Located on the eastern flanks of the Highwood Mountains of Central Montana is the sprawling Strand Ranch, home to one of the last big working cattle operations in the state. Set on 30,000 contiguous acres — half of which are protected in a conservation easement...
It was called the Great American Cattle Drive, and as Sharon Moore remembers it, 300 head of longhorn out of Fort Worth, Texas, traversed more than 1,400 miles across six states to arrive six months later to her hometown of Miles City, Montana. It was...
I have always loved the open prairie grasslands and coulees that form typical habitat for sharptails, Huns, and pheasants — Big Sky Country defined. An enormous swath of it lay spread out before me one cloudless September morning, running all the way north from the...
A chorus of crickets hums in the background as farmer Jody Manuel describes his latest experiment. The organic Petite Crimson lentil plants that he’s standing among reach his knees and are as thick and green as the top of the Amazon rainforest. He crouches to...
One of my favorite driving expeditions in Idaho is to follow the Salmon River from the Stanley Basin downstream to Challis. On this trip, the abundance of hot springs and mountain views are accompanied by an undeniable sense of nostalgia, a reminder of what the...
Once you’ve seen mountain sheep in their native habitat — the high passes above timberline that catch early snow and hold summer’s light — sheepless pastures seem profoundly empty. It’s the same with the scoured badlands, where bands of prairie bighorns, spooked by an intruder,...
THERE'S NO WALKING BY ONE OF ARTIST Beth Cavener’s sculptures without stopping to look. In each one, there’s an immediate story, and it’s told through hundreds of pounds of shaped and painted clay that often takes the form of an animal figure standing greater than...
AFTER LIVING IN AND AROUND the Greater Yellowstone area for some time now, I’m used to driving over a rise and being blown away by what I find on the other side. It might be a valley full of grazing elk, a peak jutting triumphantly...
THERE'S A CANOE HANGING FROM THE CEILING of Dick Idol’s art studio, and it’s not just any old boat. Purchased from a fur trade museum in Michigan more than 35 years ago, this 16.5-foot Ojibwa birch bark canoe was made between 1850 and 1880 in Northern...
ATTRACTION, ATTACHMENT, AWE — all come with having a sense of place, a strong resonance to one particular locale on Earth, which speaks to us in a language that feels tailored to our hearts. For artists, this sense of place serves as a generous wellspring...