A Wet Ass and a Hungry Gut

Half a Century of Stories from the White River Valley

Dad’s old ragtop Willys Jeep rolled backwards down the steep mountain road and turned over. Bang! It landed on the driver’s side and lunch stuff, thermos bottles, and Dad’s gun flew everywhere. It was pitch black at 5:30 a.m., and my body trembled with fear. “Dad!?” I yelled. There was only silence. Oh, God! The stories in A Wet Ass and a Hungry Gut begin in 1956. Danny, age eight, and his family had just moved from Yuma, Colorado, to Meeker, population 1,500, located in the White River Valley in Colorado’s beautiful Rocky Mountains. Danny and his hero, his dad, quickly fell in love with the high country east of Meeker, where majestic 10,000-foot peaks were skirted by stands of aspen and pine, surrounding them with paralyzing beauty. Rainbow, cutthroat, brook, and brown trout were abundant in the White River and the area’s many alpine lakes and streams, its forests home to thousands of deer and elk. Every September for over five decades, Danny and his dad scouted the high-country forests ablaze with fall color and echoing with bull elk bugles. Then in mid-October, they would go hunting to fill the freezer with meat for the long, cold winter. As the pair hunted and fished together to provide food for the family, they developed a father-son bond that the author describes as “God-awful special!” Filled with accounts both humorous and tragic, readers will laugh and cry their way through this adventure.