Kevin Holdsworth

Kevin Holdsworth Explores His Connection to the Uintas in Red Stone Heart

By Lauren Matthews

Red Stone Heart: Scrambling High Uinta Peaks, Kevin Holdsworth’s newest book, is a memoir of geography and identity: specifically, how Holdsworth has been sculpted by Utah’s tallest mountain range, the Uinta Mountains. Holdsworth’s earlier books, Big Wonderful: Notes from Wyoming, and Good Water, share similar threads to Red Stone Heart, namely, how person, passion, and place interweave.

Holdsworth, an associate professor at Snow College Richfield, first started climbing the high Uintas as a teenager. The drive to mountaineer has held even through a move to southwestern Utah (with wife Jennifer Sorensen), where he teaches composition, research writing, and his favorite course, ENGL 2420, Literature of the Outdoors.

“I like to get outdoors, but I don’t want to share it with a lot of people,” said Holdsworth. “A lot of us who live in rural Utah know where to go to get away from the crowds.”

Avoiding crowds comes easy when mountaineering Utah’s highest peaks.

In Red Stone Heart, the views of the Uintas are terrific. Holdsworth guides the reader into meandering, well-trod paths that arc and weave. His writing is gentle, intimate, with an eye as wary and discerning as winter sun.

The prelude opens with the risks and gains of climbing the high Uintas. Red Stone Heart circles around these risks: the terror of almost losing friends to mountain perils and the grief and guilt of losing friends to life’s perils. The laurels of mountain climbing are just that, Holdsworth suggests – laurels. “Nobody gets to be a better person by peddling a bicycle … or slogging peaks. Just thicker laurels”

The ideal of a “better” person is a running theme, as his passion for high mountain adventuring often falls under his scrutiny. He writes, “How about trying to be a better husband, Kevin, or a better father? Maybe a better friend? Hate to even say it, but a better professor? The way you’ve lived leaves plenty of room for improvement, nothing but room for improvement.”

It’s a decidedly utilitarian view. Holdsworth’s mountain excursions emboss incredible joy and infinitesimal insights, fleeting as June clouds. Holdsworth follows his undeniable pull to climb mountains. But what is the essence of that pull? His fellow climbers ask, “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” No “good answer” seems to be found.

At its end, Red Stone Heart brings the reader full circle with Holdsworth’s realization that the lack of a satisfying “why?” also includes a satisfactory answer for “why not?”: “Without these memories, what would I have? When I drive over Highway 150, I cannot see a peak that I have not climbed, and that feels right.”