Hush of the Land: Stories from the Bob Marshall Wilderness

Program Description

In Hush of the Land: Stories from the Bob Marshall Wilderness, Arnold ‘Smoke’ Elser and Eva-Maria Maggi take the audience on a journey with horses and mules deep into the mountains of Western Montana. This engaging, hands-on campfire storytelling event is based on the inspiring memoir Hush of the Land, which chronicles the six-decade quest of packer and outfitter Arnold ‘Smoke’ Elser to protect wild lands by bringing thousands of people deep into Montana’s mountains on horseback.

Experience the joys and thrills of summer rides, harrowing grizzly bear encounters, fishing in clear mountain streams, and many nights around a campfire in some of the West’s last wild places. In this lively program, Maggi shares how meeting Smoke ignited her love for storytelling, while Elser recounts how his testimony for the Wilderness Act and his fight to preserve and expand Montana’s wilderness lands influenced his career as an outfitter and educator, giving him a voice at the center of Montana’s conservation movement.

Presenter Bio

Arnold “Smoke” Elser is a legendary packer, author, teacher, and U.S. conservationist who has traveled every trail of the 1.5 million-acre Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex in Western Montana on horseback over the past sixty years. As a professional wilderness outfitter, he has provided a once-in-a-lifetime experience deep in the mountains for thousands of people, many of whom had never ridden a horse before. His famous “Horse and Mule Packing Class” has been taken by the U.S. Navy SEALs, U.S. Army, U.S. National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, as well as thousands of civilians and college students. He is the co-author of the leading textbook on horse and mule packing, Pack’in on Horses and Mules. His skills, life, and persistent work to preserve public lands and wilderness for future generations have been featured in the PBS documentary 3 Miles an Hour, National Geographic, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among others.

Smoke is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2023 Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Montana, the Distinguished Citizen Award from the Boy Scouts of America, the Lifetime Conservation Achievement Award from The Conservation Roundtable, and the Backcountry Horseman of America award. He is honored to be the only inductee of both the Montana Outdoor Hall of Fame and the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife Thelma, their dog Spunky, and their horses and mules in Missoula, MT.

Eva-Maria Maggi is a writer, teacher, and packer. Her new book, Hush of the Land: A Lifetime in the Bob Marshall Wilderness (Bison Books), is co-written with and about Montana outfitter, conservationist, and packer Arnold “Smoke” Elser. She holds a Ph.D. in political science and has been teaching college classes and giving public talks for over 15 years. Currently, she teaches Wilderness Policy and Packing at the University of Montana, Missoula. Her recent work has been published in Big Sky Journal and the Montana Magazine of Western History (both forthcoming). Her past research on Europe and the Middle East was published as the book The Will of Change (2018, Springer) and in several academic journals, newspapers, and magazines. She grew up in Germany, lived in Italy and Morocco, and now calls Missoula home.