Last night, snow swathed the meadow. This morning we scroll the window shades and trace nature’s busy history of trails, hooves and clawed footfalls crisscrossing acres blanketed white. Such complicated comings and goings, traversing so nearby while we slumbered unsuspectingly. Deer, elk, rabbit, squirrel, raccoon, milling about the moonless overcast midnight. Even now, invisible birds...
A Million Acres: Montana Writers Reflect on Land and Open Space (Riverbend Press, $34.95), edited by Keir Graff and featuring stunning photos by Alexis Bonogofsky, includes essays, short stories, excerpts from fiction, and even a song that explore ideas around open lands and the writers’...
Late one night in 1894, two men stopped outside a shack behind the old Grey Mule Saloon in Miles City, Montana. A middle-aged woman came out of the shack with a cheap suitcase and a “war bag,” a sack containing the remainder of her meager...
When it comes to design, Tracey Byrne, of the Massachusetts-based Waldyn Group, has become known as a transformation specialist. Having undertaken more than a dozen renovations in Big Sky, Montana, since she and her family discovered the wonders of this tucked-away mountain town 15 years...
Just south of McCall, Idaho, at what’s known as the McCall Activity Barn, my family and I stepped into our cross-country skis and glided into a gray ocean of fog. Our 12-year-old son Anders took the lead, keeping his skis in the tracks so he...
In the small town of Channelview, Texas, a young boy stands on scaffolding and reaches up to paint the white front tooth of a smiling woman who is 24 feet tall. It’s 1967, and Gary Lynn Roberts is working for his family’s sign painting business,...
When visitors arrive at the airport in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, they might get their first glimpse of the town’s mayor, Pete Muldoon. In addition to serving on the local government, Muldoon also holds a part-time job at Jackson Hole Airport where he works guiding planes...
Autumn’s brown grass is a heart beating for winter, for spring that becomes summer, for summer that fades to autumn and autumn’s brown grass. Autumn’s brown grass is a heart beating for bears and wolves, their bodies moving, then stopping, then moving again across open miles of autumn’s brown grass. Autumn’s brown grass is a heart...
WHEN GEORGE BIRD Grinnell visited Glacier National Park in 1921, he was outraged when a stable manager insisted that the 72-year-old be accompanied by a guide on the park’s trails, the very ones he’d spent decades exploring and preserving. Grinnell wrote to Arno Cammerer, then...
Plenty Coups’ legacy in Big Horn County Just eight days before the terrible events on the Little Bighorn in June 1876, a young Crow chief crested the ridge above the Rosebud valley in Southeastern Montana. He and his warriors paused to admire the neat organization of...