Every great setting is more than a backdrop. In The Winds, the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming function almost like a character in their own right, silent, immovable, and unwilling to let the past stay buried. To understand why David J. Bunnell chose this specific place for this specific story, it helps to understand the place itself.
Lander sits at the base of the Wind River Range in Fremont County, Wyoming, often described as one of the last true gateway towns to genuine wilderness in the Rockies. It is small, unpretentious, and shaped by the mountains around it, a place where the outdoors is not a weekend escape but simply how life works. Lander is also home to the National Outdoor Leadership School, which has drawn generations of climbers, backpackers, and outdoorspeople to the region to train in the very mountains that surround the town.
The Wind River Range is one of the most rugged and remote mountain ranges in the continental United States. It holds Gannett Peak, the highest point in Wyoming, along with the largest concentration of glaciers anywhere in the American Rockies. Its granite walls, alpine lakes, and high, exposed passes are legendary among climbers and backpackers, and equally well known for how quickly the weather there can turn dangerous. It is not a landscape that forgives carelessness.
It is not just a setting. It is a character that demands a reckoning.
The Wind River Range also sits alongside the Wind River Indian Reservation, home to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho people, whose history and presence in this region run far deeper than any road or trailhead. That heritage is woven into the identity of the land itself, and readers of The Winds have specifically noted how respectfully and vividly that history is treated within the novel.
A story about a man forced to confront a decades old tragedy needed a setting that could hold that same kind of weight. The Wind River Mountains offered exactly that: a place remote enough to isolate a character from every distraction and excuse, harsh enough to mirror the difficulty of what he is confronting, and beautiful enough that the reader understands why he cannot simply walk away from it, even when it would be easier to.
Mountains like these do not rush. They do not offer easy answers. A person standing beneath a granite wall in the Wind Rivers is forced, whether they like it or not, into a kind of honesty that flatter, gentler landscapes rarely demand. That is the emotional terrain David J. Bunnell wanted for this novel, and it is why Wyoming's Wind River Range is not simply where The Winds takes place. It is why the story could not have happened anywhere else.
Step into the Wind River Mountains for yourself. Learn more about The Winds, or head straight to Amazon to pick up a copy.
