About Dewey

 

​Dewey Vanderhoff is a journalist, raconteur, and photographer extraordinaire who has devoted his life to the wild open spaces that flank Yellowstone’s eastern border and the grizzlies and wolves that depend on them. A lifelong resident of Cody, Wyoming, he has long been the conscience of perhaps the most conservative, anti-carnivore community in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

 

Dewey’s passion for wild nature and his courage in its defense are truly remarkable. If you seek the truth about what is happening around Cody, including the dark underbelly of corruption and mismanagement of public lands and wildlife, Dewey is the one to ask. Plus, he knows more about the quirky human history of the fascinating landscape that encompasses the Absarokas, Beartooths, and Bighorn Basin than almost anyone alive.

  

Dewey is a third-generation Cody-ite whose grandparents on both sides came West to work on building the Buffalo Bill building at the turn of the last century. As a kid, Dewey rambled the country, spending time up near the top of Chief Joseph Pass between Cody and Cooke City at the family cabin homestead  that had once been a horse-drawn freightwagon waystation between Cody and Sunlight Basin. “It was magical, we had bears, elk, deer, moose year round —and you could find old bison skeletons by the hidden springs, he recalled. “I learned by osmosis about ‘ecology,’ a word we use routinely these days, but I did not then know existed—and how everything is interconnected.”

​

A naturally gifted storyteller, Dewey listened to old-timers like Bob Edgars spin yarns, enriching his career as a reporter and role as a local historian. His unwavering commitment to the principles of democracy, transparency, fair representation, and rational decision-making began in his teens when he started his journalistic career writing for the Cody Enterprise. Demonstrating a remarkable ability to cut to the heart of an issue, he also worked for the Casper Star Tribune and Billings Gazette, prominent news outlets of the region at the time. His photographs, including of aristocrats such as Prince Albert and Grace Kelly, as well as film royalty such as Robert Redford, have been published from coast to coast and in major outlets in Europe.

 

For twenty years beginning in the early-1970's, Dewey was drawn into the mountains, at first by backpacking then by horsepacking. Dewey rode a huge portion of the Absaroka Range and eastern Yellowstone wilderness on horseback in the summers and early fall with a western artist friend George Dee Smith for over 20 years. Dee also a classic old time mountain cowboy who handmade all his own horsecraft and camp gear. Some of those  trips lasted over 40 days through headwaters of five large rivers- the Shoshone, Greybull, Wind, Yellowstone, Thorofare. None were shorter than ten days in the magical Thorofare and Upper Yellowstone or a Shoshone - Lamar - traverse. Dewey also tried to make his way into as many high country wilderness fall hunting camps with any Cody outfiitters who would have him, to document that fading horse and canvas lifestyle. All those adventures were done the same as the earliest trappers and explorers  traversing the GYE country in the previous century “where everything you do has a purpose—and if you don't do it, you don't live, simple as that.” Dewey said, "backpacking is plenty fine as far as it goes, but symbiosis with a good mountain horse is the greatest of earthly enlightenments. I've seen a great deal of the world , but my heart will always be in the Absarokas. I was born there and don't know any better".

​

He ran into plenty of grizzly bears, even in the mid-1970s when only a few hundred remained in the ecosystem. He recalls one of his first up-close encounters this way. “One time I was riding out by myself with three pack horses, taking the elk meat, horns, and garbage on a 28 mile trail across two mountain passes on the eastern boundary of the park. On the south side of Eagle Pass in a tight spot, two young cinammon grizzlies stood up on the trail right in front of me about fifteen yards away. The horses' ears went up, and they started dancing. Thank God, the horses didn't explode. One of grizzlies looked straight at me, our eyes level, and the other did a full 360 spin upright...the damnest thing I've ever seen. Then they both took off and ran off 90 degrees to the trail. And I bolted  over the pass on 16 legs and down the mountain. ”

 

Dewey recounts that he has had 200 or so encounters with grizzlies, and they’ve all been positive. “I love bears because they're so damn clever and smart. When you are up close and personal, you can look ‘em in the eye and smell ‘em. If you’ve ever been close enough to a bear to smell it, then you’ve met a bear.”

​

I can’t remember when I met Dewey, who has always seemed to be part of Cody's fabric, with his long ponytail, powerful stride, and camera hanging around his neck. I often saw him at government meetings about wildlife including grizzlies and wolves – meetings that were invariably heated and sometimes frightening. Dewey always showed up, calm as a swan on a lake, to document the conversation, including the red faces.

 

While his values are as clear as the cold streams of Yellowstone’s high country, Dewey is careful in his professional work, saying: “I wanted to support bears and other green causes, but when you're a working journalist and photojournalist, you’ve got to have two faces: one face you show them and then one face for what you're doing.”

Both faces have proven to be reliably insightful, contextual, and informed. Indeed, Dewey is a unique combination of a brilliant investigator and a keen strategist. I can’t remember when he didn’t have good ideas about ways to solve a problem or failed to ask the hard questions.

​

The Cody area has long been a center of grizzly-human conflicts and unnecessary and illegal bear deaths—and for just as long, Dewey has dug into the details of these deaths. He regularly challenges managers to do more to prevent them, asking questions like: “What could’ve been done differently?” “Who was keeping an eye on the herd?” “Was there anything done to dissuade the bear from getting mixed up with the cows, garbage, or dog food?” He often concludes with this refrain: “Seems like the problem with bears is people, not bears.”

​

Dewey keenly understands his role in this community, saying: “I feel if I don’t speak up, the anti-bear people would carry the argument every time.” And then this: “A mouse on the plank can balance out an elephant on the far end of the plank if the fulcrum is in the right place.”

 

Dewey answers to a different drummer than most in Cody. Rather than money, he is primarily interested in moral accountability to nature and justice. Predictably, some regard him as an alien species when he says: “You have got to quit looking at animals as an economic incentive or disincentive, depending on which direction you're traveling. You should not look at them as dollar signs but as part of the landscape, ecology, and the bigger picture.”

​

Few think in longer time frames and a more encompassing context than Dewey, perhaps his globe spanning travels helped broaden his perspective on people and the places they live. He says: “The one thing I wish I could get across to people around here is that it isn't what you and I think today or five or ten years from now. If you're not thinking 50 years backward and 50 years forward, you're not thinking. And nothing I see on the table these days goes out further than a few years or a few miles. And it's still all about politics, landlines, and maps—not about the landscape itself.”

 

Gregarious and entertaining, with a quip ready for any occasion, Dewey enjoyed cordial relations and friendships with some of the state’s most conservative politicians, including former Congresswoman Liz Cheney and Senators Malcolm Wallop and Craig Thomas as well as Cody's favorite son, humorist, and former Senator Alan Simpson, who Dewey credits (or blames) for reflexively wisecracking at every opportunity.

​

Dewey is perhaps the only one brave and funny enough to have created the Cody Boobyprize, a spoof local newspaper that included both barbed critiques and laugh-out-loud stories that you don’t need to be a Cody-ite to enjoy.  His “Planet Cody” series also depicts a hilarious and goofy side of a community that can take itself too seriously.

​

When I asked him how he has endured in Cody for so long, he responded this way: “This is my home, the best place on earth—and I must have Teflon in my skin. Nobody's been able to buy me off or deflect me with any great degree of success. My obligations to the world in a material sense are few. I have nothing except information, debating skills, and a few other tools. I guess I love a good argument—and it helps that I can laugh at myself.”

​

Keep it up, Dewey. We—and the bears, wolves, and magnificent Yellowstone country—need you. Thank you for being a beacon of hope in a politically dark, but critical part of this irreplaceable ecosystem. 

To see some of Dewey’s photos, check out: https://www.flickr.com/people/planetcody/

​

 

Here are a few additional “Deweyisms”:

 

"Newton had a fourth law of motion that he didn't tell anybody about: if something can go off the rails, over the fence, into the weeds, and down to the riverbank, it probably will. In other words, if something can go wrong, it will—and there you will find me."

​

"Managers are applying man's rules to a wild animal—and asking the animal to concede. And that probably describes the problem with grizzly conservation as much as anything."

​

"People like us need to educate the next generation on how to fight—how to gauge, go around, through, over, or under the people making bad policies on a planet that is rapidly using up all its resources."

​

"The fight will outlive us all. Younger people need to learn from older veterans of this movement and take up the cause when the time comes—and the time has come."

​