“Most people don’t know what goes on in an oil field,” she said. “It’s a war landscape. Those boys are out there 24 hours, even when it’s 50 below and the wind is blowing sideways.”

After a day in and around Jackson, with its mega-mansions built by the super wealthy, including some from the energy industry such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Ms. Fuller offered a tour of the other Wyoming, the grit and beauty and working-class economy of Sublette County. “We’ll take a look at the sausage factory,” she said as she packed her skis for the trip.

On a brilliantly sunny day, on a sweeping landscape of glittering, snow-covered plains and mountains, we parked the car along the road and headed out on a three-mile cross-country schuss on snow so deep it buried the fence posts. The route was fairly flat until the end, when it ascended through pristine, trackless snow in a grove of lodgepole pine and aspen that camouflaged her cabin.

Ms. Fuller opened the cabin for the first time in weeks. When the road is open she spends weeks at a time at the cabin, but in winter, she uses it less because access is difficult. Ms. Fuller said she wrote much of the book there on a laptop in her bed, covers pulled up, a box of tissues on the table next to her. “I cried a lot as I wrote,” she explained.

After a lunch of fruit and bread at small table in the main room that is living room, dining room and kitchen, Ms. Fuller put on her skis and headed out. She paused in front of her home at the crest of the hill and looked out over the prairie that rises up to the mountains known as the Winds. She said that the view was bound to change.

“It’s all been leased,” she said. “It’s all slated for oil and gas development.”

Later we drove past the tiny town of Pinedale, and across public land, where towering steel oil derricks flying American flags slice into the blue sky and a natural landscape once full of antelope, jackrabbits and sagebrush is now a vast industrial landscape. White pickup trucks raise clouds of dust and fierce winds blow tumbleweeds across prairie scraped to bare dirt by bulldozers.