When I was stationed as a medical officer on the Fort Peck Reservation 50 years ago, I fell in love with the prairie but missed trout fishing. I found a few farm ponds with stocked rainbows, but that didn’t satisfy my need for dry flies...
We should bother with keeping sage grouse in the West because they are a measure of how the environment is doing,” says Martin Townsend, the conservation director for the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance. “If sage grouse go downhill, we have a large-scale problem.” Less than a dozen...
Nestled between the Snowy Range and the Sierra Madre Mountains, the hamlet of Saratoga, Wyoming is full of historical nods. Hotel Wolf, which opened in 1893, anchors downtown. Guide shops, restaurants, and art galleries line Bridge Avenue. The North Platte River divides the town, whose...
My angling career began when I was a kid in rural Upstate New York, catching pan-sized native brook trout. (As a measuring tool, the pan didn’t have to be very big.) Around the time I was 9 years old, I began transitioning from worms to...
On a Thursday night in early May, there is hardly an empty seat at Bozeman, Montana’s Tune Up Bar. The bustling crowd is largely on the younger side — a snapshot of the growing city’s hipster population — and eagerly awaiting the night’s performers. The...
As a child, Benjamin Walter didn’t spend much time wondering whether he could be an artist when he grew up. He already knew he was one. “My family — we’re all artists or musicians. I have five siblings, and we all paint, make music, or both....
Wyoming landscape painter Jennifer Hoffman watches the light shift across the Jackson Hole Valley each day, waiting for moments that spark her imagination. She moved to the area nearly three decades ago to pursue her interest in landscape painting, and ever since, the region has...
Painter Mike Piggott’s work, like poetry, demands a second look. And even a third. His compressed kinetic energy flattens out across the canvas, conveying calmness, like that before a storm. He kidnaps images, then reunites them like babies switched at birth. In his painting Silence, thin...
Anyone coming face to face with Charles Young, a recent portrait by Idaho-based artist Aaron Hazel, could not doubt that they’ve encountered a formidable man, painted in a bravura style that sets right the subject’s woefully unsung place in American history. Born a slave in...
Stacey Herries makes her art from a sunlit studio on the east side of downtown Bozeman, Montana. The space is large and airy, just steps from yoga studios, breweries, and restaurants. Simply put, it’s prime real estate. “Though I promise you, it wasn’t anything special...