This morning, the prairie is treating us to a Homeric sunrise as dawn begins to spread her saffron robes across the eastern sky. The time is late March, the place a remote corner of central Montana’s sagebrush steppe, and Lori and I are here to...
Dyna found the ring-necked pheasant and pointed. She froze. Even her tail stopped moving. Brillo stopped in her tracks, too, honoring Dyna’s point. As both dogs held point, Anita Andrus walked forward and flushed the bird. Brillo and Dyna watched it rocket up from the...
For connoisseurs of rugged, alpine landscapes, the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho are unquestionably the crown jewel of the Gem State. Michael Lanza, a regular contributor to Backpacker, astutely observes that the region’s numerous “10,000-foot peaks, [which] form a Sierra-quality skyline, [and] an eastern escarpment...
The first time I heard an elk bugle, I was a greenhorn teenager sitting on a mountainside in southern British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains, miles from the nearest road. My father had kindly brought me along on a wilderness horseback hunt, with elk as the primary...
In the rural 1.5-million-acre Blackfoot watershed, Montana’s characteristic working lands are on full display. Generational ranches are replete with grazing cattle and haystacks; rolling grass and strings of timber are seldom interrupted by the intermittent farmhouse or cabin; deer and elk graze, while waterfowl and...
Last October, Troy Collins received an unexpected, daunting honor that, almost a year later, “still gives me goosebumps,” the artist admits. The Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival informed Collins that he’d been selected as the Featured Artist for 2022. “That meant,” he says, his voice...
It’s widely acknowledged that nature inspires art, but the adage is rarely transposed. Yet, art through the ages has certainly left its imprint on nature: in gardens and dwellings, in water features and public sculptures, in designs and in deeds. The relationship between artists and nature...
For most of his life, Ott Jones has been an outdoorsman and a sculptor. As an elementary school student in Spokane, Washington in the early 1970s, he learned from his father how to hunt, fish, and camp. And both of his parents were Western art...
Their texture furrowed from heat and wax, ironed, then marked, Shawna Moore’s encaustic paintings ignite conversations between herself and the world, each a culmination of a life spent in contemplation and exploration. “My work comes from my life as an outdoors woman and trying to...
The first thing you notice is the light. The common thread running through Chessney Sevier’s art — whether etching or oil or encaustic — is her deft and masterful rendering of light. Sun illuminating a summer meadow. The neon of a country bar shining out...