calendar: July 17-23, 2019

Wednesday from Cuban dance company. Tickets

begin at $50. DWJH.org. See page 10.
Saturday m u s i c // a r t s // e v e n t s // f o o d // f i l m
Front Porch Conversation: Spirituality,
5:45-7 p.m. at The Murie Ranch. Rev. Jim-
my Bartz of St. John’s Episcopal Church,
to speak on “A Practiced Spirituality of
Conservation and the Healthy Tension It
Creates.” Free. MurieRanch.org.

“Native Stories: Preserving Tradition,”

Open Rehearsal with Malpaso Dance
Company, 5-6 p.m. at The Center The-
ater. A behind the scenes look into the
process of choreographers and danc-
ers. Free; $10 suggested donation.
DWJH.org. See page 10.
“Climate Change and Wildfire Risk in the
West”, 6 p.m.-7:30 a.m. at Teton County Li-
brary. Climate researcher will talk climate
change and wildfire risk in the American
West. Free. JHAlliance.org. See page 22.
“GTMF Presents:” Los Angeles Guitar
Quartet, 8 p.m. at Walk Festival Hall. In-
ventive transcriptions of concert, con-
temporary, and world-music master-
works. $30. GTMF.org. See page 4.
Thursday
Wilcox Gallery’s 50th anniversary cel-
ebration, luncheon buffet from noon to
4 p.m. at Wilcox Gallery; unveiling from
5 to 8 p.m. at Wilcox Gallery II. Celebrate
the gallery’s 50th birthday. Free. RSVP to
307.733.6450 or info@wilcoxgallery.com.
6-8 p.m. at Trailside Galleries. Joint show
and artist reception for Western painters
Bruce Cheever and Jeremy Winborg.
Free. TrailsideGalleries.com. See page 17.
Music on Main, 6-10 p.m. at Victor City
This Week: July 17 - 23, 2019
Park. Free, all-ages outdoor summer con-
cert series featuring Remember Jones
and the Casey Jack Kristofferson Band.
Free. TetonValleyFoundation.org.
GTMF Festival Orchestra: Beethoven’s
GTMF Thursday Chamber Music: Ewald
Fifth Symphony, 6 p.m. at Walk Festi-
and Beethoven, 8 p.m. at Walk Festival
val Hall. Festival Orchestra performs
Hall. The brass section of the Festival Or-
two popular works in classical music:
chestra teams up for a performance
Smetana’s piece about the Moldau
of Ewald’s charming Brass Quintet. $30.
river and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
GTMF.org. See page 4.
$25–$60. GTMF.org. See page 4.
Music on Main After Party, 9-11:55 p.m.
at West Side Yard in Victor, Idaho. Party Sunday
continues with Canyon Kids music. $5.
Facebook.com; search “Canyon Kids — Southern Brunch Sundays with Aaron Da-
Music on Main After Party.” vis, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. at StillWest Brewery and
Grill. Southern-style brunch menu with a
Friday
side of Southern roots music from Aaron
Davis. Free. AaronDavisMusic.com.
Cuban fiesta in the park, 5-8 p.m. at Cen-
ter for the Arts. Cuban festivities, food and
Monday
dance with Malpaso Dance Company.
“Calm, Confident and Coordinated Un-
See page 10. der Pressure,” 7-9 p.m. at Riot Act Studio
305. Alexander Technique class taught by

The
WilcoxGallery.com. See page 14. Eve Bernfeld focused on teaching partici-
pants how to be “more at home under
Artist demonstration and reception: pressure.” $30. RiotActInc.org.
Bridgette Meinhold, 1-5 p.m. demonstra-
tion Wednesday and Thursday at Gallery Tuesday

Metal
Wild; reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday.
Bridgette will be working on a few new Artist reception: Ashley Collins, 5:30-
encaustic pieces. Show will hang until 7:30 p.m. at Altamira Fine Art. Reception
July 24. Free. GalleryWild.com. See page celebrating contemporary painter’s new
21. exhibition. Free. AltamiraFineArt.com.
See page 11.

Artist reception: Mark Gibson, 5-8 p.m. at
Mountain Trails Gallery. Tipi painter. Free.
MtnTrails.net. See page 16.
Artist reception: Donald Martiny and Hunt
Slonem, 5-8 p.m. at Diehl Gallery. Recep-
tion celebrating two contemporary art-
ists. Free. DiehlGallery.com. See page 8.
Dancers’ Workshop benefit featuring Mal-
paso, 5:30 p.m. at Center for the Arts; per-
formance at 9 p.m. Annual gala benefit
for dance non-profit with performance
See JHNewsAndGuide.com for more events and to submit an event
Hayes Carll with Sister Karee and the
Other Brothers, 6-10 p.m. at Snow King
Ball Park. JacksonHoleLive summer
concert. $5, free for kids 17 and under.
JacksonHoleLive.org. See page 3.
BBQ Shabbat and cowboy music, 6:30-
8:30 p.m. at Owen-Bircher Park. Musical
Shabbat led by Chazzan Judd Grossman
and special guest musician Ted Wells.
Kosher hot dog and s’mores. Bring a sum-
mer side dish to share and a jacket. Free.
JHJewishCommunity.org.
Mentality
GTMF Haberfeld Chamber Music Se-
ries: Dvorák and Grieg, 6-8:15 p.m. at St.
John’s Episcopal Church. Festival Musician
Steven Laven evokes a sense of Jackson
Hole pride and western wanderlust with his
piece Moon Over Jenny Lake. GTMF.org.
Mix’d Media: “Spirit Totems,” 6-9 p.m. at
National Museum of Wildlife Art. Event Metal isn’t just music. It’s a way of life for the
celebrating sculptures from Herb Alpert,
a 9-time Grammy Award-winning musi-
fans at Fire in the Mountains. Page 2.
cian and painter. Free. WildlifeArt.org.
See page 18.
Hayes Carll // Herb Alpert // Wilcox Gallery turns 50
RYAN DORGAN / NEWS & GUIDE
2 SCENE // Jackson Hole News&Guide // July 17, 2019
Festivalgoers gather around the bonfire Saturday evening as Wolves in the Throne Room leave the stage during Fire in the Mountains at Heart Six Guest Ranch in Moran.
The Metal Mentality
Metal isn’t just music.
It’s a way of life
for the fans at
Fire in the Mountains.
By Billy Arnold and Allie Gross
Photography by Ryan Dorgan
Reader alert: This article contains copious
redacted profanities. — Ed.
L
ightning struck the Leidy Highlands as
a cloud of dust rose from the mosh pit.
A swirl of black, leather and flying
hair dripping with rain, sweat and bug spray
pulsated to the pounding rhythm of the Ger-
man extreme metal band The Ruins of Bever-
ast as the crowd in the pit linked arms and ran
in circles.
Deeds Gorman stood on the edge of it
all, watching, when a double rainbow burst
through the Buffalo Valley sky.
“Happy birthday to me,” the now 34-year-
old shouted, dust- and mascara-tinted tears
streaming down her face. “This is the best day
of my life, ever. F---ing rainbows and Ruins of
Beverast and f---ing mountains.
“It’s too much,” she said.
More than 800 metalheads from across the
country and world descended on a quiet, cell
service-less valley in Teton County last week-
end for a joyful (and loud) celebration of metal
music: the second Fire in the Mountains festi-
val at Moran’s Heart Six Guest Ranch.
Between the screaming, growling, head-
banging, studs, moshing and patch-covered
“battle jacket” vests, metal is about more than
music.
“It’s a mentality, man,” explained Alex Fe-
her, a co-organizer and co-founder of the fes-
tival.
Metal is a thousand things and is not a
thousand others. The Ruins of Beverast playing
through a storm while their gear gets soaked
Cover art: Metal fans listen as Wolves in
the Throne Room play Saturday evening.
RYAN DORGAN/NEWS&GUIDE
onstage? Metal. Thunder? Metal. Lightning?
Metal. Rainbows? Also metal. Picking up
your friends after they fall in the mosh pit?
Definitely metal. Leaving your friend on the
ground to get trampled in the pit? Not metal
at all, at least at Fire in the Mountains.
The festival attracted a heterogeneous mix
of people, music and mentalities, start to fin-
ish. Clad in a spectrum of black, cosplay, street
clothes, with some in barely any clothes at all,
festivalgoers banged their heads while mosh-
ing and sat in folding chairs to enjoy the mu-
sic from the back of the crowd with their kids.
They ate fried chicken, devoured vegan quinoa
bowls, drank beer, sipped sloshies, camped and
sprayed a mechanical bear with faux bear spray
in a lesson from Wyoming Game and Fish
Department.
“I think that’s one of the most beautiful
things about metal as a whole,” Feher said. “It’s
a lifestyle in a sense that you don’t conform. You
are who you are, you are self-aware and you ex-
press that. It’s an expression through music or
what you do.”
Fintroll the good boy
By day, Feher (metal name: Liability. His
golden retriever’s metal name: Finntroll the
Dragon Slayer) is a farmer at Huidekoper
Ranch. The other organizers and founders, Jer-
emy Walker (metal name: Bone Crusher) and
Oliver Tripp (metal name: Father Carnage)
are a sommelier at Bin22 and a massage thera-
pist. They’re three locals who don’t invest hours
of free time into planning the festival to make
money. In fact, they’re in debt.
“I am driven by passion,” Walker said. “For
me to be able to get [bands] to play ... in my
home, in front of the most beautiful mountains
in the world, is the best feeling I’ve ever had. I
want to create something unique for not only
our community, but also the world of music.”
It all started with a metal radio show on
community radio station KHOL before evolv-
ing into a birthday party campout on Shadow
Mountain in 2015 and 2016, featuring a live
band, Wayfarer. After paying a fine to the U.S.
Forest Service for those “clandestine” shows
(very metal), the festival then moved to the
Pink Garter Theatre in 2017, Walker said. Fire
in the Mountains debuted at the Heart Six
Guest Ranch in 2018 with 357 attendees.
At the 2018 festival the three organizers
started the weekend swearing they’d never do
it again: The pre-show anxiety was too much.
Still, a moment at last year’s headlining Panop-
ticon set brought them back for year five.
Tripp put his arm around Walker as they
raged and rocked out.
“We’re definitely doing this again next
year,” Tripp said.
“Yeah, I know,” Walker replied.
This year festival attendance more than
doubled, with what organizers estimated to
be between 800 and 850 attendees.
The Heart Six Guest Ranch, one of Amer-
ica’s oldest dude ranches, nestled in a bend of
the Buffalo Fork River with a breathtaking
view of the Tetons’ jagged peaks, was selected
intentionally for the festival’s expansion. Metal
music, Feher said, is inextricably linked to na-
ture.
“We’re trying to get people to get back to
the simple roots of what it means to be hu-
man,” he said. Metal is “very inspired by the
natural world and esoteric mysteries that exist,
you know, without it being hippie or preachy
or religious in any way. It’s very human, very
basic.”
A little ways up the road from Heart Six are
a couple subdivisions whose residents were not
especially eager to trade their views of grazing
elk and sandhill cranes for men in leather vests
and loincloths, even for a weekend.
Metal roared from below as Andrea
Riniker, whose home overlooks the concert
site, ate dinner with her husband and watched
the Wimbledon finals. She and her neighbors
worry about the impact of campers, traffic and
amplified music on wildlife, and feel large pub-
lic events belong in other, less sensitive loca-
tions. (For related story see A section.)
“While heavy metal takes it to the extreme,
I don’t think that your key wildlife habitat
ought to be a place where you are thinking of
fairly large public events,” Riniker said. “Do I
think a classical music concert might be less
RYAN DORGAN / NEWS&GUIDE
intrusive? Of course, but that isn’t the funda-
mental question.”
The neighbors have fought the concert for
the past two years.
Frank Chapman, owner of Heart Six, feels
making 800 people happy is worth the neigh-
bors’ inconvenience. He doesn’t listen to metal
and would have Van Morrison perform if it
were up to him. But two years of hosting the
festival has upended his opinion of the genre.
“Everybody as a whole has this preconcep-
tion of everybody dressed in black and being
goofy,” Chapman said. “It’s not that at all.
They’re professionals in their careers who have
the ability to travel all the way out here and
hang out and listen to music they love, which
isn’t anything like anybody thinks. It’s almost
embarrassing for me that I thought that.”
Breaking down walls
Metalheads know what you think about
them.
“First off, they think we sacrifice babies to
Satan,” said Sabrina Smith, who hosts a metal
podcast, “Bitchin Metal.”
Misconceptions, they say, range from peo-
ple thinking they’re devil worshippers to con-
flating mainstream metal heads with fringe
white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. That’s
all rooted in a little bit of truth. Norwegian
black metal bands like Mayhem are known
for their association with church burnings and
murders committed in the 1990s. There cer-
tainly is still some singing about Satan and a
subgenre called National Socialist black metal
espouses neo-Nazism.
But if you ask anyone at Fire in the Moun-
tains, Nazism falls firmly into the “not metal”
category. They disavow any Nazis who may
have co-opted their music in a hateful way.
And while the music may be angry the
people are friendly and warm and kind of,
well, nerdy, in a “Lord of The Rings,” “Magic:
The Gathering” type of way. They dismiss the
satanic elements and roots of metal music as
antiquated, a relic of the past or as “tongue in
cheek” or “a schtick.” It’s like they’re all in on a
joke that’s gone over your head. It’s exagger-
See Metal on 12D
12 SCENE // Jackson Hole News&Guide // July 17, 2019
Wolves in the Throne Room guitarist Kody Keyworth plays during Fire in the Mountains.
Metal
Continued from 2D
ated, not literal.
“You break up with your boyfriend, and if he
did it in a bad way and cheated on you, you’re
gonna have intense feelings about that — hurt,
sadness, anger,” Feher said. “So what’s so great
about metal is you can take that to an extreme
and express it, but do it in a way that’s so ex-
treme, it’s like it’s comical, almost.”
The heaviness of it provides a catharsis, chan-
neling aggression and negative feelings. The
black clothes, the piercings, the tats, the “Christ
Ripping Blackened F---ing Thrash” and “Hail
Satan Worship Doom” T-shirts: they’re all
about self-expression and camaraderie.
“Being here, you don’t care about the walls
you put up the rest of your life,” said Charles
Salvo, a fan.
Sure, there’s probably some sense of cama-
raderie among fans of any type of music. But
metal seems to brings together people with
shared experiences, like skateboarding or teen-
age rebellion.
“It’s about feeling empowered,” Oregon fan
Sean Minor said. “I think it’s about finding
your place in a society that may have rejected
you or what your musical tastes are or how you
like to dress. It’s kind of, the outcasts. Like even
in high school, the kids who wore black, they
always hung out together. We’ve all experienced
something similar to that.”
Following the festival’s Sunday morning ses-
sion of “headbanger yoga,” a class geared toward
relieving whiplashed necks, Mathias Nordvig, a
professor at the University of Colorado-Boul-
der, gave a well-attended presentation about
Nordic mythology before musical sets.
But Nordvig isn’t just an expert on northern
European myths. He’s also a metal professor
of sorts, having researched the role of extreme
metal in Scandinavia, where it’s commonplace.
Nordvig said that, similar to the hippie
movement of the 1960s, metal is about individ-
ual liberation from established religion, as well
as other constraints, like the expectations of a
parent or job.
“It’s an ideology that tells you you’re OK the
way you are,” Nordvig said. “It’s OK that you
choose to live your life like this way and that you
choose to engage with these particular things
that you find interesting without having a dog-
matic book telling you, ‘You have to do these
particular things and this is what good means
and this is bad.’”
Non-metalhead attendees were impressed
by the crowd. Local food and drink vendors said
they were polite and tipped well. Teton County
sheriff ’s Master Deputy Bret Bommer leaned
against his truck at the festival’s entrance, where
he viewed the festival as “fairly mundane.”
There weren’t any incidents, other than a noise
complaint. A few attendees even approached
Bommer and another deputy for a hug.
“It’s an easy crowd,” Bommer said. “Can’t
beat it.”
Heavier and heavier
Metalheads usually get started on the tame
stuff: Guns N’ Roses, Led Zeppelin. That taste
leads some to crave something heavier. And
heavier. And heavier.
“I just needed it to be harder, and more f-
--ed up as time goes on,” said Liz Ruggles, a
40-year-old fan from Texas.
Believe it or not, the Beatles are often cred-
ited with getting the ball rolling on metal and
hard rock in 1968, when the band released
“Helter Skelter.” Black Sabbath followed that
with a charge into metal, finding commercial
success exploring satanism.
The bands that followed intensified that
sound, as household names like Iron Maiden
and Metallica emerged. When that wasn’t
heavy enough, Slayer and Venom delivered
more violent lyrical themes and increasingly
technical music. Metal’s reputation for brutality,
Satan worship and corpse paint (think Kiss, but
scarier) developed with European bands like
Mayhem and Burzum.
These offshoots continued to splinter until
the metal scene fractured into its current seem-
ingly infinite subgenres: thrash, hair, doom,
black, death, and many others. Black metal
dominated this year’s Fire in the Mountains,
though many fans struggled to put it in a box.
“Black metal is the grimmest and the bleakest
of all forms of metal,” Stormkeep band member
Jason Langfield said. “It’s all about death and ha-
tred and evil, it’s f---ing dark and it’s atmospheric.
But it’s equally grim as it is beautiful.”
A different place
Most fans had never been to Wyoming and
Heart Six Ranch played host to Fire in the Mountains along the Buffalo Fork River. The organizers of the festival considered the beauty of the natural environment to be a perfect setting for a metal festival.
never been immersed in a mountain landscape.
They were awestruck and that was the intended
effect: to blend the beauty of nature and music.
“We’re not f---ing celebrating death, we’re
f---ing celebrating life,” said Torrey Guruth-
Nathron, a fan who goes by Deathweaver. “We’re
celebrating the life of the f---ing Earth around
us, we’re celebrating our f---ing lives and the lives
of all our f---ing friends.”
(“We curse like sailors, but we’re very friendly,”
fan Chelcia Dunn said.)
Atmospheric black metal band Wolves in the
Throne Room was a major draw for festivalgoers.
The core members of the Olympia, Washington,
band are brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver.
Their Saturday night headlining set was the first
Aaron Weaver had played in about five years, af-
ter taking time off to raise his kid, work in the
studio and tend to his farm.
“I was beginning to get disconnected from the
sources of the music for me, which is the salt wa-
ter and mountains and the plants and the animals
where we live,” Weaver said.
Nature is central to the brothers’ music.
“It’s about love of earth and love of each other
and love of community, love of family, love of tra-
dition, love of ancestors,” Weaver said. “There’s a
lot of good ways of being in the world, you know,
and that’s a different perspective than a nihilistic
or satanic metal band.”
That idea of differing perspectives seemed to
permeate the whole festival. It wasn’t that Weav-
er and his brother didn’t scream on stage, blast
the double bass drum, or pump distorted guitar
through their amplifiers — they did.
It was more that the bands represented a wide
swath of worldviews, metal and otherwise. While
Wolves in the Throne Room espoused the sort
of naturalistic focus Weaver described, The Ruins
of Beverast and Munly and the Lupercalians, a
gothic folk band from Denver, used their lyrics
and performances as an opportunity to play with
fictional worlds they’d created.
The members of Blood Incantation, a death
metal band from Denver, and the members of
Osi and the Jupiter, an orchestral folk band that
had never played live before Fire in the Moun-
tains, fostered introspection. Chris Brown, a cel-
list and composer in the latter group who goes by
Kakophonix, said he was focused on creating a
“live ritual” rather than a concert experience.
“The music is supposed to affect the audience
members in a way that helps them to see beyond
their normal perspective,” Kakophonix said.
Munly of the Lupercalians agreed.
“I want to take people to another place,” he
said, “Let them get out of this — some might
say — terrible real world.”
Will Todd, a fan from Austin, Texas, said the
music “brings you places.”
“It’s more like a journey rather than just mu-
sic,” he said. “It transports you to faraway lands
and fantasy worlds and sorrow and dread, and all
these emotions that come with it.”
Warm moshy feeling
In the weekend’s moshes, the pit went where
the people wanted it to go. When they felt in-
clined to run in circles, the pit spun. When they
felt like getting together, locking shoulders in a
massive line and banging their heads, the pit did.
And, when somebody tripped, fell over, or got
knocked down, three or four hands pulled them
to their feet.
Deathweaver and Monehra Mari, who goes
by both Moon as well as her stage name Datura,
were locked arm in arm, equal parts skipping and
throwing one another into the mosh pit. They ran
in circles, pushed each other around, tripped, fell,
got up and generally had a good time, moving
their bodies in something vaguely resembling an
aggressive synchronicity. The pit spun, stopped,
collapsed in on itself and exploded outwards,
sometimes all at the same time.
When Moon tripped and hit the ground,
Deathweaver and two others grabbed her and
pulled her to her feet, all four rejoining the throng,
shoulder-length hair bouncing through the dust.
“The brightest lights cast the darkest shad-
ows,” Moon said. “I feel like a lot of people in
the metal community are super f---ing loving
and so, you know, the pain they’ve experienced in
life, I feel like it’s the reason they gravitate toward
metal music.”
Nordvig, a pit veteran, said moshing — and
metal as a whole — creates a space for people to
express emotions they can’t otherwise, whether
that’s anger, rage or exhilaration.
“I think that’s probably the most important
lesson people could learn from this kind of scene
SCENE // Jackson Hole News&Guide // July 17, 2019 13
RYAN DORGAN / NEWS&GUIDE PHOTOS
even if they’re not interested in the music,” Nord-
vig said: “Give yourself an outlet.”
Standing around the fire later that night, Jon
Soresensen, from Saskatchewan, said moshing is
intended to be cathartic.
“People don’t go into pit to hurt people,” So-
rensen said. “That’s more of a release of energy.
Get your anger out. It’s all in good fun.”
When Dakota LeClair, from Denver, sus-
tained one of the festival’s only injuries in the
pit — a hyperextended knee — a man asked him
how many fingers he was holding up and tested
his hearing. Another woman, a nurse, walked
over and asked about his pain level. When he was
sitting in the back of the festival by the first-aid
tent, festivalgoers came over to check on him
“Everyone showed up knowing that every-
thing is a community,” LeClair said.
Self-proclaimed as “metal to the core,” Matt
Farides is a member of a select group of people
who can pull off the loincloth-with-cowboy-hat
look. He said despite the outfit, he’s introverted,
but being among fellow metalheads is a comfort
space where he’s at home.
“It creates enough of a common theme for
people to just relax,” he said. “Everyone’s here
for the same reason. There’s no strangers, it’s just
friends you haven’t met yet.”
An anticipated return
As the dust settled after the Ruins of Bev-
erast’s set, Feher and Walker emerged from the
crowd, dusty and wet from sweat and rain. Tripp
joined them from the back of the festival where
he’d been working with volunteers to keep the
first-aid tent from blowing away in the storm.
Backstage they relived the show. It wasn’t the
first time they had been in the crowd for a perfor-
mance at this year’s festival but the rainbow, the
storm and the crowd’s reaction set it apart.
In 2020 Walker, Feher and Tripp hope to
bring the festival back.
“This is where my heart is, Tripp said. “When
I grew up metal was my escape and my home A metal fan headbangs to Wolves in the Throne Room. Organizers of the festival said
and that’s what this is. It’s bringing that to other they plan to do it again next year.
people.”
“It’s a way of life,” Feher said. the bass drum kicked behind him, the lights lit Contact Billy Arnold at 732-7062 or
“A way of life,” Walker agreed. up the stage and the crowd roared as the Scottish entertainment@jhnewsandguide.com,
“It’s my sanctuary,” Tripp said. metal band Saor dove into its first song, starting and Allie Gross at 732-7063 or county@
It was fitting that, as Tripp spoke those words, off the final, closing set of the festival. jhnewsandguide.com.