SEPTEMBER IS A MONTH of transition here on Central Montana’s high plains, often beginning with temperatures that near triple digits and ending with a cold front that reminds us of winter yet to come. This particular year, the first storm of the season had arrived...
IN A ROOM ON THE LOWER LEVEL OF THE Livingston-Park County Library in Montana, a group of more than 15 people listen to Marco Restani talk about ospreys. He starts by discussing how, after World War II and up through the early 1970s, osprey populations...
MY ABIDING LOVE OF THE MISSOURI BREAKS was earned through sustained hardship, a little like how stubborn streptococci earn resistance through repeated exposure to antibiotics. [caption id="attachment_14751" align="alignright" width="300"] A short-horned lizard warms itself in the sun.[/caption] I arrived in the Breaks later than some, sooner than...
AT LAKE McDONALD, IN GLACIER NATIONAL PARK IN JULY 2018, my moment came late in the day, after the trailhead parking lots had emptied, after the swimmers had docked their giant pink dragon floatie, after the families had retreated to campgrounds to roast marshmallows, after...
BIG SKY COUNTRY IS ALSO BIG BEAR COUNTRY. Most estimates suggest that Montana has between 13,000 and 17,000 black bears (Ursus americanus) and roughly 800 grizzly bears (Ursus arctos ssp.). Most of the grizzlies in the contiguous U.S. live in and around Glacier and Yellowstone...
IN CLASSIC FASHION FOR a college student in upstate New York, Sam Hoffmann first started brewing beer in his dorm room. But it was a childhood spent traveling around the rural byways of Europe that sparked his interest in beer, cider, local foods, vineyards, and...
FOR A FEW DAYS IN EARLY JUNE, Bozeman positively brimmed with activity and emotion: Cubans moved furniture out of the way and danced for pleasure; Afghan women biked across a beige desert; a Kiwi fire chief strove to save a cardboard city from burning; Pakistani...
PLENTY OF WESTERN ARTISTS AND THEIR CRITICS LIKE TO TALK ABOUT "PLACE" as a primary inspiration for their work, but when artist Ted Waddell speaks of the landscape, he refers to the actual ground itself. His use of the word “ground” when one expects to...
THERE IS A SAYING ABOUT LIVING IN THE WEST, that it’s like one big Main Street, where the connection to just about everyone you meet is whittled down from 6 degrees to more like 2 or 3. So I was not completely surprised to learn...
WHEN YOU FIRST ENCOUNTER SUE TIRRELL'S CERAMICS, you might feel a hint of nostalgia or a nagging sense that you have seen something vaguely similar somewhere before. But where? Perhaps in one of the fairytale books you read as a child — Aesop’s Fables or...