BOZEMAN, Mont. – More than two decades after a trip to the mountains of southwest Colorado planted the seed of a story into his mind, Bozeman Deputy Mayor Terry Cunningham’s novel finally hit the shelves this year.
Cunningham wrote Red Mountain Pass twenty years ago, before he even moved to Bozeman, after visiting Ouray and Telluride, Colorado. It was on a Jeep ride up an avalanche-prone highway where Cunningham saw a run-down looking shack near the road. Despite being at the top of a mountain at an elevation of thousands of feet, Cunningham noticed a mailbox outside the shack.
That struck him as interesting, as did the remnants of an old fort and the ruins of old mining shacks that dotted the mountains.
Cunningham returned home to Atlanta, but the experience stuck in his mind.
“So after that vacation I was like, I think there’s elements of a story there,” Cunningham said. “I always thought that I might have one book in me.”
Cunningham decided this story was that book. He returned to Colorado a few times for research, and after a few years had a draft.
The finished product is a thriller with a storyline centering on a snowplow driver accidentally plowing a car off the Million Dollar Highway — a notoriously dangerous road — during a storm.
Cunningham hired an editor who used to work for Penguin Books, who got the book close to a deal with a publishing house before it fell apart. Subsequent attempts to sell the book resulted in “frustratingly ambiguous” rejection letters, Cunningham said.
“The question was, do I have a book in me, and the answer was yes, but no one wanted to buy it,” Cunningham said.
In the meantime, Cunningham settled in Bozeman, and eventually the draft ended up in archive folder after archive folder on his computers.
Last year, Cunningham found the file, and went through it again to see if the book still “rings true.”
There were some things in the book that Cunningham’s years living in Bozeman taught him needed to be updated, like the scene where a character rides a snowmobile wearing only a baseball cap for headgear.
And, as it was written 20 years ago, Cunningham had to decide whether to update time references or rework a character who was written as a middle-aged Vietnam War veteran.
Ultimately, Cunningham decided to publish the book under his marketing agency mostly as is, and started selling copies on Amazon and at the Country Bookshelf downtown.
“I just wanted my friends to be able to read it,” Cunningham said.
So far, Cunningham has gotten some good reviews, from both friends and strangers. The book has a few five-star reviews on Amazon, and Country Bookshelf placed two follow-up orders after their initial purchase, Cunningham said.
Not looking to recoup the time and money he originally put into the book, Cunningham decided $3 from every purchase of the book will go to the Friends of Hyalite’s snow plowing fund, an endeavor that’s already raised hundreds of dollars.
The book sales are exciting, Cunningham said.
“I thought it was a pretty neat story, and I just hope other people find it interesting,” Cunningham said.
