"We live in the house of unspeakable gratitude in the city of hunger." — from Mystic Lake, The Beartooth Range by Shann Ray I would have first heard the name Ferch some 35 years ago, the summer we moved to Livingston, Montana. It was 1982 and I was 12....
I was 14 or 15 years old when my father, Burl Jones, created a wildlife museum. This was a couple of miles south of Livingston, Montana, off Highway 89. Dad was on his way to an applauded career as a bronze artist, and had just...
It’s been nearly a week of frigid, blustery weather — shoveling and re-shoveling, plowing and re-plowing, snow scuttling away and then coming back around, swirling up the benches on both sides of town and then down again, pushed by giant snorts of wind. It’s wrestling...
The story of dude ranching in the Rocky Mountain West is, in a way, the history of the contemporary West itself. Through the lens of ranching and recreation, you can see, in microcosm, aspects of what’s made the West such an iconic part of the...
When Alan Kallio was in high school, he was transfixed by an image of an ice boat he saw in National Geographic. Not long after, he was working in a lumber yard and able to gather enough pieces to build his own craft, basing it...
If you don’t believe Montana was once a land of skyscrapers, ask the wind. Decades ago, the infinite huff of the mountains and the high plains was raked by more skyscrapers than soar today in any major city. Everywhere across Montana they stood: tall, slope-shouldered, wooden...
Usually it goes like this. I’m skiing in the backcountry, up Bear Canyon east of Bozeman or along one of the Yellowstone Park trails off U.S. Route 191 south of Big Sky. Much of the time I have the trail to myself, but occasionally I’ll run...
The images float before the viewer’s eyes, strange and otherworldly — like photos of the Crab Nebula from Hubble, or mixings from a hippie light show. They might be satellite shots of the Mojave, cell-section studies from an electron microscope, or hallucinatory paintings from a...
Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War by Daniel J. Sharfstein (Norton, $29.95), is a hefty and thoughtful examination of the widely studied 1877 Nez Perce War. Sharfstein, a professor of law at Vanderbilt University, offers a nuanced...
When a Bay Area family decided on Jackson Hole, Wyoming, as the location for their second home, they initially chose to live on a ranch. “We knew we wanted to be near a world-class ski mountain, and also have some kind of town where we...