About

Monty Orrick was born just north of San Francisco. That’s where he grew up and went to school—graduating from the University of California in Berkeley with an English degree. Once he nailed the sheepskin to the wall, he went without hesitation into the Sierras with a fly rod and remained there every season for the next ten years. The best years of his life. Since that time, he has resided in Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico and, most recently, Maine.

The focus of all his magazine writing occurs in places out West—short stories about backpacking in the Sierras and fly fishing (published in The Drake and California Fly Fisher.) The Crater Lake Murders is his second book of non-fiction. His first, Feeding the Beast, is a journalism text about how to tell stories in a TV news format.

He began researching this book while working for the ABC affiliate in Portland, Oregon—initially co-producing a three minute “sweeps piece” about it in 2013. Unlike every other TV assignment, he did not forget it the next day and never got the story of the Crater Lake murders out of his system. A breakthrough came in 2020. After that he devoted himself to it full time. So, as his mother used to say, “It took a lot of work. You better enjoy it.”

Other Works

  • Feeding the Beast

    2014