Tracking the Snowshoe Itinerant
The snow numbed Kent Gunnufson's face as he skied into the wind. The cold penetrated deep. He stopped to gasp for breath — and in that moment, the words of Father John Dyer came to him: "The snow and wind were blowing so hard that a man could hardly stand… No pen nor tongue can describe its awful appearance."
Father Dyer — the "Snowshoe Itinerant" — was a Methodist circuit rider who skied throughout the Rocky Mountain gold camps in the 1860s, carrying the mail for his livelihood and the gospel for his calling. His routes crossed the same high passes of Summit County, Colorado, that Gunnufson would photograph more than a century later.
Tracking the Snowshoe Itinerant combines Gunnufson's black-and-white photography of these historic routes with Dyer's own words from his journals — two separate experiences, a century apart, united by the same landscape and the same human impulse to push through the storm and document what's there.
The Denver Post and Popular Photography highly praised Tracking the SnowShoe Itinerant. The book received Presidential praise from President Gerald Ford, who offered his support for Gunnufson's efforts to document the Rocky Mountain region during an interview at his Beaver Creek home. Twelve images from the book comprise Portfolio One, which was sold in Denver's finest photographic galleries throughout the 1980s.
Awards & Recognition
- Presidential praise from President Gerald Ford
- Twelve images exhibited at Camera Obscura, Ginny Williams, David Hills, and Eclipse galleries
- Feature review by Popular Photography Magazine
- Review by Denver Post legendary book reviewer Sandra Dallas
| Format | Hardcover book |
| Author / Photographer | Kent Gunnufson |
| Publisher | SnowStorm Publications |
| Year | 1981 |
To Order
Contact Mountain Magazine to place your order. All products are produced and copyrighted by Kent Gunnufson / SnowStorm Publications.
Contact Us to Order »Popular Photography Review
Popular Photography, January 1982, Pg 48
by Dave Sagarin
"The preacher and photographer: a celebration, in words and pictures, of a grand American landscape, past and present"
"In 1861, his sight failing and some of his family having pretended him West, John Lewis Dyer, a Methodist preacher, set out from the Midwest to see Pike's Peak. His travels across the plains, his sense of wonder at first seeing the mountains, and his marvelous adventures exploring, preaching, and working in the gold camps are set out in his book, Snow-Shoe Itinerant."
"Now Kent Gunnufson, a 35-year-old resident of Breckenridge, Co., and a landscape photographer in the grand romantic tradition, has combined several dozen of his photographs with excerpts from the Dyer autobiography, and published it himself with the title, Tracking the Snow-Shoe Itinerant."
"Although the reason for this book's being reviewed in these pages is the quality and interest of the photographs, I must mention my fascination with the text: a first-person account, by a modest and decent man, of a time and place that have been obscured from us by legend, and by the movies. Gunnufson's style is very straightforward. He obviously loves these mountains, and wants very much to have us share his experience. There are broad landscapes, inspiring mountain ranges, mid-range views of valleys, meadows, brooks, and waterfalls, ghost towns and gold camps and details, such as an abandoned sluice, a bit of machinery, a bleached skeleton."
Denver Post Review
By Sandra Dallas
The Denver Post
"A photographic study of South Park and Summit County"
"His dramatic photographs show snowstorms hovering over desolate mountains, streams clogged with ice, the white bones of aspen trees covered with snow, brittle cold nights with bright stars like giant snowflakes."
Breckenridge photographer Kent Gunnufson has used The Snowshoe Itinerant, the autobiography of the early-day Methodist circuit rider Fr. John Dyer, as the basis of a photographic study of South Park and Summit County. Father Dyer's diary, published 100 years ago, provides endless inspiration, since the preacher comments on everything from gold strikes to Godless men, from the price of a meal to the amount in the collection plate, and always he talks about the howling snow that falls 11 months of the year in the high country.
At one point Father Dyer despairs: "No pen or tongue can describe its awful appearance." But photographs can. And Gunnufson, like Father Dyer, is overwhelmed by the snow. His photographs are not of pretty mountain scenes but of the cold and awesome land at timberline that bedeviled Father Dyer.