This is the story of how Margaret grew up going to grandfather Stanford law professor A.M. Cathcart’s cabin at Fallen Leaf and how with the help of her five young children she wrote the first comprehensive guidebook to any wild area in Idaho. Trails of the Sawtooth and Boulder-White Cloud Mountains was first published in 1979. Tom Lopez, author, says this about the book:

Like all good memoirs, this book not only relates interesting history but also puts us in Margaret’s life, times, mind and soul. Margaret’s adventures exploring the Sawtooth, Boulder and White Cloud mountains are a priceless documentation of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area’s (SNRA) early years. From a historical perspective her narrative of those years adds a much needed eyewitness account of the way things were and of how they evolved. However, the memoir is much more than an Idaho time piece.

She somehow found the time to not only successfully raise five children but to also instill in them a love of mountains. All the while this grand venture proceeded she was sewing sleeping bags and down jackets from kits to outfit her family, overcoming her fear of bears and the resistance that many locals had to anyone publishing an Idaho guidebook. Many locals found it sacrilegious that anyone would consider letting the world know about Idaho’s secret places. As a fellow Idaho guidebook author I can attest that the resistance to Idaho guidebooks was real even in the 1980s. Margaret paved the way for all Idaho guidebook authors who came after her.

All of her adventures and struggles documented in this memoir coalesced in the publication of the definitive guide book to one of America’s greatest treasures, Trails of the Sawtooth, and Boulder-White Cloud Mountains. In the process of exploring and writing Margaret Fuller became an Idaho treasure.