Gretel Ehrlich

A public television assignment about sheepherders took Gretel Ehrlich to Wyoming in 1976. Her partner, who was also her colleague on the film, had been given a terminal diagnosis, and after his death she made her way back to Wyoming rather than settle in New York again, hiring on as a ranch hand and sheepherder around the town of Shell. Journal entries addressed to a friend turned into The Solace of Open Spaces, twelve essays published in 1985 on branding, blizzards, herding, and the reticence of people who live at that altitude. It won the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award the following year. Ehrlich, born in Santa Barbara in 1946, studied at Bennington College, UCLA's film school and the New School, and made documentaries from 1967. Later books include the novel Heart Mountain, set at the Wyoming camp where Japanese Americans were held during the war, and This Cold Heaven, on seven seasons in Greenland. A lightning strike in 1991 nearly killed her, and A Match to the Heart, from 1994, follows the long recovery.