Being out on the range in the rural West forces a change in how you relate to the world; your safety depends on it. But even when you’re by yourself, hours from the closest town, you’re anything but alone — the landscape keeps you company....
The Occidental Hotel started as a couple of tents along Clear Creek, at the foot of Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. Charles Buell, a carpenter from Wisconsin, made camp in 1879, just three miles from the new Fort McKinney. As was often the case, an “army town”...
for Lauren Raven at canyon rim fast by talon to stone quietly casts its body upon torrents of wind cottonwood banked below anchored to soil by root drifts a veil of seed over gale of riverflow and all along the ridge the feeling of a question surrendered and all along the water the feeling of a question abeyant the vital...
In Headwaters: The Adventures, Obsession, and Evolution of a Fly Fisherman (Patagonia, $27.95), Dylan Tomine casts a line into his life of angling adventures with vivid detail, political and environmental astuteness, and wonderfully infectious humor. The narratives collected here take the reader all over the...
We gaped from our cabin deck as thunder roared and lightning stung the high peaks of southwest Montana’s Gravelly and Madison ranges, 10,000-foot monoliths like Sphinx and Helmet. Rain strafed our roof — a deluge unseen in months — dousing intense July heat and wildfire...
When you drift down the Yellowstone in a wooden boat, you know it: The momentum is different. There’s a glide through the waves instead of a pull. On a July afternoon, it can smell like the trunk of a sun-warmed cedar. A wooden boat sounds...
The chief problem for the grasshopper, in terms of its status among fly fishers, is the mayfly. The mayfly — delicate, slender, standing quietly on a river, the soft peaks of its full wings angling high — is the insect that, to trout-stream fly fishers,...
Madison bluebirds and other miracles Listen to the river sing sweet songs, To rock my soul. — Grateful Dead The ranger at the northeast entrance to Yellowstone National Park had been adamant: “Do NOT engage in any recreational activities.” Thus advised, my friend Jerry and I set off toward...
In 1914, as the silent-movie wave swept the nation, Hollywood’s biggest character was Jim Stokes, the Two-Gun Man. In the film The Bargain, Jim wore a six-shooter on each thigh, rolled his cigarettes one-handed, and rode a brown-and-white pinto named Fritz. He was the good...
It’s midafternoon in October, and a bonfire is burning behind our house. With me is David James Duncan, revered Montana author, storied activist, and one of the deepest spiritual and ecological minds of our time. He’s just finished a forthcoming novel, Sun House, a sweeping...