Gore traveled to this remote site to acquaint himself with ice-core drilling technology and the field processing of uncontaminated sections of ice core, which would later provide data for the study of global climate change.

Lopez at camp about twenty kilometers from the South Pole during an expedition to collect snow samples in Antarctica in 1988. The temperature was -29°F.

Lopez in situ with a sixty-eight-pound meteorite on the Polar Plateau at about 88° south in December 1998. Lopez and the five meteoriticists he was traveling with established an unheated field camp at Graves Nunataks, about 120 miles from the South Pole. During their field season, the group found and collected 192 meteorites.

Lopez (left) with expedition leader John Schutt in the Transantarctic Mountains in December 1998, at the start of a forty-five-day field season, picking out a route across a crevasse field to Graves Nunataks, the expedition’s destination.

Left to right: Juanita Pahdopony