By Stan Potts
Former Idaho outfitter Stan Potts grew up, explored, worked in and lives in some of the wildest country in America – the famed wilderness of northcentral Idaho. In the process of spending a lifetime of working at just about every enterprise a wild country person can, from rancher and cowboy to wilderness guide to outfitter, plus a dozen others thrown in for good measure, he has pitted his own penchant for pursuing wild things into a way of life unique to his land and his personality. And he has done it, almost every step of the way, as a family man. His adventures – well, most of them anyway – were his family's adventures, whether it was living in the wilds or sharing the arduous lifestyle of a wilderness outfitter. Now, in a big 192-page book issued in both hardcover and softcover editions, titled “The Potts' Factor Versus Murphy's Law,” he tells in a straight-forward and yet often humorous way the travails of a life spent battling the vagaries of the famed Murphy's Law (it something can go wrong, it will at least half the time) in terms of just about every enterprise he ever undertook. From ranching to hunting wild sheep (he was one of the first hunters to score the famed grand slam of wild sheep) as well as sharing the stories of any number of mishaps from the air (he's a pilot, too) to a breathtaking encounter with death in an accident that slowed him down long enough to put his life story down on paper, Stan Potts has been a legendary figure in the state of Idaho and its great River of No Return Wilderness country for more than five decades. From his first brushes with fame (winner of the National Rodeo Finals when he was in high school to a big write-up about him and his wife, Joy, in Life magazine in 1972, Stan Potts has battled horses and wild fires, drought and calamity as well as plane crashes and unfriendly, even dangerous, wild critters such as the grizzly bear.
Beyond that, his fame as a wild-country storyteller proceeded his new book. As Dr. Richard Clark says, in lauding Potts' storytelling ability, in the book's foreword: “Stan Potts has been crawling around in the hills of Idaho about as long as there have been hills of Idaho. He looks like, talks like, and smells like the hills of Idaho. He even walks like the hills of Idaho. I doubt he could make it on level ground. And there is one more thing, he loves the hills of Idaho.”
“ The Potts' Factor Versus Murphy's Law” was issued in 6x9-inch format by Stoneydale Press of Stevensville, Montana. Its 25 chapters and more than a hundred photographs chronicle the highlights of Stan Potts' amazing back country life. It literally takes the reader inside one incredible adventure after another. Indeed, Stan Potts' book makes you wonder not only how one person could accomplish how much he has, especially in the face of the many adventures and misadventures in which he was able to overcome Murphy's Law and his own penchant to stack the odds against him, which he calls the “Potts' Factor.” This is a book that is one fine read.
ISBN 1-931291-04-7 The Potts' Factor Versus Murphy's Law (softcover) – $23.50
ISBN 1-931291-09-8 The Potts' Factor Versus Murphy's Law (hardcover) – $28.50
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