On July 25, 1877, a band of weary Nez Perce began to descend the Bitterroot Mountains into Montana. As the subtitle of this piece suggests, I’ve chosen to focus on the Montana leg of the Nez Perce flight toward Canada for several reasons: I live...
At 14 months old, Harpy makes her way over upended picnic tables, through tires, and across a wooden ladder suspended 8 feet in the air. Her blond jackrabbit legs slip out from underneath her, first one, then the other. She freezes long enough for the...
In Montana, ice climbing has a bit of a medieval-cult feel. Those who belong are fiendishly devoted; those who’ve never tried it wonder why anyone would fall into its grip. Hanging off frozen icicles, with razor-sharp daggers that might bite more than the ice if...
Both sky & mountain wearing the same coat today Faces lost in breath Yellow leaves drifting on soon to be frozen pond Ships at sea of clouds Slipping on the ice Old man wonders: Is this my last time hearing birds? Snow-deepened night sky Each flake exactly alike: All melt in the end Pushing through the gray Crow...
Matt Pavelich has done something wondrous in The Harrows: A Novel of the American Century (Bar R Books, $24.95). This five-generation story of the Harrow family rolls off the pages with such liquid grace and poetic clarity that one feels a new Montana classic has...
Lisa Simon, owner of Radius Gallery in Missoula, Montana, still remembers her earliest encounters with Stella Nall, whose Native name is Bisháakinnesh. “She had such clarity of who she was and what kind of art she was creating,” Simon recalls. “Even though she is so humble,...
In the late 1970s, when Mike Papke was 5 years old, his older brothers took him to Bridger Bowl Ski Area just outside of Bozeman, Montana and went straight to the top of the Bronco run — an area notorious for large, knee-bashing moguls. They...
Each February, Punxsutawney Phil emerges from his burrow in small-town Pennsylvania to tell the American public whether they can look forward to six more weeks of winter. In Montana, cold-weather conditions can last for eight months, and the rule of thumb is to not plant...
In October 1973, I traveled to Butte, Montana for The New York Times to photograph its copper miners. Known as “the richest hill on earth,” Butte once supplied over a third of the world’s copper. Miners — Old Stock Americans, Finns, Cornish, Welsh, Chinese, Italians,...
Few images evoke the despair of the Great Depression more poignantly than photographs of the enormous dust storms that defined the Dust Bowl era. Frequently described as “black blizzards,” these airborne tsunamis were primarily caused by successive droughts, the most significant of which occurred in...