The stakes are awfully high, he says.

Ten years of his life. Nearly 300 pages.

No less than a "war against the mindlessness of the use of the West."

And, Trimble says, possibly incendiary material about some of Utah's most prominent movers and shakers, among them Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett.

The book centers on the notorious Snowbasin land trade deal between the federal government and Utah billionaire Robert "Earl" Holding.

Seated at a picnic table in the leafy backyard of his Salt Lake City home, Trimble wonders aloud what the senators will think of his depiction of their involvement in the trade.

Upstairs in his study he's got a couple of postcards, written in careful cursive, that he'll mail off soon.

To Sen. Hatch: "You are a major character in these stories. I've done my best to tell them honestly. I think you will find my book of interest."

To Clint Ensign (one of Holding's Sinclair Oil deputies): "My book is finally coming out - and I'm proud of it, many thanks for your help."

He hasn't written one to Holding himself, but he hopes a copy of Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America might find its way into the magnate's hands.

"My wife's the realist," Trimble says, shrugging. She keeps telling him to get a grip.

Fifty-eight, silver-haired, and mustachioed, Trimble folds his small white hands together like a reprimanded schoolchild. But from the look in his eye, you just know he's not giving up.

For 10 years, foolishly or not, he's been holding out for the slightest glint of recognition from Holding.

He freely admits to hanging out at the service station on 900 East where his nemesis reportedly used to pump his own gas.

He less freely admits to the unrequited dream of himself alone with Holding in an office on the upper floors of Sinclair's South Temple headquarters.

Trimble's dream is no revenge fantasy. Rather, he explains, visiting with Holding would be a chance to ask two burning questions: "What is the legacy you plan to leave?" (In his lifetime Holding, reportedly worth $5 billion, has no record of philanthropy). And: "Why does anyone in the world need to own so damn much land?"

The genesis of Eden - Trimble began working on his book 1998 with a different question in mind. With the Olympics coming to Salt Lake City, he wanted to know just what kinds of mountains would have to be moved - literally - to get a single ski racer down an Olympic slope.

Trimble, who has a master's degree in ecology, had written some well-regarded works of photographic journalism, but his New York agent returned his first Olympic book proposal, saying no one wants to read about the Olympics, "they just want to watch it on TV." That's when Trimble allowed the project to morph into something else.

Bargaining for Eden is a puzzling patchwork of memoir, manifesto, and journalism.

It begins at Snowbasin in 1999 during the opening of the new women's downhill course. Trimble encounters Holding in person for the first - and really only - time. The two shake hands, utter their names, but quickly part ways.

"Did he remember my letters and calls - all unanswered?" asks Trimble. "Had any of his minions said anything about me?"

The narrative moves to the author's nostalgic remembrance of childhood treks across Wyoming and stops at Holding's iconic Little America. There, Trimble imagines that he and his family must have been rung up behind the counter by the young, hardworking entrepreneur.

The book then shifts into a chronicle of Holding's meteoric rise in stature - to the successful owner of Sinclair Oil, to the mastermind behind Idaho's Sun Valley resort and Salt Lake's Grand America hotel to the 14th largest landowner and 59th richest man in America, according to Forbes magazine.

Trimble then recounts the long process by which Holding exerted power and spent cash to build Ogden Valley's Snowbasin into an extension of his larger franchise.

What follows are sections in which Trimble chronicles the literal inch-by-inch building of the resort and the resistance that local environmentalists and citizens tried to put up in the face of what seemed merely inevitable: the irrevocable alteration of their known landscape, and by extension, their way of life.

Trimble reaches outside classic journalistic bounds when he offers environmental credos such as "Arrogance is the opposite of relationship"; when he flirts with conjecture -describing a suicide that takes place on the Snowbasin grounds as tantamount to ecoterrorism; or when he oozes guiltily about the purchase of a Torrey vacation home, the ownership of which makes him feel all too similar to Holding.

The most challenging material is Trimble's wholly immaterial relationship with the man in question, the object of his desire and his loathing - a man he can know only by hundreds of degrees of separation and thousands of moments of inference.

Subject and object - Holding is one of Salt Lake's most reclusive residents. Like many who have tried before him, Trimble was never able to secure a one-on-one conversation with his book's subject.

Trimble admits to being "conflict-averse" in person, though he admits that, in writing the book, he is at war with the kind of "mindlessness" Holding's use of land symbolizes.

Bargaining for Eden, isn't biography, says Trimble.

It's not really about Earl," he says, using his antagonist's first name instead of any common honorific like "Mr." or the man's last name.

Then why make Holding the book's central character and rely so heavily on hearsay and personal meditation to sew the book together?

Trimble is coyly evasive here.

"I wanted readers to experience Earl the way most people do," Trimble tries to argue - as a specter, as a Howard Hughes-like, unreachable megamogul, as the wizard operating the controls behind the nation's - and Utah's - economic curtains.

As the proverbial guy in the black hat who with his finger on the trigger, can make everything change in an instant.

Waiting and Holding - In his shaded backyard, Trimble describes with relish the eeriness of the Sinclair Oil building on South Temple.

"There's no signage," he points out. No indication that the building is Holding's home office, the site of one of the most successful, privately held corporations in America.

However unremarkable the building may be, though Trimble says, you can always infer something from what is even slightly visible.

At Christmas, Trimble says, with a half-smile, the Sinclair building is festooned with holiday lights. In the warm months it is planted copiously with petunias.

"Earl loves his petunias," Trimble says with a little knowing laugh, as if there's meaning to be found in beds of flowers.

That's what makes it all too easy to doubt the fundamental veracity of Trimble's assertions about Holding and even the facts he presents about the Snowbasin deal. So much of what he presents is based on conjecture and something a psychologist would call "displacement" - in Trimble's case an only half-conscious mechanism by which what is objectionable or frightening in oneself is made manifest in another.

So much about Trimble's journey was, and still is, covered in a kind of personal haze.

On the day that Trimble mails his friendly postcards to senators and other luminaries, calls by a reporter about Trimble's book are met, first by awkward silence.

At Sen. Hatch's office, for example, the press secretary had never heard of Trimble's book and later said in a statement that the senator "has not read the book."

A call to Sinclair Oil headquarters about Holding's awareness of Trimble's long-awaited work is met with a similar set of question marks.

"There's a book about Mr. Holding?" an assistant to Ensign asks. "And what exactly is it about? And what is the name of the author? Can you spell that, please?"

At home in his garden, Trimble says "hitting walls" is part of the whole Snowbasin/Holding story.

Still, he holds out hope that his book will speak truth to power in the ways that the literature of witness sometimes can.

That is, if those in power, ever get to hear him.

Then maybe Trimble can do what his arch enemy Holding does all the time.

Make something seismic happen.

Alter, with a godlike hand, a familiar landscape or the very way that people think.

In other words, maybe, just maybe be able, like Holding, to move a mountain.

jcheckoway@sltrib.com

Slide show at SLC Main Library

Salt Lake City author Stephen Trimble will give a slide show presentation on his new book, Bargaining for Eden, on Thursday, 7 p.m., at the Main Library, 210 E. 400 South, Salt Lake City. Free.