Dean Krakel - 1952
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I. Biography
Dean Krakel was a man who always wanted to be a cowboy. He is now a photo editor at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado. In this profession, he could find the places and people he loves without having to herd cows. He has captured "the spirit of the land and its people" in his writings according to Alan Dumas in "The Cowboy Way".
Krakel was born on October 23, 1952, in Laramie, Wyoming. Krakel lived in Jackson, Wyoming, where he wrote his first book Season of the Elk, which is about the elk herds in northwestern Wyoming. His father is the head of National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Krakel enjoys sitting alone in the main gallery surrounded by his favorite paintings: Moran's Mountain of the Holy Cross, Russell's When Mules Wore Diamonds, Remington's Hunter's Camp in the Bighorns . Krakel grew up in the outskirts of Laramie.
When Krakel was old enough to travel, his father took him on trips through the country. One of his father's and Dean's favorite places was around Keota. This was a small town in north central Colorado that was "surrounded by a vast emptiness of wind and buttes". He wrote in a journal about this place when he was eleven. He thought that God had forgotten about Keota because there were no fences or people there. He spent his summers on cattle ranchers in Colorado and Montana according to Alan Dumas in "The Cowboy Way".
Krakel loves everything about the cowboy's life and history. The only thing is that he hates horses and cows. In the summers, when he was at the cattle ranches, he was thrown off horses many times. With this in mind, he decided to be thrown professionally and took up rodeo riding according to Alan Dumas in "The Cowboy Way" .
Krakel says, "I made it to the whistle just once and when the horse stopped bucking, I fell off. Today I'll do anything to avoid riding a horse." Krakel lives in Colorado with his wife, Alisa, and three sons. His 19-year-old son works for Winter Park. Krakel remarked, "It feels a little odd to be going through fatherhood for the second time, but it has done wonders for my work." Krakel went to Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado, for a year and then Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma, for about two years. He then dropped out to be a photographer/writer. That is one of his regrets because he didn't finish his education; although, he says that his life has been a great educational experience for him.
Krakel is best known for his photo series in the Rocky Mountain News called "Krakel's West." He has been shooting pictures in the West since 1977 and gave the best to Scripps Howard Publishing for his book Krakel's West. Krakel worked for The Pinedale Roundup, a Wyoming weekly, before he joined the News in 1987. His work won many awards and he was hired as a general assignment photographer at the News. One of his awards was for photography. Krakel was recently part of the team that won a national first place in photo editing in the Pictures of the Year competition for coverage of the Columbine High School shooting.
Krakel stated, "A photographer needs a child's eye, that sense of wonderment. Little kids are wide open to everything, and there's a lot in Colorado to be wide open to see. It's a harsh country and a country of great extremes. The people who left the comfortable life in the East to settle this state knew that your vision had to be big to live out here on the plains."
Krakel wrote two other books. One book was Downriver-A Yellowstone Journey. This is a story about a 700-mile trip by the Sierra Club in 1987 down the Yellowstone River from its headwaters near Yount's Peak in the Absaroka Mountains of Wyoming, across Montana to its confluence with the Missouri River. Krakel lived in Livingston, Montana, when he worked on this book. The other book was a compilation of photographs that was published in the Denver Rocky Mountain News. It was called Krakel's West in 1994.
II. Contact Krakel
Dean Krakel can be reached at
dkrakel@yahoo.com III. Works Cited rakel, Dean. Email interview. 7 Mar. 2000.Krakel, Dean Fenton. Adventures in Western Art. Kansas City: Lowell Press, 1977.
Krakel, Dean. "The Cowboy Way." Rocky Mountain News 20 Nov. 1994. Rpt. in Newsbank NIN, fiche 12, grid F3.
This essay was submitted by a student of Judy Iliff, a teacher at Campbell County High School in Gillette, Wyoming.