As angler numbers increase, is grace the answer? It's early morning on Idaho’s Silver Creek. The water is calm, the fly anglers are calm. There is a symphony taking place between insect and trout, between trout and angler, and between angler and angler. It’s music played...
For millennia, flowing water has been a powerful metaphor in mythology, religion, and art, explaining our precarious passage down the river of life. And when once-sparkling trout streams slowly, warmly, and mysteriously slip into the earth — only to upwell transformed — perhaps they symbolize...
An adventure-loving couple combines biking and fishing One could consider Russ Roca and Laura crawford gurus of simple living and the Zen of bike packing. Living in a tiny three-room apartment in Missoula, Montana, they own one car and cell phone between them, and get around...
A trail re-route to save a species [caption id="attachment_13415" align="alignright" width="300"] The 1,200-mile Pacific Northwest Trail, that stretches from Glacier National Park to the Pacific Ocean, has the potential to put the diminishing Yaak grizzly population at risk.[/caption] Last year was the 50th anniversary of the National...
Montana’s smallest ski area is a big part of the community One Sunday last winter, on the second ski day of a weekend road trip to Bear Paw Ski Bowl, I pulled into the parking lot a little before noon. Making the rather slow, 35-mile drive...
Writer Tim Cahill and I walk, scouting the horizon for pronghorn antelope (Antilocapra Americana), an animal like no other and North America’s fastest. None appear. No cattle are here now either. From this bench situated within public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management,...
Is the next state-record northern pike swimming in Fort Peck Reservoir? A hardy crew of ice anglers is betting their spears on it Joe Horn briefly disappears in a cloud of blue smoke. His airboat has just fired to life, and after a sputter and a chug, the...
The small town of Tetonia, Idaho, propels a tradition Ever since he was a small child, Brent Robson’s life has been intertwined with snowplanes. His father, Dale Robson, constructed his first one in 1949 — just one year before Brent was born. For those not in the...
Skating the backcountry I’ve skated before, but this time it feels like flying. The ice is smooth and fast; it takes almost no energy for me to glide from one side of the lake to the other. I push with my left leg and flow along...
After 37 years, Big Sky Resort’s ski patrol director is hanging up his coat and cross During his first week of work ski patrolling at Montana’s Big Sky Resort in 1982, Bob Dixon was buried in two avalanches. He also saved someone’s life. By that time, the 33-year-old...