Few images evoke the despair of the Great Depression more poignantly than photographs of the enormous dust storms that defined the Dust Bowl era. Frequently described as “black blizzards,” these airborne tsunamis were primarily caused by successive droughts, the most significant of which occurred in...
Outdoor winter pastimes have a way of looking a lot like a love of suffering: the cold of melted snow on icy fingertips; the sting of subzero air on delicate nostrils; the muscle burn of trudging through deep, heavy snow. I think about winter fly...
This has never happened to me at a restaurant before. I’m seated at a picnic table. Before me, rows of vegetables and herbs unfurl themselves, pushing into the green foothills of the Gallatin Range. The light is golden and coming in slantwise between steel-gray storm...
Editor’s Note: This column is adapted from When Montana Outraced the East: The Reign of Western Thoroughbreds, 1886-1900 by Catharine Melin-Moser (University of Oklahoma Press, April 2025). Nineteenth-century Montana folklore tells of a beautiful chestnut-colored Thoroughbred mare named Oriole. On April 10, 1894, the heavily pregnant...
When Charles Fritz moved to Montana in the 1980s, he ran into a problem. Up until then, the Iowa-born artist had carved out a niche for himself in the watercolor market, painting sporting still lifes: wooden decoys, hanging mallards, shotguns. “But when I came out...
Knife maker Will Hutchinson — known to most as “Hutch” — has spent a lot of time thinking about the marriage of form and function. With an undergraduate degree from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in Ohio and a Master of Fine Arts from the...
Let’s face it, Old Faithful, Great Fountain Geyser, Norris Geyser Basin, and the various Yellowstone fumaroles don’t get a lot of attention when they’re in the steam phase, which comes after all the “oohs” and “ahhs” and visual thrills of an eruption. Sitting by myself,...
Guardians on a hill Ever a watchful eye. Spraying branches to fill An ever-enveloping sky. What history have they seen with many a passers-by? Cruelness of the white sheen Finally releasing buds of spring. Industrious inhabitants of fur Stocking up in hidden holes. The giants still, pausing to hear The inner workings of their soul. Autumn comes...
Some themes may be too big for one story. Love, the overarching theme of Shann Ray’s Where Blackbirds Fly (University of Nebraska Press, $27.95), is explored throughout the five novellas that make this novel. This is because love, in Ray’s handling of it, contains much...
In the predawn black, I trek up to a saddle off Emigrant Peak’s west flank, nestling into a small thicket of young Douglas fir to watch the day arrive. My back leans against an old rampike, a once-grand whitebark, stripped and bald, but still standing...