About the Author
A Biography of Thomas J. Elpel
Thomas J. Elpel had the rare opportunity as a child to spend hundreds of hours with his grandmother, Josie Jewett. Together they explored the hills and meadows near Virginia City, Montana, collecting herbs, looking for arrowheads, and watching wildlife. Grandma Josie helped Tom to learn about native plants and their uses, igniting a passion for nature that has inspired him ever since. She also sparked his interest in survival skills.
Tom was born in Los Altos, California in 1967 to Edwin and Jeanette Elpel. Every summer the family traveled back to Montana to be close to the extended family. They spent much of that time with Grandma Josie. Tom's father died in 1979, and the following summer the family moved permanently back to Montana. Tom attended junior high and high school in Bozeman, Montana.
"All I ever wanted to do as a kid was to go to Grandma's house," Tom said. "When she moved from Virginia City to Pony, I followed her. I eventually bought land just a couple blocks from her place."
Tom's first serious exposure to wilderness survival skills began at the age of sixteen, when he went on a 26-day, 250-mile walkabout in the desert canyons of southern Utah with Boulder Outdoor Survival School. The following year he and Grandma Josie went together to Tom Brown's Tracker School in New Jersey. From there Tom spent thousands of hours practicing and developing survival skills in his "backyard" in the Rocky Mountains.
Tom met Renee, in high school, where they both spent a lot of time in the art room. He asked her to go on a hike with him, and she said "no." But later Tom asked her again to go for a walk, and she said "okay." There was a big difference between a hike and a walk. Hiking didn't sound like much fun to her, but walking sounded good. In 1988, two years out of high school, they walked 500 miles together across Montana, starting in Pony, and ending at Fort Union on the North Dakota border. They were married in the Pony Park the following summer.
The couple bought a five-acre parcel in Pony, just two blocks distance from Grandma Josie's house. They moved into a tent and started building their own home of stone and log. They both worked with troubled teens in wilderness therapy programs, so they commuted to Idaho, Utah, or Arizona for three-week trips, then came home to spend their money on building materials. (Be sure to read Tom's article Building a House on Limited Means for more details.)
Tom's desire to make a difference in the world started early, partly the result from watching the news with Walter Chronkite as a child. By the time he entered junior high, he was on a mission to change the world. Friends in high school said he would grow out of his idealism and learn to accept the world as it was, but so far that hasn't happened. He hasn't exactly changed the world either, but insists he is still working on it.
In an effort to tackle the issues of making a living while making the world a better place, Tom wrote his first book (more of a booklet) in 1991, which evolved over the years into Green Prosperity: Quit Your Job, Live Your Dreams. He has always written about subjects he wanted to learn and developed professionalism by writing, reflecting, revising, and republishing. He typically publishes four or five draft editions in comb-bound format before printing with a conventional paperback binding for the mass market. Along the way he started his own publishing company, HOPS Press, LLC, and created a successful internet bookstore.
In 1991 Tom also founded a wilderness survival school, originally named Hollowtop Outdoor Primitive School (HOPS) and began giving classes on everything from Stone Age living to stone masonry. The school later evolved into Outdoor Wilderness Living School LLC (OWLS) for teaching wilderness survival and nature awareness skills to public school groups.
Tom's basic philosophy is that wilderness survival skills are useful to connect with nature, yet we shouldn't run away from the problems of modern society. Instead, we need to apply the lessons and spirit of living close to nature towards the quest to solve our worldly problems.
"Experts and lay persons alike bemoan the difficulty of creating a sustainable lifestyle, but it really isn't that hard." Tom said. "We had less money and less skills than a lot of people, but we built an energy-efficient passive solar home, and we now generate our own electricity with solar panels. Sustainability isn't that difficult; you just have to stay focused on the goal."
Tom and Renee adopted three children, Felicia, Cassie, and Donny in 1996. Edwin was born to them in 2001. The family went on many great adventures together, exploring the world by canoe, by car, or occasionally by bus and train. Tom continued to pursue his writing career with passion, no matter what other distractions there were, learning to focus even through a parade of kids marching back and forth through his office.
In 2001 Tom founded the Jefferson River Canoe Trail (originally named 3Rivers Park) to help sustain Montana's traditions of open space and open access along the Jefferson River segment of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.
The publishing business and internet bookstore took over the house room by room, until Tom and Renee bought Granny's Country Store in Silver Star, Montana in 2003. Renee had long dreamed of owning a general store, and as a child, she sometimes pretended to sort the mail. Coincidentally, Granny's Country Store was both a general store and a contract post office. Although the store was an hour away from Pony, it included a house built into the store, so they migrated back and forth between the two places.
In the fall of 2004, Tom launched Green University®, LLC, his next endeavor to make real and lasting change in the world. The first major project was to build a passive solar stone house for G.U. students to live in next door to the store. Along the way, Tom and students cooperated on various book and video projects, practiced primitive skills, and occassionally took time off from G.U. to run wild in the woods on wilderness adventures.
Tom's grandmother died that same year at the age of 89. Her love for nature continues to inspire Tom every day. Although he is still crazy busy (and still chasing dreams of changing the world), getting out into nature remains a high priority, and he continues to hone his wilderness survival and awareness skills.
Tom and Renee gradually drifted apart over time. Emotionally very different from each other, their marriage was more of a deep friendship than a love affair. They succeeded at twenty-one years of mostly good marriage together before the emotional divide caught up with them. They formally separated in 2010, by which time the kids were already accustomed to living in two places. Renee moved into the new stone house, and Tom returned to Pony. Losing their marriage was the hardest thing either of them ever experienced.
Tom re-invented his life in the afftermath of divorce, becoming more outgoing, adventurous, and out-spoken for life on earth. In 2018, Tom carved a dugout canoe under the tutelage of Churchill Clark, direct descendant of William Clark, and in 2019 Tom led a five-man, five-month exedition down the entire length of the Missouri River from Three Forks, Montana to St. Louis, Missouri, as told in his award-winning book Five Months on the Missouri River.
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