Author Topic: Fictional places we love: Brokeback Mountain - from San Francisco Chronicle  (Read 2393 times)

Offline ptannen

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/30/TRL0RTA6P.DTL&hw=brokeback&sn=001&sc=1000

places we love: Brokeback Mountain
Spud Hilton

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Unreal place: Brokeback Mountain, on Forest Service land north of Signal in northern or central Wyoming.

Background: The mountain and Signal don't exist outside Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" short story (New Yorker, 1997) and Ang Lee's film (2005). For the movie, however, filmmakers turned to Alberta, Canada, specifically Kananaskis Country, a collection of provincial parks and protected lands in the southwestern part of the state, west of Calgary. The pinnacle identified as Brokeback is actually Moose Mountain, a 7,995-foot peak at the southern end of the Canadian Rockies; Jack and Ennis' first camping spot is near Canyon Creek. For an exhaustive scene-by-scene guide, visit www.findingbrokeback.com.

Why we love it: Regal, craggy, fractured peaks rise from a carpet of lodgepole pines, where isolation, trails and plentiful cold mountain streams make for excellent horse-packing, cowboy camping and, ahem, skinny-dipping. Part of its beauty is in its stark contrast to the dreary, dusty and lifeless flatlands below.

Real-world counterpart: While some of the scenes were shot on private land, much of the movie's wilderness scenery is in public park land in Kananaskis Country (tprc.alberta.ca/parks - search for "Kananaskis"). It's easily accessible - maybe too much so for those seeking Brokeback isolation. A 9-mile round-trip trail takes hikers and bikers to the top of Moose Mountain, although hazards include occasional bear sightings in the woods and lightning strikes above the tree line. Those seeking a more literal experience (in Wyoming, that is) might consider Bighorn National Forest ( www.fs.fed.us/r2/bighorn) in north-central Wyoming, which has 189,000 acres of wilderness, 1,500 miles of trails and, obviously, the Big Horn Mountains. (Some "Brokeback" devotees use the nearby town of Ten Sleep as a jumping-off point for pilgrimages.)

Trivia: In Proulx's original story, Jack and Ennis never return to Brokeback Mountain after that first season, opting instead for camping in dozens of other ranges and parks.

- Spud Hilton

This article appeared on page G - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/30/TRL0RTAA6.DTL&hw=favorite+fictional&sn=004&sc=424


Fictional places we love: Travel guide to our top film, literary sites
Spud Hilton, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, September 30, 2007

    More...
It is the ultimate armchair travel: verdant jungles, idyllic islands, quaint villages, shimmering seas and toothy mountains you know better than your own backyard - but that you'll never see in person.

Why? Because these places don't exist.

Or, rather, they don't exist outside the pages of a beloved novel or the flicker of the silver screen.

Destinations we visit in fiction capture our imagination just as surely as the places described in the best travel literature or documentaries. One in four of us has "visited a destination because a favorite show took place there," according to a survey by Kayak.com, and half of those polled said they want to take a "TV-inspired trip."

What follows are 10 of Travel's favorite unreal places, not because they are the most beautiful or Utopian (yawn), but because the description or script struck a chord that made us yearn to go there - just as good travel writing and videos should do for real destinations.

Ground rules: We've excluded "Lord of the Rings"-style fantasy, extraterrestrial sci-fi and cliches: no Xanadu or Shangri-La, and no Margaritaville - the American version of Utopia..

In a sense, the places we've chosen are real: They were inspired by or filmed in a real place, and likely are the doppelganger of a place with many of the same qualities, which we'll identify. Just because it doesn't exist doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to go there.

See our favorites in the linked box above right.



Tell us about your favorite fictional place - and its real-life counterpart - by adding your comment online at sfgate.com/travel. A selection of answers will be printed in a future edition of Travel.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/30/TRL0RTAA6.DTL

This article appeared on page G - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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Offline Meryl

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That's cool, Pete.  Brokeback is the greatest choice!  I might have told them to add New Zealand to the list, since it doubled beautifully for Tolkien's Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings.
Ich bin ein Brokie...