Pepper Trail is a naturalist, photographer, writer, and world traveler who has lived in Ashland since 1994. He works as a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and in his spare time leads natural history trips to every corner of the world, including Jackson County.
Pepper is a regular essayist for the Jefferson Journal and for High Country News, and his writing has been included in several anthologies, including Intricate Homeland and What the River Brings: Oregon River Poems.
In 2009, he published Shifting Patterns: Meditations on Climate Change in Oregon’s Rogue Valley, a collection of essays and poems, with photographs by Jim Chamberlain and himself. Pepper’s poetry has appeared in the Jefferson Monthly, Windfall, Kyoto Journal, Borderlands, Comstock Review and many other publications. His writing combines a scientist’s insights with deeply personal meditations on memory, mortality, and the human place in the natural world.
Our August guest was retired journalist Paul Fattig. Born in Kerby, Oregon, Paul wrote for many of the newspapers in Southern Oregon and beyond. In 2001, Paul and his wife Maureen bought a burnt out shell of a cabin along Sterling Creek, about 10 miles from Jacksonville. Once retired, Paul told the story of renovating that shell and turning it into a family home. That story became the book Up Sterling Creek Without A Paddle. In our interview, Paul talks about writing, the challenges involved in renovation, and his new project about two uncles who became draft evaders in World War I.