“I just baked some snickerdoodles. Eat ’em while they’re hot!” It was an unsuspecting proclamation while camping on southwest Wyoming’s Green River. And yet, to my astonishment, my friendly campground neighbor strolled over from her site and presented a plate full of delicious cookies as I...
Charles Punchard arrived at the headquarters of Yellowstone National Park on July 19, 1918, with a letter in his hand. Signed by Stephen T. Mather, director of the newly formed National Park Service, the letter declared that Punchard had been hired as the agency’s first-ever...
Let us begin with a flight of imagination purely of my own making. Around the time of first European contact, a band of Indigenous hunters has camped out of the wind in a sheltered canyon in what is now southern Montana. Perhaps they are Crow...
The first songbird to arrive on the thawing Northern Plains each spring isn’t the meadowlark. It’s the northern pintail, a graceful duck that whistles like your favorite uncle. That is, badly. Still, it’s the sound of spring across Montana’s Hi-Line and Canada’s prairie provinces. This high-pitched,...
Next to the iconic Missouri River, in the small city of Great Falls, Montana, I’m crouched with a camera near a mannequin wearing a repurposed prom dress in a room overflowing with fabrics, threads, and sequins. At center is a Singer sewing machine and at the...
Sweat dripped from my brow as I bent over the grass, trying to figure out what I was looking at. “You need to find the shiny green ones,” Melinda Bullshoe Kipp called to me. “Is this one?” I asked, holding up a blade of grass. “No,” she said,...
The Northern Rockies remain a treasure trove for artistic talent, with many new and emerging artists hitting their stride. Here are a few artists catching our attention. Amanda Markel Sculptor Amanda Markel takes the fluidity of paint and translates it to bronze. Through the idea of negative...
It’s a Saturday afternoon in Red Lodge, Montana, and I’m on my fourth cup of coffee as I take my seat in a small room above Black Canyon Bistro. Three songwriters — Montana’s Lena Rich and Tom Catmull, along with Nashville’s Tai Shan — tune...
For many viewers, the first thing that emerges when observing a Kenneth Yarus painting isn’t the sheer scale of the mountains, the glint of glacial water, or the depth of the alpine sky. It’s how the piece makes a viewer feel — an emotional resonance....
Growing up in Billings, Meghan Spielman and her sister were encouraged to explore every kind of art. They took classes at the Yellowstone Art Museum, studied watercolor painting during the summers, and were rarely told there was a right or wrong way to create. Today, Spielman’s...