The antique mall below Last Chance Gulch in Helena, Montana is full of temptations. Myriad treasures fill the rooms, many beyond price. An enormous glass bowl full of colorful matchbooks draws my eye. Atop them lies a tattered brown book. About the size of a...
As I detour from Interstate 90 and drive down the rural road toward Fishtail, Montana, my daily concerns diminish to distant contours in the rearview mirror, and my focus turns to the colorful frame ahead. Like scenes in a motion picture, images from the road can...
On a late summer morning in southern Idaho, our campground neighbors hang a “Happy Birthday” banner from the awning of their trailer. They are the kind of empty nesters I aspire to be; tanned and fit, they began the day kayaking in the lake and...
Each month on the cusp of the full moon, Mark Paulson and about two dozen other people attend a regularly scheduled business meeting in Kalispell, Montana. Then, they move to the parking lot, get out their telescopes, and look up. As the president of the...
Jackson Hole Mountain Resort is well known for deep snow and long, steep ski runs, but recently the summer season has rivaled the winter for big mountain adventures. The newly expanded via ferrata, offering guests an outstanding climbing experience with 15 different routes above 9,000...
The quest for supernatural revelations or visions in wilderness environments has been chronicled in a variety of cultural contexts. One of the oldest expressions of human spirituality, this religious tradition was embraced in North America, particularly among Central and Northern Plains peoples, and especially in...
As a conservation filmmaker, I often travel to remote and unfamiliar places, but few have surprised and challenged me more than Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin. In 2021, I found myself there filming my first feature documentary, Golden Eagles: Witnesses to a Changing West, with conservation ecologist...
Master Luthier Kevin Kopp came to us through the best journalist working in America, Richard “Dick” Manning. Manning, writing about music while learning to play the guitar, approaches it the way he approaches everything: with an inexhaustible curiosity and intelligence — two qualities often inextricably...
I’m watching claws and jaws. Snowflakes and fur are swirling through the scene, too, perfectly focused in my camera’s lens. The claws and jaws belong to a female grizzly bear. It’s snowing in late May. Two small puffs of fur, the sow’s twins, weave between...
Peeking to preen beneath water gleam to glitter under the amber spell-bound, serene sunlight. Swiftly swimming so their scales sparkle of endless crimson, teal, gray, olive. Whisks through foreign lands, crossing peaks, icy slopes. Consistently wavering in the water. Content and unknowingly holding us so that our breathes hold to admire pearly eyes, leopard fins, amber gills even as they...