All gifts are temporary The sun, the moon, the stars Stripes on the backs of chipmunks Beaver tracks in the mud. This morning It was a troop of robins Busking for worms Their bouncing advancements timed To a foghorn of cows. Meanwhile The rising sun Didn’t believe in a thing Not me, not you And the...
A regular contributor to Big Sky Journal, John Clayton is the author of Wonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon and Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands. In addition to Big Sky Journal, Brian...
“To write a meaningful memoir, I have been told, you must have interesting people living in interesting times,” writes Jo Anne Salisbury Troxel in Waiting for the Revolution: A Montana Memoir (Sweetgrass Books, $17.95). By recounting the lives of her parents, Troxel — a distinguished...
Writer Thomas McGuane made Montana his permanent home in 1978. After working hard in Hollywood and playing hard in Key West, Florida — where he was known as “Dr. Berserko” — he decided to trade in the thrill of a peripatetic life for Montana’s big skies,...
While researching the possibility of building a sleek and modern home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a retired couple went to lunch at a Chicago restaurant with two design principals from Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. Architect Peter Bohlin had already spent time at the couple’s home in...
THE SUN IS RISING IN THE SMALL TOWN OF DRIGGS, Idaho, and like most summer mornings in the Teton Valley, there’s a distinct chill in the air that will fade as the day progresses. Sleepy spectators wander from their cars, making their way across the...
I’VE BEEN LUCKY ENOUGH TO STAY AT MORE than two dozen Forest Service cabins around Montana since I moved here nearly 30 years ago. And I’ve stayed in many of them more than once, some for several days at a time, and during every season...
LAST YEAR, WRITER THOMAS MCGUANE UPDATED The Longest Silence — his 1999 collection of essays on trout, tarpon, and bonefish — by adding 15 new chapters, including a final one called “Shrink to Fit: Fly Fishing While Old.” In that essay, he recounts how he...
ERNEST THOMPSON SETON’S BIOGRAPHY OF A GRIZZLY has been a classic illustrated animal book for children since it was first published in 1899. Despite the factual-sounding title, the book is fiction; Seton invented the storyline for his bear-hero Wahb. But there was a real grizzly named...
ONE AUTUMN DAY, I WAS SITTING ON A RIDGE in the foothills of the Alaska Range glassing for caribou when I spotted a strange, dark form scampering across the tundra a hundred yards away. Despite my familiarity with wildlife in Alaska, I’d never seen anything...