My family has been involved in the development of original Rocky Mountain Resort Towns for FIVE GENERATIONS, spanning from Bozeman to Telluride.
I have been a TOP PRODUCING Real Estate Broker in Montana for over 20 Years.
O utfitting the Rocky Mountain West through integrity, hard work and trust.
WYOMING
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“IT IS A PLEASURE TO WRITE THIS LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION ON THE GREAT JOB YOU AND YOUR TEAM DID IN BUILDING OUR NEW HOME. WE ABSOLUTELY LOVE THE HOUSE AND THE CRAFTSMANSHIP, QUALITY AND CARE THAT WENT INTO IT. YOU WERE EXTREMELY EASY TO WORK WITH AND ALWAYS PUT US, THE CUSTOMER, FIRST. THANKS FOR ALL YOU DID TO MAKE THIS SUCH A SPECIAL EXPERIENCE.”
-JACKSON HOLE CUSTOM CLIENT
156
Honoring the Queen of the Tetons
The world mourned the loss of the iconic grizzly 399 in October 2024 after the famous bruin was fatally struck by a car near Jackson, Wyoming. Local writer Brigid Mander pens this issue’s Featured Outlaw Honoring the Queen of the Tetons, who reigned from her throne in one of the wildest habitats in the Lower 48 for nearly 30 years, mothering 18 cubs and inspiring people across the globe to connect with and protect threatened wild species and places.
80
When the River Runs Dry
After a catastrophic failure of the St. Mary Siphon dried up northern Montana’s Milk River, the 18,000 people and 700 farms that rely on the critical waterway face down the devastating impacts of another season without the region’s lifeline. Mountain Outlaw contributor Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan provides an intimate examination of this disaster along the entire length of the water system, offering a glimpse of what it means for human communities When the River Runs Dry.
108
‘Jamie’s Turn’
As the daughter of famous writer Jim Harrison, Jamie Harrison may have literary influence in her bones, but the 64-yearold novelist has undoubtedly authored her own trajectory. After releasing the fifth installment to her acclaimed Jules Clement mystery series following a 20-year hiatus, the Livingston resident shares a glimpse of her life with Mountain Outlaw writer Toby Thompson, illuminating how her thoughtful body of work and personal history have carved a space for ‘Jamie’s Turn’ on the page.
Business owner Bill Powell (left) and Blackfeet Tribe Agriculture Director Craig Iron Pipe stand in the dry bed of the St. Mary Canal on the Blackfeet Nation, void of crucial water after an infrastructure failure in June 2024 that's had devastating impacts for the Montana communities that rely on this resource. Read more on p. 80. Photo by Dave Gardner
DEPARTMENTS
INSIDE OUTLAW
19 Letter: Stories from the Land
22 Publisher’s Lens: Lemonade Stand
24 Forum: Mountain Town Kids
TRAILHEAD
28 Our editor’s picks on Reels, Reads, Listens, Cause, Visit and Event
SHORTS
35 News in brief on a disease diagnosis discovery, chamber music in Montana and the economic impact of Yellowstone
OUTBOUND GALLERY
40 Farm Wife: How one life of contribution makes a community
ADVENTURE
54 Adventure Guide Stateline Yurt
60 A Journey Down the Wildest River on Earth Boating Alaska’s Alsek River
68 Après Guide Mountain Outlaw readers divulge their go-to spots
72 Under the Flyway A photo essay documents the Bridger raptor survey
LAND
80 When the River Runs Dry An irrigation failure threatens a year without water on the Milk River
90 Poem Coyote Returns
94 Considering the Hunter and the Herd Prioritizing coexistence with predator-friendly ranching
100 Greater Yellowstone’s Frontline Protectors Profiling area conservation nonprofits
CULTURE
108 ‘Jamie’s Turn’ Jamie Harrison stakes her own claim in Montana’s literary landmark
116 Book Review ‘The River View’ by Jamie Harrison
120 The Curious Case of Curling in Montana A humorous dive into Montana’s growing winter pastime
126 Giving Voice to a Quiet Revolution A girls education movement in rural Pakistan
132 Cutting-Edge Craftsmanship New West KnifeWorks
HISTORY
136 Full Steam Ahead How James J. Hill and the Great Northern built Montana’s Hi-Line
144 The Will to Remember A filmmaker seeks to honor Earthquake Lake history 65 years later
150 25x50x100 Journey through Greater Yellowstone’s past
152 Trial Lawyers for Justice Defending the vulnerable and holding the powerful accountable
FEATURED OUTLAW
156 Honoring the Queen of the Tetons Can grizzly 399’s death inspire the same action that her life did?
LAST LIGHT
168 Teton horse
Owned and published in Big Sky, Montana
PUBLISHER
Eric Ladd
VP MEDIA
Mira Brody
MANAGING EDITOR
Bella Butler
ART DIRECTOR
Robyn Egloff
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Fischer Genau
CONTENT MARKETING
Taylor Owens
COPYEDITOR
Carter Walker
ART PRODUCTION
ME Brown
Megan Sierra
SALES & ADVERTISING
Ersin Ozer
Patrick Mahoney
Ellie Boeschenstein
MARKETING DIRECTOR
Tucker Harris
ACCOUNTING
Sara Sipe
Taylor Erickson
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
Josh Timon
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER
Megan Paulson
VP DESIGN & PRODUCTION
Hiller Higman
DISTRIBUTION
Ennion Williams
Visit outlaw.partners to meet the entire Outlaw team.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Scott Bosse, Jen Clancey, Maggie Neal Doherty, Fischer Genau, Elisabeth Kwak Hefferan, Brigid Mander, Shelli Rottschafer, Bay Stephens, Ednor Therriault, Toby Thompson, Brenda Whaler
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS/ARTISTS
Colin Arisman, Melissa Butynski, Christopher Boyer, Hazel Cramer, Daniel Combs, Lynn Donaldson, Dave Gardner, Annie Gomiss, Halle Hauer, Neal Henderson, Tom Mangelsen, Micah Robin, Savannah Rose, Adam Sklar, Johnathan Steele, Toby Thompson, Madeline Thunder, Della Watters, Anna Wearn
Subscribe now at mtoutlaw.com/subscriptions.
Mountain Outlaw is distributed to subscribers in all 50 states, including contracted placement in resorts and hotels across the West. Core distribution in the Northern Rockies includes Big Sky, Bozeman and Missoula, Montana, as well as Jackson, Wyoming, and the four corners of Yellowstone National Park.
To advertise, contact Ersin Ozer at ersin@outlaw.partners or Patrick Mahoney at patrick@outlaw.partners.
Sunrise glow strikes Mount Moran on an October morning as Grand Teton’s famous resident grizzly 399 crosses the river. The photographer, Thomas D. Mangelsen, was among many who spent countless hours watching and photographing the enigmatic bruin, who spent much of her life raising cubs in close view of people. Following her October 2024 death, read about the legacy 399 left in the wild landscape where she hailed as Queen of the Tetons on p. 156. Photo by Thomas D. Mangelsen
FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS
The Curious Case of Curling in Montana | p. 120
Halle Hauer, founder of Bozemanbased Studio 2 Skip, blends a passion for drawing with a strategic approach to brand design. Her studio, originally a side project, is now a full-time pursuit, fueled by her experience as a senior designer, lead web designer and creative director. Beyond design, Hauer finds inspiration in rock climbing, skiing and mountain biking, which refresh her creativity and keep her work connected to the spirit of adventure.
Bay Stephens
Giving Voice to a Quiet Revolution | p. 126
Bay Stephens was a Mountain Outlaw staffer right out of college, before marrying and moving to Ireland—before the pandemic punted the newlyweds back stateside. He’s written about beavers, and Bozeman builders in Bhutan; monitoring avalanche from space, and composting human sh—waste. Stephens relishes any opportunity to write, squeezing articles in whenever curiosity grips and won’t let go.
Full Steam Ahead | p. 136
Brenda Wahler of Helena is a fourthgeneration Montanan who wears multiple hats. An attorney, freelance writer, independent historian and lifelong horsewoman, she has studied cantankerous characters from conmen to countesses. Author of Montana Horse Racing: A History, and Marcus Daly's Road to Montana, Wahler digs into the deeper stories behind the myths of the American West. Her current project is a sequel to Marcus Daly’s Road to Montana.
Lynn Donaldson
Outbound Gallery: Farm Wife | p. 38
Lynn Donaldson is a fourthgeneration Central Montana farm girl raised on the land her greatgrandparents homesteaded. She grew up road tripping throughout Montana with her parents and now shoots and writes about food and travel for Sunset, Travel + Leisure, National Geographic Traveler, Via, as well as many Montana publications. Donaldson lives outside Livingston with her husband and their three children, but she still considers her family's Denton farm home.
Brigid Mander
Honoring the Queen of the Tetons | p. 156
Brigid Mander is a writer based in Wilson, Wyoming. She covers adventure travel, tourism and attendant impacts, and has written features and opinion pieces about various conservation topics and land use issues in the American West. She contributes regularly to The Wall Street Journal, a host of outdoor magazines such as Backcountry Magazine, and online news magazines including Slate and Mountain Journal. In her free time, she is a skier, cyclist and backcountry hunter.
Shelli Rottschafer
Poem: Coyote Returns | p. 84
Poet, educator, and advocate Shelli Rottschafer (she/her/ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico in 2005 in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 she taught at a small liberal arts college in Michigan as a Spanish professor. Now she lives and writes in Colorado and New Mexico with her partner and their rescue pup.
Halle Hauer
Brenda Wahler
Unwind and indulge in rejuvenating wellness rituals after a day of adventure. Experience the tranquility of an elevated mountain sanctuary where the surrounding nature provides an unparalleled backdrop for heightened relaxation.
FROM THE VP OF MEDIA
Stories from the Landscape
Along a particularly barren stretch of U.S. Highway 50 in Middlegate, Nevada, there’s a large cottonwood tree sitting beside Bench Creek from which hundreds of shoes hang by their laces. The Shoe Tree. Legend has it, what began as a fight between a honeymooning couple in which the husband threw his wife’s shoes over the branches of a tree and stormed off for a drink at the local watering hole, grew into an unceremonious yet interactive tourist attraction to which passersby would add their own soled ornaments. As I drove by this past fall, a few fellow travelers had stopped for lunch.
One hundred and fifty miles west in Lee Vining, California, there’s the Upside-Down House. That’s right, the roof is the foundation, and the furniture is mounted to the ceiling inside, complete with a historical plaque explaining its origin. The house’s builder, Nellie Bly O’Bryan, took inspiration from the whimsy of children’s books. It’s across the street from the Mono Cone, a traditional cash-only burger dive, and has a breathtaking view of Mono Lake, one of the oldest lakes in North America whose lack of outlet leaves calcium tufas along its shoreline. I am often asked why I don’t fly when I travel across the West. The expanse of sagebrush that fills the Great Basin, towering granite of the Sierra Nevada and intricate red rock of the Southwest desert, along with the little tokens of human fingerprint like The Shoe Tree, UpsideDown House and Mono Cone, are all reason enough for me. The landscape holds stories that you miss when you’re in the air.
We present this 29th issue of Mountain Outlaw as a meditation on such stories. Contributor Elisabeth Kwak Hefferan traces the water-carved narrative of the Milk River, an
essential water source for Hi-Line communities that ran dry in 2024 due to a devastating infrastructure failure. Wilson, Wyoming, resident Brigid Mander pens a catalyzing eulogy of grizzly 399 after the treasured Grand Teton grizzly was killed by a car. We’re also excited to share stories from the landscape in other forms: Shelli Rottschafer’s poem “Coyote Returns;” Lynn Donaldson’s intimately shot gallery of a farmer in Denton, Montana; and Hazel Cramer’s photo essay documenting a decades-old raptor survey in the Bridger Mountains. From wherever you read them, we hope these pieces bring you closer to the landscapes in which we’ve embedded this magazine and serve as a reminder of the interconnectedness of life within them.
On my way back home to southwest Montana, exploring the opposite angles of the compass rose that took me to the Eastern Sierra, I pass through a more recognizable, but no less inspiring setting. It’s the place Captain William F. Raynolds deemed “one of the most remarkable and important features of the topography of the Rocky Mountains,” according to the historical marker at the rest stop along the Montana-Idaho border. From here, if you’ve honed your road trip skills like I have, your impeccable timing will grant you a splash of red alpenglow just as you’re in view of Sphinx Mountain. There’s nothing quite like meditating with the hundreds of miles between where you are, and where you’re trying to get.
Happy Reading,
Mira Brody VP of Media
The Lemonade Stand PUBLISHER'S LENS
It was a warm summer day when I received a text from a close friend that his son and daughter had a lemonade stand set up on the golf course in Big Sky. As my wife and I approached these young entrepreneurs between the eighth and ninth holes, I was struck by the courage and effort it took for them to create this business venture. I reminisced about the days when I set up an apricot stand as a child and what a profound impact that venture had on me: the art of running a business as a young child, the independence of being left to negotiate with adults and the excitement of closing a sale. This golf course lemonade stand was impressive, with an amazing location, colorful signage, well-dressed business owners, a quality product and friendly customer service. It was a professionally executed venture that even accepted Venmo, had business cards and offered free samples.
Now tasked with the gift of fatherhood, I often find myself reflecting on our cumulative impact on the next generation. What should our collective role be in mentoring and influencing them as they enter a complex and demanding world? As adults, I believe it is not only our responsibility, but also our privilege to support and encourage the younger generation. Doing so not only benefits them individually but also strengthens our communities and the broader world.
At Outlaw Partners, we are blessed with the opportunity to reach millions of readers and fans and positively impact the community. With the moral compass of our country spinning, an investment in the growth and well-being of young people is an impactful way to create change.
The success and well-being of children is deeply intertwined with the future of our communities, country and planet. Let us therefore commit to being the mentors, advocates and champions that the younger generation needs so they can grow into the leaders and innovators of tomorrow. The next time
you see a young business entrepreneur setting up a lemonade or fruit stand, selling candy door-to-door or hosting a car wash, I would encourage you to support them, knowing that your investment and encouragement could be transformative for them and benefit society as a whole. In addition, many adults have accumulated a wealth of knowledge and experience over the years. Whether it’s career advice, personal development or coping strategies for life’s challenges, mentorship can be invaluable to young people. When we invest in young people, we are investing in a brighter, more innovative and compassionate future. Let me also take this moment to give praise and appreciation for teachers. These classroom warriors are critical in the life journey of a child. As a society we need to compensate teachers appropriately and equip them with the resources necessary to execute at the highest level.
As we travel life’s path, I hope our youth encounter adults who are valued mentors and good role models. I hope that someday the youth can share stories of adults supporting their lemonade stand or teaching them problem-solving strategies and critical thinking and many other skills. May we adults help unlock the youth’s full potential and empower them to create positive change in the world. May the symbolism of a lemonade stand be a powerful metaphor for the cherished days of youth and the opportunities for adults to take a moment to lean in and become a mentor by sharing a compliment, recognizing the effort and buying a cold glass of lemonade.
Eric Ladd Publisher
Two young entrepreneurs, a summer day and their lemonade stand. Photo courtesy of Eric Ladd
Mountain Town Kids
By Jen Clancey
Mountain towns in the West are among the fastest growing places in the country. With so much energy and evolution in these dynamic towns, Mountain Outlaw thought it was fitting to seek the perspectives of those shaped by these communities and landscapes: the kids growing up in them.
While tourism and scenery can take center stage in mountain towns, residents continue to live routine lives in these unique places. Kids in communities like Big Sky, Bozeman and Driggs witness change resulting from rising populations and tourism where they live, but also call these evolving places home. Mountain Outlaw spoke to three kids to gain their insights and hear a little about their lives.
Billy Brennecke, 12, lives in Big Sky, Montana. He is on the Big Sky Freeride Team, loves the scenery in his community as well as his friends and family, and finds it funny that there are more golf courses than ski mountains in Big Sky.
Logan Ladd, 6, lives in Bozeman, Montana. She enjoys skiing, loves animals (especially her family’s dogs), and spending time with family by the creek.
Sedona Kilgore-Karp, 11, is from Big Sky, Montana. She loves skiing and riding horses and hopes one day to be a competitive barrel racer and veterinarian. She also loves hanging out with her dogs, Darla and Chloe.
Anna Milne, 11, lives in Driggs, Idaho. She is on the Grand Targhee Freeride Team, enjoys arts and crafts and competes in skijoring in the wintertime.
The following answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.
M.O.: What’s your favorite ski story?
Anna: My favorite story was probably when I did my first competition here on Old Reliable. Old Reliable is kind of a tricky cliff that you go through on one of our competitions. It’s just a free ride, so you have to try to get jumps and stuff.
Billy: So one time, my first competition in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, one of my coaches—his name’s Robbie—he took us into this powder stash and we ran into a moose with its fawn and I ran right over his feet and [Robbie] picked me up by the shoulders and like dragged me out and forever since he’s been calling me moose meat because I almost got eaten by a moose or charged.
Logan: My favorite story was with my first [ski] teacher. She was so nice. We learned how to … go in the woods there and we saw these signs and we go on the hills and it was so fast. It was so fun.
Sedona: I love skiing with my friends. We laugh a lot when we’re skiing. Like a lot! And when we fall, we laugh at each other too but always help each other up and we make sure we’re all okay.
M.O.: What do you think makes your town special? What’s your favorite thing about it?
Anna: We always see really fun wildlife. Like we saw a moose walking to Makerspace after school one time.
Billy: There’s only like 4,000 people, but we have so many great skiers … we’re a tiny town, but we got a big heart. And the mountain, it’s an iconic mountain … it’s just so fun to be home to one of the best mountains in the world.
Sedona: People who live here and are raising their kids here, even though we’re not related, we’re all kind of like a family and take care of each other.
M.O.: What do you wish your town had?
Anna: A pool. I probably wish they had one you could go to in the summers.
Billy: I wish it had a little bit more people, just more people so that I can be friends with more people.
Logan: Laser tag [and an aquarium] and I wish it was in our city.
Sedona: An animal shelter where people could volunteer too. And more big sledding hills.
M.O.: What’s new and exciting about your town?
Anna: Building some new places and new restaurants and they renovated Makerspace.
Billy: There’s a lot of buildings and a lot of houses in the Town Center.
Sedona: I love BASE [Big Sky’s community center]. It’s super cool.
M.O.: If someone new was visiting your town, what would you tell them about it?
Anna: The town is a pretty cool place, and they should try skiing or snowboarding, because it’s really fun. They should go to Targhee and try it.
Billy: That it’s the real deal to go skiing here. And you wouldn’t want to go jump off the cliffs that me and my friends do because it looks easy but it’s hard.
Logan: How are you feeling? And welcome. Welcome to the city.
Sedona: We may be small, but we’re mighty.
M.O.: What’s your favorite place in your town?
Anna: I like Makerspace. It’s where you go and you get to make all sorts of things. You get to sew and we walk there a lot after school.
Billy: The mountain.
Logan: I like [my backyard]. There’s so much deer jumping over the fence, and then we can see how far they jump.
Sedona: Hungry Moose. Definitely.
TRAILHEAD
Browse all Trailhead features online
The Mountain West can be explored by way of many different directions. At this Trailhead, we offer you paths through film, books, podcasts, music, experiences and places. Enjoy the journey!
–The Editors
POETRY: These Creatures of a Day
By Marc Beaudin
Livingston poet and bookseller Marc Beaudin presents a new book of poetry that is poignant and witty, yet somehow equally sharp and smooth. Celebrated by beacons of Western literature, These Creatures of a Day is regarded by writer, editor and teacher CMarie Fuhrman as “a talisman against the mundane … a spell book for enchanting wild people, places, and beings with understanding, attention, reverence.” A follow-up to the Elk River Books co-owner’s Life List, this collection of 56 poems published in spring of 2024 is a reflection of the human experience in its most fundamental form: a yearning for hope.
FICTION: The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
By Debra Magpie Earling
A 2023 novel penned by Bitterroot Salish author Debra Magpie Earling, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is a lyrical narrative that reframes the mythologized story of Sacajewea, the Indigenous guide and interpreter for the Corps of Discovery, as “the arbiter of her own history,” according to the novel’s synopsis, “casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her.” Staying true to the incomparably dreamlike prose that inspired the success of her first novel, Perma Red, Magpie Earling’s latest has garnered deserving and widespread praise. “A formally inventive, historically eye-opening novel,” according to The New York Times, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is both a timely and overdue reckoning of a fraught history empowered through the beauty of an artistic lens.
NONFICTION: Beyond Everest: One Sherpa’s Summit and Hope for Nepal
By Corinne Richardson
More than the typical tale of summiting the world’s highest peak, Beyond Everest chronicles the unique account of Nepali Pem Dorjee Sherpa through his escape from poverty, dual summits of Everest—one of which is where he married his wife, Moni—and their eventual immigration to the United States. Today, he carries on a love for mountaineering along with Moni and their two daughters from their home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a motivational speaker and a board member of Tsering’s Fund, a nonprofit that aids underprivileged children in remote areas of his home country. Beyond Everest is authored by Montana State University ESL professor Corinne Richardson, who calls Bozeman her home base to a life of travel and adventure.
THERMOPOLIS, WYOMING
Thermopolis, Wyoming, is not the usual winter visit pick of modern-day travel blogs and content creators, and this is one of the reasons why it’s ours. A departure from the heavily curated experiences of today’s travel market, Thermopolis offers a return to the kind of trip defined by its quirky wonder. Somewhat Seussian, as the name suggests, the north-central Wyoming town of less than 3,000 is best-known for its colorful geothermal terraces reminiscent of Yellowstone’s Mammoth Hot Springs. While it’s an experience to simply walk the terrace boardwalks in the almost zoo-like Hot Springs State Park, Thermopolis is an ideal winter destination for the park’s many retro-style hot springs facilities, including the Bath House, as well as the familyfriendly and waterslide-adorned Star Plunge and Hellie’s TePee Pools. The natural hot springs, which spill 18,000 gallons of 135-degree water over the terraces every 24
hours, are adjacent to the scenic Bighorn River, which also makes Thermopolis a popular boating and angling destination. To boot, Thermopolis boasts a historic downtown and petroglyph site. For the more temperate months, several campgrounds surround the town, but for a winter visit, consider opting for the Hot Springs Hotel and Spa, just a few steps from the soaking pools.
"THE WIDE OPEN"
"ANOTHER F*IN MOUNTAIN"
BY LENA MARIE SCHIFFER
Launched in August 2024, “The Wide Open” is a Montana Public Radio and Montana Media Lab podcast that tells the story of our evolving relationship with the Endangered Species Act. Through keen examinations and colorful storytelling, host Nick Mott brings listeners into a conversation of fascinating history and contentious present that culminates at the precipice of an undecided future. From stories of grizzly bears and wolves to a tiny fish in Tennessee, “Season One: Threatened” gives timely insight into the ripple effects of this crucial 1970s legislation.
In a relatable and metaphor-rich tune about rest and reset when you’re busy and burnt out, Livingston, Montana-based singer and songwriter Lena Marie Schiffer sings an original “Another F*n Mountain” to the folky sounds of Ani Casabonne’s fiddle and Kailey Marie’s upright bass. Available on YouTube, or during one of Schiffer’s performances, the song is emblematic of the artist’s home-infused sound. Schiffer first made a name for herself during a successful decade-long stint with the bluegrass group, Laney Lou and the Bird Dogs, and currently plays solo, with her trio including Casabonne and Marie, or in the Canoe Dealers duo with her husband Ryan Acker. As Schiffer prepares to record her debut album, an endeavor for which she is accepting support through a Kickstarter, “Another F*in Mountain” is a promise of the insightful lyrics and intimate sound sure to define her first record.
TRAILHEAD
Browse all Trailhead features online
ENDURANCE
In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 set sail on the Endurance, an expedition ship intended to launch the explorers on a journey across the Antarctic continent. But when the ship was fatally claimed by pack ice, Shackleton’s legacy became one of the greatest polar survival stories known. Now, more than a century later, celebrated filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin and Natalie Hewitt present a National Geographic film that weaves Shackleton’s tale with a modern-day mission to retrace his path and retrieve the remains of the long-abandoned Endurance ship. True to the filmmaker trio’s reputation, the 2024 documentary is organically dramatic, telling a story with palpably high stakes.
SEMI-AQUATIC
How much can a five-minute short documentary with no words say? In Bozeman-based filmmaker Leif Everson’s film SemiAquatic, captivating and revealing cinematography provide a visually lyrical sequence of operations inside a fish hatchery. As controversy around fish hatcheries rises to the public conversation, this Big Sky Documentary Film Festival 2024 pick blends ambient sound and oscillating composition to tell a timely story from an intimate perspective. As evidenced by Patagonia Films’ 2019 documentary Artifishal: The Fight to Save Wild Salmon, film lends a fresh lens to the way we understand our relationship to fish, whether in a lab or in natural waters. Everson is a candidate in Montana State University’s Science and Natural History Filmmaking MFA program.
THE LEAGUE: A FUTURE FOR FREESKIING
In a refreshingly original style that breaks the formula of most contemporary ski movies, Holocene Studios’ The League is defined as much by raw story as it is by beautiful cinematography and modern adventure film construction. More documentary than adrenaline-infused ski flick, this 40-minute film follows three trail-blazing athletes in their pursuit to disrupt the rigidity of modern freeskiing competition. In the inaugural season of the Jib League, they return to the sport’s “unruly” roots and culture 10 years after freeskiing debuted in the Olympics. Dubbed by ski content website Newschoolers as “probably the best thing to happen to competition skiing since, well actually maybe ever,” the Jib League is capturing the attention of fans and participants in the sport alike.
WINTER WILDLANDS ALLIANCE
Winter in the mountains offers us so much: beauty, tranquility, adventure, renewal, and so much more. The national nonprofit Winter Wildlands Alliance works to protect these treasured snowscapes through its alliance of more than 100 grassroots environmental organizations and backcountry partners, including familiar local names like Wild Montana; the Teton Backcountry Alliance; Dan Bailey’s Outdoor Co. in Livingston, Montana; Wyoming’s WYldlife for Tomorrow; among many other dedicated brands and organizations. Through SnowSchool, which has engaged more than 500,000 kids in science-based field trips and education, as well as the Backcountry Film Festival, WWA advances its mission to protect and steward
“America’s wild snowscapes to ensure thriving ecosystems, natural soundscapes, climate resilience, and the long-range sustainability of publicaccess human-powered recreation.”
Examples of WWA at work include its involvement in the 2022 recommendation for the inclusion of a 92,500-acre Gallatin Range Wilderness in the Custer Gallatin Forest Plan, and the 2021 protection
of Idaho’s Centennial Mountains from a heli-skiing proposal that threatened wolverines, grizzly bears and recreationists.
WWA accepts support in the form of donations—anything above $35 qualifies the donor for a membership with perks—volunteer opportunities and public engagement in various advocacy efforts.
In a season of thrills in the snowy Intermountain West, the World Championship Jackson Hole Snowmobile Hill Climb might claim the title of most rip-roaring event. Co-hosted by Jackson, Wyoming’s Snow King Mountain and the Jackson Hole Snow Devils, the hill climb is a snowmobile race in which riders attempt to speedily ascend the 1,500 steep and grueling feet from the base of the mountain to the summit of Snow King. As if that simple premise wasn’t exciting enough, the race’s 10,000 spectators often witness both the thrill of victory and the agony of crash-and-burn defeat. The 48th Annual World Championship Jackson Hole Snowmobile Hill Climb is scheduled for March 20-23, 2025. Money raised from the event supports the Snow Devils, a nonprofit which seeks to educate the public about winter activities and sports, and offers educational scholarships.
WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP JACKSON HOLE SNOWMOBILE HILL CLIMB
SHORTS
New ALS test discovered in Jackson
Brain Chemistry Labs in Jackson, Wyoming, reported in September 2024 that they identified a revolutionary diagnostic test for ALS. A biomarker they call an “ALS fingerprint” detectable from a blood sample yielded 98 percent accuracy in a preclinical study.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal neurodegenerative disease that causes people to eventually lose control of their bodies, has been difficult to diagnose. Roughly 40 percent of people who have it are told they have a different disease, and 10-15 percent of people diagnosed with ALS don’t have the disease at all.
“By the time ALS patients now receive a diagnosis, their motor neuron system has been seriously damaged,” said Marya King, the development assistant at Brain Chemistry Labs. “All drugs work best early in the course of a disease, so our rapid microRNA test will permit patients to begin treatment far earlier, with better results.” Brain Chemistry Labs says the test could be widely available within two years.
The nonprofit lab is also currently working to innovate preventions, treatments and diagnoses for several other diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Words by Fischer Genau and Bella Butler Illustrations by Madeline Thunder
Yellowstone adds $828M to local economies
A National Park Service report found that in 2023 Yellowstone National Park’s 4.5 million visitors collectively spent $623 million in communities near the park. The report added this spending supported 8,560 local jobs, creating a cumulative benefit of $828 million.
In total, the report found that 325.5 million national park visitors spent $26.4 billion in communities near parks, and this spending supported 415,400 jobs, provided $19.4 billion in labor income and $55.6 billion in economic output to the U.S. economy.
“I’m so proud that our parks and the stories we tell make a lasting impact on more than 300 million visitors a year,” said National Park Service Director Chuck Sams. “And I’m just as proud to see those visitors making positive impacts of their own, by supporting local economies and jobs in every state in the country.”
Across all national parks, the largest direct contributions came from the lodging sector at $9.9 billion in economic output and 89,200 jobs, followed by restaurants at $5.2 billion and 68,600 jobs. An interactive tool to explore the report, 2023 National Park Visitor Spending Effects, is available on the NPS website.
Fischer Genau is a writer and filmmaker whose work invites us to look closer at the world around us and the world inside. He lives in Bozeman, but his heart still resides with the lakes of his homeland back in Michigan.
Classical music graces rural Montana
Angella Ahn has performed all over the world with her two sisters as the Ahn Trio—in New York’s Lincoln Center, Vienna’s Musikverein, Beijing’s Concert Hall, and the White House—so one might be surprised to find her at the Pony Bar in Pony, Montana, population 137, playing a concerto. But by playing in rural parts of the state, the Montana State University violin and viola professor believes she can use classical music to break barriers.
Ahn, who is the artistic director of Montana Chamber Music, hosts different musical groups every few months, with each playing two shows in Bozeman and one at a rural location as part of Montana Chamber Music’s community outreach shows.
“We are bringing incredible, Grammy-nominated musicians from New York and other major cities to small, rural towns in Montana and they love it,” Ahn said. “I’m excited to continue bringing these concerts to Montana and we hope to extend our reach around the state.”
Bella Butler is the managing editor of Mountain Outlaw. Madeline Thunder is a freelance artist based in Bozeman, Montana. When she is not creating, she can usually be found playing outside.
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OUTBOUND GALLERY
Farm Wife
How one life of contribution makes a community
Photos by Lynn Donaldson | Words by Bella Butler
In the early 2000s, Darrell Gerer was chasing cows on his farm in Denton, Montana, when he rolled his four-wheeler and broke his back. Denton, a small town of around 200 people in central Montana, doesn’t have its own medical facility, but it does have the Denton Ambulance and the volunteer EMTs who run it around the clock for neighbors in need. After the accident, Darrell’s wife, Tova, watched gratefully as EMTs safely transported her husband to care.
“This is something I can do for my community,” Tova thought in a moment of opportunity that would eventually lead her to become an EMT—and later an Advanced EMT—and volunteer with the ambulance. It’s one of the many hats she wears: AEMT, farmer, wife, mother, grandmother, devoted daughter and daughter-in-law, former 4-H leader, friend and neighbor.
Tova and Darrell, who have been married for 35 years, together farm roughly 5,600 acres on land that was Darrell’s grandfather’s, growing hay feed, winter wheat, spring wheat and lentils, and raising red Angus cattle. True to a farm, everyone does a little bit
of everything, but Tova specifically drives the semi, combine and hay rake. She runs the sprayer, fixes fence, feeds cows and helps calve. It’s good work, and it’s hard work.
In the following gallery, photographer Lynn Donaldson, who grew up on a farm in Denton, explores the identity of “farm wife” through a spread of images that captures just a sliver of the involvement and dedication Tova applies to the world around her. Small towns run on people like Tova, who see others doing remarkable things and think about what they can do for their community. Small towns get their resilient character from people like Tova, who says: “You do what you gotta do to try and survive on the farm, which is getting harder and harder to do. The margins are getting tighter, and it’s just you gotta do what you gotta do.” Small towns are made communities by people like Tova, who when asked about her service as a volunteer EMT, uses the space to offer thanks for the support that led to the purchase of the new Denton Ambulance. In Donaldson’s photos, we hope readers can glimpse not only the life of one woman, but the community she makes possible.
Photojournalist Lynn Donaldson, a 1988 graduate of Denton High School, grew up on the farm her great-grandparents homesteaded and has known Tova and Darrell Gerer and their parents all her life. Donaldson now resides with her husband and three children in Livingston but still considers Denton home. "Those wheat fields and wide-open skies are in my blood; it’s an extremely beautiful corner of the world and and extremely beautiful way of life rooted in faith, family, community and service."
Bella Butler is the managing editor of Mountain Outlaw.
Tova Gerer, 54, poses with her dog Digger by her field truck on the farm she owns with her husband, Darrell. On the farm, which is near Denton, Montana, they grow hay feed, spring and winter wheat and lentils in addition to raising Red Angus cattle.
Left: The Gerers’ cattle cluster while munching on feed. Tova graduated from Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming, with a degree in Agriculture Business in 1990. She raises red Angus cattle, implementing her own system of tagging which enables her to track the cow line using a letter that designates the breeder they come from and a unique number to individually ID them at a glance.
Top: Tova feeds her 2024 replacement heifers creep pellets once a day, and they have free choice hay.
Above: Tova poses with her 2001 International Semi, which she uses to haul grain 51 miles away to the United Grain elevator in Moccasin, Montana.
Top left: Tova, a volunteer AEMT (advanced EMT) for the Denton Ambulance crew since 2012, shows off the new ambulance the Denton community generously donated to help replace the old one. With a lean crew, the new power stretcher enables a single crew member to load a patient solo.
Above: Tova shares a laugh with her hair stylist and colorist Scott Anderson—owner of New Image Salon in Stanford, Montana, where Tova has been a client since 1994—as Anderson’s father Don “Andy” Anderson looks over his schedule. Andy also owned a satellite barber shop in Denton but closed that space a few years ago after celebrating his 40th anniversary cutting hair there.
Left: Tova helps her mom Helen Lodman into a sling following her recent shoulder replacement surgery as Lodman’s dog Copper supervises. Being 30 miles from Lewistown, home health services are limited in Denton, so Tova has taken on the responsibility of checking on her mom and helping with meals and tasks several times throughout the day. Lodman’s home received significant smoke damage after the Denton Fire of 2021, and she and her dog and cat had to move in with Tova and Darrell for 14 months during restoration.
Tova and Darrell’s farmhouse located a few miles north of Denton is backed by the Highwood Mountains (pictured). Round Butte and Square Butte sit just out of frame at the northeast end of the Highwoods; the Little Belts and Snowy Mountains anchor the panorama to the south, while the North and South Moccasin and Judith ranges stretch to the east. Tova grew up on her family ranch between Lewistown and Moore, while both sides of Darrell’s family have ranched near Denton for five generations. The couple took over part of Darrell’s family’s place in 1991 and the rest in 2010.
mother
touches up the trim on Our Savior Lutheran Church in
where her parents and grandparents worshiped and which her dad helped build in 1951.
is also a lifelong artist whose scenic and wildlife paintings grace the walls of most central Montana homes.
Right: Like an antique GPS, signs like this one on Alton Road in Denton, pointing the way to Everson on the left and Bear Springs on the right, adorn many rural intersections, stating family surnames and the mileage to their respective homes. Made by 4H clubs, this was constructed by Denton’s Sunnyside Shiners (a club that’s well over 100 years old) and was refurbished when Tova and Darrell’s kids were in high school around 2010.
Denton’s primary street, Broadway, is anchored by the North Moccasin Mountains in the distance. Broadway is also Montana Highway 81. A town of roughly 200 people, Denton's been Tova’s home since she married Darrell in 1992.
Top: Darrell’s
Marlene Gerer
Denton,
Marlene
Above:
ADVENTURE
Bozeman resident Madeline Thunder cuts a turn through fresh snow in the backcountry near the Stateline Yurt.
54. Photo by Micah Robin
Photo Essay: Under the Flyway
Adventure Guide: Stateline Yurt
By Bella Butler
Splitboarding isn’t often regarded as an especially comfortable or graceful way to move across a landscape, but something about my tour into the Stateline Yurt made it distinguishably torturesome. Looking back on that January 2023 trip, I suppose it could’ve been the 20-pound frozen block of Bolognese sauce in my backpack. It could’ve been the second backpack strapped to the outside of my 50-liter backpacking backpack, and it might’ve had something to do with the biting wind and the abandoned hope that the temperature would find its way above zero. I can still feel the repeated drop in my gut every time my edge failed to grip the bulletproof, storm-stripped traverse slope, a precariously
teetering tower of gear strapped behind me (reminder: splitboards are snowboards cut in two; each plank basically has one sharp edge, and one other edge). And yet, if I were ever lucky enough to nab another one of those coveted backcountry yurt reservations, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
ACCESS
The Stateline Yurt, named for its positioning at 7,200 feet on the Idaho/Montana border atop Lost Trail Pass, is a Mongolian-style yurt that serves as a cushy basecamp for a barely touched swath of the region’s iconic skiing paradise. Owned and operated by the Salmon, Idaho-based Wilderness
The Stateline Yurt glows with sunset colors in the backcountry near Lost Trail Pass on the border of Idaho and Montana. Photo by Adam Sklar
Harlow Punderson (front) and Madeline Thunder skin up a ridge in the backcountry while staying at the Stateline Yurt in January 2023. Bozeman’s Punderson and Thunder, along with friends Adam Sklar and Micah Robin, were a part of the writer’s first trip to the Stateline Yurt. Photo by Adam Sklar
River Outfitters, the yurt is accessed from the base of Lost Trail Ski Area, which makes it a perfect excuse to spend a day at this mom-and-pop powder haven on either end of your backcountry excursion. From Thursday to Sunday, when the ski area is open, yurt goers can catch a ride on a chairlift to the top of the ridge. From there, it’s a quick mile-plus traverse to Stateline. Depending on what luxuries you’ve allowed to weigh down your pack, as well as conditions (often blizzarding and windy—but makes for great turns later!), this varies from a scenic dash to your destination, to a memorable side-cutting adventure that makes arrival to the yurt that much sweeter.
THE SPACE
Despite being in the backcountry, Stateline doesn’t leave much to be desired in the way of amenities. At 20 feet in diameter, it’s cozy but roomy enough for up to six folks with plenty of room to hang wet gear, stay far enough away from your friend’s stinky wool socks, and put up a disco ball for a post-ski dance party—or whatever you’re into. The yurt is well stocked with every kitchen gadget and gizmo you might need, solar lights and propane lanterns, two wide bunk beds and two cots, a wood-burning stove with lots of wood, and my personal favorite amenity: an outdoor pit toilet with the best commode view you’ll ever have. A wood deck (that may require a bit of shoveling) extends off the front of the yurt.
THE SKIING
The terrain around Stateline presents a menu of adventures. Due to unfavorable snowpack conditions and temperatures, my crew opted for a luxurious day of hot laps straight from the
ADD-ONS
Especially if you’re traveling to Stateline from farther away, consider folding some of these worthy additions into your itinerary to make the most of the trip.
+ Lost Trail Ski Area: This one is worth mentioning again. Especially if you’re used to bigger resort skiing like me, Lost Trail offers a refreshingly laid-back atmosphere without sparing the quality of skiing. It truly doesn’t get much better than making a new friend on the chair and then sharing pow turns in the Hollywood Bowl. Because it’s closed mid-week, Lost Trail celebrates Powder Thursdays. If you can, schedule night one of your Stateline trip on a Thursday for fresh Lost Trail turns during the day and the benefit of riding the chair up at the end of the day to head out to the yurt.
+ Bitterroot Brewing: If you’re traveling home north through the Bitterroot Valley, put off unloading your wet gear an hour longer and enjoy a bite and a brew at Bitterroot Brewing in Hamilton, Montana. I like the Snow Church milkshake IPA and the pickle-brined fried chicken sandwich.
+ Antler Saloon: If you’re heading back toward the Big Hole Valley, grab a stool at the Antler Saloon in Wisdom, Montana, a bar that boasts: “This is the real deal! Cowboys, truckers, ranchers & all the locals stop by here. Montana’s best pie!”
+ Hot Springs: If you’re feeling a little sore and a little chilled from touring, opt for a soak at one of the many nearby hot springs. Depending on which way you’re heading, check out Montana’s developed Lost Trail Hot Springs, Jackson Hot Springs or Elkhorn Hot Springs, or consider hiking into the beautiful Goldbug Hot Springs in Idaho.
Madeline Thunder (left) and the writer, Bella Butler, pause on the skin track. Photo by Micah Robin
Top left: Robin chops wood outside the yurt after a day of skiing. Photo by Adam Sklar Top right: Punderson fries bacon in the yurt’s generously stocked kitchen. Photo by Adam Sklar Above: This map shows the path to Stateline Yurt from the top of nearby Lost Trail Ski Area, which is how the yurt is accessed. Photo courtesy of Wilderness River Outfitters
Stateline Yurt
Ridgeline Yurts
porch into the North Fork of the Salmon River drainage. After a few turns down from the yurt, an open slope to the west is the perfect canvas for a skin track, and a 15-20 minute climb will get you to the top of the ridge, from which pillow lines, tight trees and an old burn scar present endless options. From here the yurt is only a quick climb away, making for an easy indoor lunch break and hot toddy warm-up.
For those looking for a longer line, the Saddle Mountain summit is roughly 1,200 feet above the yurt and directly to the north on the Montana side. Depending on conditions, Saddle is said to deliver excellent turns and crisp views of the Bitterroot Range to the north. Other options abound in this area, and a morning group map study can yield any number of routes to fill your days at Stateline. Wherever you choose to go, this area is famous for its cold smoke powder, so bring your snorkel.
THE APRÈS
For me, winter yurt trips are as much about time with friends before and after skiing as they are about scenic skins and fresh turns. In fact, I probably spend more time planning for yurt time as I do for time on the snow, which means I don’t pack light. I’m more than willing to endure that torturous inbound tour if it means I can serve up fun cocktails, homemade meals and party flair to my friends. On my Stateline trip, I was lucky to have my former bartending friend along to whip up the best old fashioneds I’ve ever had, and we each ate our share of pasta and then some thanks to the Bolognese I prepared and froze at home before the trip. When the days are cold, which they are likely to be, a hot toddy or tea is the ideal warm-up. If you haven’t figured this out yet, it’s easier to haul a pint of whiskey than a six-pack of beer. What can I say—we all choose to sacrifice our weight in different categories.
Bella Butler is a splitboarder and wig aficionado. She is the managing editor of Mountain Outlaw.
IF YOU GO
+ Book early! Stateline is a gem, but it’s no secret. Reservations fill up fast, so plan ahead and make that booking! You won’t regret it.
+ Plan for the worst conditions. As Wilderness River Outfitters says, “It’s called Lost Trail for a reason!” This area has great skiing because it receives so much snow, but this also means blizzards are frequent, temps can drop quickly, and wind is inevitable. Pack your usual layers, and then maybe some more. Gear gets wet quickly, and you won’t regret having a dry (ideally wool) base layer when you start your tour back out, or an extra fleece or puffy even for hanging at the yurt.
+ Take safety seriously. While Stateline is just a quick tour from Lost Trail, the yurt and the surrounding skiing are in backcountry terrain. Check the avalanche report for the area leading up to your trip, and have the latest report available when you head in. The area is forecasted by Missoula Avalanche. When narrowing your invite list, choose friends who are knowledgeable backcountry partners (bonus points if they know how to make fun cocktails and own colorful wigs).
+ Use Wilderness River Outfitters resources. Your trip to Stateline will kick off with a mandatory orientation with Jonas Seiler, the yurt manager, at the base of Lost Trail. In addition to getting us briefed, Seiler was stoked to answer our questions and send us off on the right note. I’d also recommend downloading and possibly printing WRO’s maps of the surrounding area. Cell service is partially available but limited at the yurt itself, so prep what you need to navigate to the yurt and around the yurt ahead of time. An emergency communication device, like a Garmin inReach, is highly recommended. WRO also provides a great packing list and rundown of what the space includes.
+ Take a moment for gratitude. Even if you’re lucky enough to be out there for more than a single night, your time at Stateline will fly by. Whether it’s a solo moment on the porch or a beat on the skin track, make an intention to take a moment to appreciate the special place around you, and the people you’re sharing it with.
Punderson catches air off a pillow of snow on a slope near the yurt. Photo by Micah Robin
Whether you are interested in chasing billfish in Costa Rica or Cabo or relaxing along the Emerald Coast of Florida, Jimmy Azzolini, Big Sky resident, is your authority on yacht ownership.
A JourNEY DoWN THE W ILDEST rI vEr ON EArTH
Words by Scott Bosse
Photography by Colin Arisman
As someone who has spent his career working to save rivers, I’ve had the opportunity to explore some of the most spectacular waterways North America has to offer. Some of my favorites include the Middle Fork Salmon River in Idaho, the Middle Fork Flathead River in Montana, the Skeena headwaters in British Columbia, and the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
While all these rivers are special, none, for me, compares to the Alsek. This remote, relatively obscure river flows for 174 miles from its headwaters in the Yukon Territory, across the northwest panhandle of British Columbia, then makes its final run to the Pacific Ocean through Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park. Among its superlatives, the Alsek traverses the largest non-polar icefield, the largest protected wilderness area, and the second highest coastal mountain range on the planet.
Back in 2012, a friend of mine from Montana who had guided on the Alsek for years invited my wife and me to join him on a private trip down what he called “the wildest river on earth.”
We jumped at the opportunity, and that August, 14 of us embarked on an epic two-week adventure. The thing I remember most about that trip was the bears: we saw 53 of them, including one large male grizzly that charged full speed into our camp on the first morning as we were cooking bacon.
There are precious few trips that are truly life changing. That trip down the Alsek was one of them for me. I had to totally recalibrate my concept of wildness.
I never thought I’d get a chance to return to the Alsek. But then American Rivers President Tom Kiernan had to
Scott Bosse, the writer, and his tripmates settle in to Lowell Lake camp while on the Alsek River in Alaska.
drop out of an Alsek River trip for donors due to an injury. The main purpose of the trip was to discuss with supporters how we plan to expand our river protection work in Alaska. I was asked if I could take his place. I felt terrible for Tom because I knew how much he was looking forward to this trip, but I could barely contain my excitement at the prospect of returning to the river that had so captivated me.
So, on the summer solstice, my wife and I flew from our home in Montana to Juneau, Alaska, where our adventure began. Early the next morning, we boarded the ferry for the four-hour trip up the Lynn Canal to Haines, where we met the other trip participants and guides at the historic Hotel Halsingland. As the guides handed out personal river gear to everyone, I felt the same giddy anticipation that I’d felt 12 years ago.
Haines
Alsek river put-in
Gulf of Alaska ALASKA
Junction Juneau
YUKON TERRITORY
Dry Bay Take-out Haines
Our expedition team included five highly skilled guides from Haines Rafting Company; American Rivers Northwest Regional Director Sarah Dyrdahl; a mother-daughter duo from Wyoming; a retired couple from Sitka, Alaska; a gentleman in his 70s from California who once hiked the entire Pacific Crest Trail; another gentleman in his 70s from Florida who had never camped before; a whip-smart young investor from Colorado; and a professional photographer from Haines.
The following morning, we made the three-hour drive to Haines Junction in the Yukon Territory, checking in at the international border station along the way. From there, we drove another hour on a rough four-wheel drive road to the put-in on the Dezadeash River. After loading our rafts in a light drizzle, we were finally ready to launch into the great beyond.
A few hours into our float, we spied a grizzly bear swimming across the river a few hundred yards downstream. It disappeared into a thick patch of willows on a peninsula right where we planned to camp for the night. “Here we go again with the bears,” I thought to myself. But the only large animals we saw that evening were a dozen trumpeter swans in a backwater slough.
For the next several days, we made our way down the Upper Alsek, marveling at the glacier-polished landscape and soaking in the warm sunshine. As we approached our camp at Lava Creek, we pulled over at a familiar point on river-right where one of our fearless team members, Ariana, took a swim in a gin-clear pond while the rest of us hiked around on the sand dunes and rock outcroppings. On that upper section of the river, the land is so freshly sculpted it feels like you’re floating through the Pleistocene. You half expect to see a wooly mammoth around each bend.
On day three of the trip, we arrived at iceberg-studded Lowell Lake, created by a 50-mile-long glacier that dammed the entire width of the river not long ago. Words can’t describe the beauty of this place. We camped beside the lake for two nights, spending our days hiking, swimming in off-channel ponds, and glassing for wildlife. We had planned to climb Goat Herd Mountain, which affords dazzling views of the 15,000-foot-high Hubbard massif, but a swollen side-channel of the river blocked our way. In the evenings when the sun dipped behind the mountains, we sipped tequila by the campfire and listened to the faint roar of distant waterfalls and the occasional thunderclap of calving icebergs.
As we departed Lowell Lake through a maze of icebergs, we entered the most perilous whitewater section of the trip: first Sam’s Rapid, and then Lava North (named after the notorious Lava Falls rapid in the Grand Canyon). We pulled over on river-left to scout our line through Lava North. You don’t want to flip your raft here, as the consequence is a long and harrowing swim in 35-degree water. Only after we made it through safely did we hear the story of one of our guide’s friends who did just that, got sucked down into a thundering hole, and “saw the darkness.” He hasn’t rowed the river since.
get around the canyon where the Tweedsmuir
Top right: The boaters depart Alsek Lake. Below right: A man prepares the helicopter portage of the group’s boats and belongings. The portage is the only way boaters can
Glacier comes into the Alsek.
Alsek River
An approximate map shows the boater's journey from arrival in Alaska to their adventure down the Alsek River. Mountain Outlaw map
As we made our way downriver, both the mountains and the river grew in size, making our rafts seem like tiny specks in comparison. We arrived at the entrance to Turnback Canyon and pulled into the portage camp on river-right. As we unloaded our gear from the rafts, someone noticed a chocolate-brown grizzly sow and her three cubs at the foot of an alluvial fan across the river. We took turns watching them through binoculars for hours.
Later that afternoon, we took a short hike onto the Tweedsmuir Glacier until we got bogged down in knee-deep mud. The glacier hems the Alsek River against a waterfall-studded mountainside, turning it into an unrunnable maelstrom of whirls and boils. The only way rafters can get around the canyon is via a helicopter portage. So, we got up early the next morning, wolfed down breakfast, and laid out all our gear in neat piles so the helicopter could haul it in a cargo net dangling from a longline. Once the helicopter transported us and our gear around the canyon and onto a sandy island, we reinflated our rafts, reassembled the frames, and reloaded our gear. The whole operation took four trips and about three hours.
Downriver from Turnback Canyon, the climate rapidly changes from continental to coastal. As we made our way toward camp at the confluence of the Tatshenshini River, we added layers of clothing to ward off the damp chill. The confluence is one of those power spots that heightens all your senses and makes you feel incredibly alive. On maps, it is known as the Center of the Universe because there are petroglyphs carved into a rock outcropping on a nearby island that tell the story of how the world was created.
Before we departed the confluence camp, we gathered in a circle on the beach to share the story of how, more than three decades ago, U.S. and Canadian conservationists fought off the proposed Windy Craggy copper mine. At the time, it was called the most environmentally destructive project ever proposed in Canada. It would have lopped off the top 2,000 feet of Windy Craggy Peak, sending acid mine drainage into the Tatshenshini and Lower Alsek rivers, devastating their salmon fisheries. After a long battle, the Canadian government designated the Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Wilderness Park in 1993, closing the door to future mining. A year later, the area was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Below the confluence, the Alsek doubles in size and glaciers and waterfalls plunge into it from every
Photos left to right: A truck transports boats and boaters to the put-in of the Alsek River. One of the boats on Bosse’s trip runs a rapid on the Alsek River. A grizzly charges into camp on Bosse’s first Alsek River trip. Photo by Scott Bosse
direction. While there are no large rapids in this reach, rowers must stay laser focused and follow the deepest channel in the labyrinth of braids, or risk running aground on a submerged sandbar or worse yet, get carried across the floodplain and separated from the group. In the latter case, rowers might not reconnect with their party until the next day.
The last major landmark on our trip was Alsek Lake, the entrance to which is marked by a distinct promontory known as Gateway Knob. You can enter the lake through one of three doorways. We chose door No. 3, to the right of the knob, because the other routes can lead to rafts getting trapped in a dangerous traffic jam of constantly shifting icebergs. We set up camp on a wildflower-spangled beach, then scrambled up to the top of the knob through a dense forest of alders and devil’s club. From that vantage point, we could absorb the grandeur of the landscape we had traversed over the past two weeks: the huge, silt-laden river slithering across its floodplain like a thousand snakes, the massive glaciers pouring off the Fairweather Range and the giant icebergs sailing across the lake like frozen ocean liners.
On our last morning, we rowed across the outlet of the lake in a silvery fog, then made our way downriver, escorted by icebergs that occasionally would hit the bottom, rear up, and then roll over. Arriving at the takeout near Dry Bay, we formed a firemen’s line to unload our gear from the rafts for one last time. Soon, our bush plane would arrive and fly us up the coast to Yakutat where we would say our farewells, catch our commercial flights, and go our separate ways.
Epilogue
On July 20, two weeks after our trip ended, a small plane carrying our bush pilot, Hans Munich, and his partner, Tanya Hutchins, disappeared on Mt. Crillon in the Fairweather Range in poor weather conditions. A few days later, the U.S. Coast Guard called off the search for the plane and its occupants. Our hearts go out to all who knew them.
Editor’s Note: This story originally ran on the American Rivers blog on Aug. 21, 2024. Scott Bosse is the Northern Rockies regional director for American Rivers.
T HE I NN R ESIDENCES
Ownership at The Inn is offered in deeded, one-quarter ownership interests. These 32 fully-furnished three- and four-bedroom Residences provide a unique second home ownership opportunity in a luxury Residence steps from Montage Big Sky. Connected by an underground pathway, owners will enjoy access to the resort's many amenities including five dining establishments, Signature Spa Montage, a bowling alley, golf and sports simulator room, and indoor and outdoor pools, plus ski-in/ski-out access to Big Sky Resort.
Owners will also enjoy the benefits of membership at Spanish Peaks Mountain Club, which includes private concierge services, an 18-hole Tom Weiskopf Championship Golf Course, a new 10-hole Par 3 course, clubhouse, and a year-round calendar of special, member-only events and experiences.
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Winter 2025 Après Guide
We compiled our readers’ favorite spots to celebrate a day of playing outside. And this list doesn’t disappoint!
We, the editors of Mountain Outlaw, hold a firm belief that how you celebrate after a day of recreating in Greater Yellowstone’s great outdoors is just as important as the activity itself. Because what’s it all worth if at the end of the day you can’t saddle up to a bar counter with your buds, shake out stories from the day with your wet mittens and cheers a beverage or a bite over the good fortune of getting to play outside in the ultimate winter wonderland? While we considered how to send you all out into pure après glory this winter, it dawned on us that the best folks to give advice on the top après experiences in our region are you all, our readers. Just like the friendly local who chats you up on the chairlift, Mountain Outlaw readers from near and far spilled some of their favorite spots, and we’ve compiled many of them here for our Winter 2025 Après Guide.
Cheers, The Editors (P.S. We didn’t bother weeding out the repeats. You deserve to know the fan faves!)
“Love going to Apples for an Aperol spritz or beer and loaded tachos (tater tot nachos) after skiing down Warm Springs in Sun Valley, Idaho!”
–Berkeley H., Ketchum, Idaho
“ Big Sky, Montana, Scissorbills Saloon, Skiing, White Russian and loaded tots, it is a great environment and the food is awesome! Great spot to grab a drink and food after skiing!”
–Connor C., Big Sky, Montana
“ MAP Brewing! Best place to hit after skiing Bridger Bowl all day and a few beers at the Griz. It’s calm, casual and the nachos HIT (especially with a side of poutine). Was devastated when they took them away for the 20’-21’ season, but they heard our cries and the town is at peace again.”
–Maeve W., Bozeman, Montana
“ Valhalla Meadery, on the way back from Bridger Bowl at the end of the canyon road. Hot or cold drinks with big winter and ski vibes with images of Ullr, Odin, and Skadi. You can even drink your mead out of a horn. My favorite part is that you can get hot food like salmon chowder with your horn of mead.”
–Taylor O., Bozeman, Montana
“ Everett’s 8800. Perfect on-mountain spot to take a break from skiing with incredible views. Love the atmosphere, architecture of the building, food, and views. Cold Smoke beer and my wife likes the hot toddy!”
–Michael P., Big Sky, Montana
“The Murray Bar in Livingston, Montana, is a historic bar in the heart of town. It has partnered up with a restaurant next door to offer some delicious bites. After getting done backcountry or cross-country skiing, this is a perfect spot to stop and get a bite and a drink. My personal favorite is their fried chicken sandwich, and a wide selection of local beers. And if you’re feeling up for it, their houseinfused spirits are incredible. I recommend trying their habanero margaritas.”
–Ali B., Livingston, Montana
“ Scissorbills at Big Sky after a fantastic ski day! Rainier tall boy please and an order of tater tots.”
–Joe S., Big Sky, Montana
“After a long day of making turns on the slopes, nothing tastes better than a cold beer and some hot chicken! Riverhouse BBQ located just a few miles south of the 191/64 intersection in Big Sky is the perfect roadside grub and pub locale for après! Comfortable warm atmosphere and million-dollar views!”
–Sara S., Big Sky, Montana
“Hands down The Stagecoach Bar, or simply the Coach. Located at the base of Teton Pass in Wilson, Wyoming. I go upon my return from the resort, splitting on the pass, a skate at the neighborhood rink or a quick after-work bootpack up Glory Bowl. On the one side of the Coach is where Streetfood started slinging their top-tobottom killer menu. I often go for the carne asada tacos (ask for their in-house hot sauce). Then we make it over to the bar for a pitcher, usually Pacifico, occasionally Wilson IPA, and maybe a shot of whiskey. I dig that it is a lowkey, unassuming spot that gets absolutely packed (at least these days) and maintains a good bit of Western charm.”
–Sam D., Jackson, Wyoming
“ Big Sky Mountain Village outdoors on the patio after skiing of course. We get a six-pack of beer from the Hungry Moose Market and Deli. We sit outside, enjoy the sun, people-watching, and occasionally live music/DJs.”
–Brian M., Big Sky, Montana
“ The Miner, in Cooke City, Montana, is my favorite spot to get a burger, pizza or even a plate of enchiladas after a long day out snowmobiling. Though sometimes all you need to enjoy the iconic saloon is an ice cold beer and a roll of quarters to play Big Buck Hunter, which they have conveniently installed in the back.”
–Micah R., Bozeman, Montana
“I love the Hellroaring Saloon in Whitefish. I’ve been going there since I was a kid specifically for the nachos but they have a great menu so you really can’t go wrong. It’s right on the hill so you can ski/skin/bike/hike right to it (it’s open year-round) making it the best après hot spot! The atmosphere is soothing and the waitstaff are lovely, what more could you ask for! Go check them out.”
–Britt M., Whitefish, Montana
“Nothing better than pitchers at the Stagecoach after a day on Teton Pass. It’s separate from the buzz of the ski resort so it feels more backcountry-tailored.”
–Peter L., Jackson, Wyoming
"Love going to the Montage for an Aperol spritz and bison tartar, and you can’t miss the Bavaria meatballs.”
–Josh T. Arvada, Colorado
“ Streetfood in Wilson, Wyoming after a day of ski touring on Teton Pass. Dancing, beer, a bite and some warmth for your toes and soul.”
–Taylor G., Jackson, Wyoming
“ The Trap Bar and Grill at Grand Targhee is the best place to stop after a day of skiing! If you’re not ordering the Wydaho Nachos, what are you doing?! I love the community feel of The Trap. It feels like home as soon as you walk in there and are greeted by many smiling faces and live music. It’s just the best!”
–Sophie G., Bozeman, Montana
“ Scissorbills FTW. One of the oldest bars in Big Sky and my favorite after skiing of course. Cider and nachos.”
–Frank P., Big Sky, Montana
Under the Flyway
Looking through the lens at the Bridger Ridge raptor surveyors
Nobody believed Steve Hoffman, a passionate 27-year-old birder, when he told a group of scientists that there was another raptor migration flyway in North America. It was 1978 and the only known raptor flyways, routes that birds funnel into while migrating, were in the eastern part of the United States.
Most North American raptors (meateating birds with talons, not dinosaurs), migrate from the northern reaches of the continent to the south for warmer weather in the winter, and geographic features are major determinants of their flight paths. Large bodies of water or vast expanses of barren land make it difficult for migrating raptors to find food or a place to roost, and poor weather at high altitudes makes it difficult to fly. Hoffman, who in his spare time had been counting birds flying over the top of the Wellsville Mountains in Utah, knew his theory was strong.
Still disbelieving, the scientists sent Hoffman on a quest to catch, tag and release these sometimes massive birds, and collect enough data to prove his hypothesis. A master’s degree and three years later, Hoffman had irrefutable evidence; he had not only proven there is migration in the West, but he had discovered the largest flyway in western North America.
Decades later, the learning continues for now-73-year-old Hoffman in the Bridger Mountains of southwest Montana, where the second largest concentration of migratory golden eagles is recorded in the U.S. Each year for the last 33, Hawk Watch International, a nonprofit founded by Hoffman, partners with Montana’s Sacajawea Audubon Society to hire a small group of surveyors to watch the skies of the Bridger flyway to count the migrating birds that pass overhead. During the two-month season from late August to the end of October, they’re required to hike 2,000 feet up through the snowless ski resort and look up and to the north for eight hours a day. In 2024, the surveyors hired to carry on that tradition were Adam Brown, Alicia Wilson and Rosemary D’Andrea.
think today is a perfect day for them to start flying over.”
Adam Brown, Vince Slabe, Rosemary D’Andrea and Steve Hoffman (left to right) track a migrating Cooper’s hawk on Sept. 25th, while sitting in their usual spot on the Bridger Ridge, just above the ski area. “Raptors will usually choose to migrate in nice weather on windy days,” Hoffman said. “So I
Far left: After the 30-minute drive from Bozeman, D’Andrea and Brown gain the ridge. “Having a long term monitoring project like this is so important," D’Andrea said. "Thirty-three years, that's a really long data set ... so we’re able to look at long term trends of an indicator species, like a hawk, which shows us if we should be concerned [about the environment.]"
Left: Brown, D’Andrea and Alicia Wilson (left to right) stand for a portrait on the helipad where they work. Their shifts are split up so that at least two people count and keep watch every day, so that the third person can take their days off. Hawk Watch International and Montana Audubon raise money to pay the surveyors for their work.
Below: Brown, Wilson and D’Andrea pack up their things in the small patrol building surveyors call “the Penthouse” where they keep their belongings and survey supplies—and sometimes spend the night. “I think the name for it gives it too much credit, personally,” D’Andrea said, smiling.
Far left above: D’Andrea and Wilson watch the skies over Tilly’s Peak and Ross Peak for raptors. “While I’ve been doing this, my IDing of raptors has gotten a lot better,” Wilson said. “First, you’d look at the shape of the bird, and then the flight mannerisms, and I would say plumage is something you’d look at last, which sometimes surprises people—but that’s because the sun catches, and [what you’ll see] isn’t the true color of the bird.”
Left above: Brown holds up a pocket anemometer, a small gauge that measures wind speed and pressure, exposing it to the gusts flowing over the mountain range. He then recorded the reading to keep track of bird migration trends in correlation with weather.
Far left below: Hoffman updates the species count after spotting the third sharp-shinned hawk of the morning. “The average numbers of migrating birds in the Bridgers have declined,” Hoffman said. “That’s one of the big findings of this project is that we’ve seen a 35-40 percent decline in [migrating] golden eagles over that 30-plus-year period.”
Left below: Wilson and Brown descend the trail back to their cars. “It was a really cool experience,” Brown said after finishing out the season. “It’s funny, before, [my relationship to] the Bridgers was a little bit of mountain biking, a little bit of trail running or skiing, but now it’ll always represent the fall that I spent up there, my home away from home, counting birds.”
Hazel Cramer is a freelance documentary photographer and filmmaker. Passionate about raising awareness for humanitarian issues like climate change, she approaches her work with a critical eye.
LAND
80 Feature: When the River Runs Dry 90 Poem: Coyote Returns
The St. Mary River runs near Hook's Hideaway, a restaurant, motel and rodeo arena in the Blackfeet Nation owned by Bill Powell. When the St. Mary Siphon failed in June 2024, the river flooded Powell's rodeo arena and inflicted costly damage to his business. Read more on p. 80. Photo by Dave Gardner
WhentheRiver
A devastating irrigation failure has Hi-Line communities fearing a year without water
Words by Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan
by Dave Gardner
Runs
On the morning of June 17, 2024, a pipe in northwestern Montana was leaking. It was one of two pipes, side by side, and really big ones at that—tall enough for the San Antonio Spurs to walk through without ducking. Together they held a flow of almost 600 cubic feet per second of thundering water. Around
8:45 a.m., quite suddenly, a section of
A screenshot from an aerial video shows the two burst pipes of the St. Mary Siphon on June 17, 2024. The siphon is a key piece of infrastructure for the Milk River Project, which supplies essential water to much of Montana’s Hi-Line. The infrastructure failure has had devastating impacts. Photo courtesy of the Milk River Joint Board of Control
creaking, aging steel burst open. A torrent exploded onto the surrounding field, carving a gaping ravine alongside the tubes and flooding nearby property.
By 2 p.m., the second pipe had also failed.
Photos
Dry
The dry bed of the St.
Canal—which once served as a boundary and provided water for livestock, ranchers and wildlife on the Blackfeet Reservation—shows an impact of the failed siphon, near Babb, Montana.
Mary
Bill Powell overlooks the construction of the new siphon and the new road that will eventually lead to his motel and bar, Hook’s Hideaway, near Babb, Montana. Hook’s Hideaway, just a stones-throw away from the failing siphon, managed to escape the siphon failure without any harm to humans or livestock, but it destroyed the access road, the motel’s well system and flooded the bar and arena.
Just like that, a crucial link ensuring a steady supply of water to an arid region hundreds of miles east had been severed. And now, after enduring a dry summer, the tens of thousands of Montanans who depend on those pipes are staring down another season without water.
The pipes are important enough for an official name: the St. Mary Siphon, a key piece of the Milk River Project. That’s an ambitious irrigation system that diverts some of the St. Mary River into the smaller Milk River, which then flows north and east across north-central Montana. The Milk is the stuff of life on the Hi-Line, a vast agricultural expanse roughly following U.S Highway 2 for hundreds of miles. It waters the hay and grass crops that in turn feed the cattle grazing this land. It fills the drinking glasses and bathtubs of small-town residents along its banks. It forms the reservoirs that bring in boaters and anglers. There wouldn’t be much of a Hi-Line without it.
The Milk River Joint Board of Control, in partnership with the Bureau of Reclamation, began work on the siphon almost immediately, but this is no mere patch-up job. Officials quickly determined they’d have to replace the entire siphon. That meant no St. Mary River water flowing to the Milk until
construction is complete, scheduled for late summer 2025—almost two seasons without the supplemental water that farmers, ranchers and outdoor recreationists have counted on for more than a century.
“It’s a catastrophe for the Hi-Line,” says local fisherman Bob Nelson. “It’s the same to me as the hurricanes down southeast. Devastating.”
The Source
Bill Powell was at home sipping coffee with his wife on the morning of June 17. The Powells own Hook’s Hideaway, a
popular complex encompassing a motel, restaurant, rodeo arena and campground just northeast of the St. Mary Siphon, on the Blackfeet Nation near Babb.
Suddenly, Powell recalls, “A guy came whipping up here and said, ‘You’ve got a rodeo arena, do you have any animals in there?’ I said, ‘There’s some steers down there.’ He said, ‘You’d better get them out.’”
The busted siphon sent its deluge of water straight toward Hook’s Hideaway, inundating the arena. By the time one of Powell’s employees made it down to let the cattle out, the water was up to his waist. The flood missed Powell’s home and motel, but mud flowed under the bar, putting the floor and walls at risk of rotting. A few inches of mud also oozed into a cabin used for employee housing. Water tore a 30-foot-long hole across the only access road to the motel, forcing Powell to cancel two weeks’ worth of lodging reservations at $210 per night and forgo $1,500 a day in restaurant revenue. And it damaged Powell’s well system so badly that he had to buy new water pumps and haul water to run his operations in a 450-gallon tank in the back of a pickup all season. All in all, Powell estimates the siphon blowout has cost him up to $500,000—money he’s filed a tort claim against the Bureau of Reclamation to reimburse.
The Milk River Project was born at the turn of the 20th century to help develop
Powell stands behind an empty bar at his motel and restaurant, Hook’s Hideaway.
Stats:
agriculture in the water-challenged West. The Milk River naturally runs dry six of every 10 years. So engineers decided to pour some of the larger St. Mary River, which originates in Glacier National Park, into the Milk. The St. Mary Diversion Dam shunts some of its water overland into a 29-mile-long canal with several siphons and concrete drops until it reaches the North Fork of the Milk River. The Milk then heads up to Canada before winding back down into Montana just west of Havre. A couple of reservoirs help control the flow until the river meets the Missouri near Fort Peck Lake, a total of 729 river miles.
Engineers built the first of the St. Mary Siphon pipes between 1912 and 1915; the second started operating in 1926. The finished system irrigates about 120,000 acres, serving 700 farms, and provides drinking water for 18,000 people.
“I don’t think the Hi-Line would be what it is” without it, says Jennifer Patrick, project manager for the Milk River Joint Board of Control, which manages irrigation along its length. “There’s no other place for water besides the Milk River.”
the now dry St. Mary’s Canal.
And though it was intended to serve irrigators in Canada and north-central Montana, the Milk River Project has had benefits for the Blackfeet Nation, too. The canal snakes across tribal lands, providing stock water and serving as a de
facto fence for the many cattle ranchers on the reservation. “Right off the bat, [the siphon failure] caused strife between all of our producers out there,” says Craig Iron Pipe, agriculture director for the Blackfeet Tribe. For decades, the canal water has kept herds separated; when the water drained out, the cows started wandering.
“The second damage that was done was when those cows mixed, they started breeding,” says Iron Pipe. “This guy has Charolais, this guy has Wagyu, this guy has registered Angus. Next year, you’re not going to have 100-percent Charolais, 100-percent Angus. It’s all going to be mixed. So how are they going to market their calves?”
And without easy access to canal water, cattle have had to walk farther to drink, thereby reducing cows’ milk supplies and producing lighter calves—in other words, less valuable ones. Given longstanding inequities in the ways the U.S. Government has treated the Blackfeet, “It’s very, very hard to make a living here on a ranch,” Iron Pipe says. The St. Mary Canal running dry sure isn’t helping.
Chinook
Harlem
Fresno Reservoir
Havre
Blackfeet Indian Reservation
Craig Iron Pipe, Agriculture Director for the Blackfeet Tribe, stands next to
A map shows the course of the Milk River Project, which begins with the siphon that failed near Babb.
Above: A lone car is parked at the only accessible boat ramp on Fresno Reservoir. The water levels in Fresno are 23 feet below where they sat this spring, before the siphon failure when the reservoir was full. Below: Water from the Fresno Reservoir empties through the Fresno Dam
Bob Nelson, recreation representative for the St. Mary Rehabilitation Working Group, stands on a dock at the last accessible boat ramp on Fresno Reservoir. Where he currently stands would have been under 20 feet of water before the siphon failure in June.
The Dam
Only one boat braves the persistent wind one sunny afternoon in October at Fresno Reservoir. Bob Nelson had planned to fish, too, but the whitecaps on the 7,388-acre lake have changed his mind. Nelson, a retired high school teacher who’s now on the board of the local Walleyes Unlimited chapter, has had plenty of opportunity, though: He typically spends 15 to 20 days fishing at Fresno every year. Nelson also serves as the recreation representative on the St. Mary Rehabilitation Working Group, a coalition that formed in 2003 to develop solutions for upgrading the aging irrigation facilities “before they face catastrophic failure.” (“We haven’t done very well,” says group co-chair Marko Manoukian, an irrigator near Malta.)
“This is a tremendous recreational place,” Nelson says, looking out over the reservoir, a deep-blue oasis among the grasslands just west of Havre. Besides the day-to-day fishing—stocked walleye, plus northern pike and perch—and the
angling tournaments, Hi-Liners come to Fresno for wakeboarding, tubing, Jet Skiing, swimming and camping along the shoreline. Fresno is the first storage capacity along the Milk River, and right now, it’s 23 feet below full pool. (That’s not only because of the siphon break; engineers had already lowered the reservoir level to work on repairs to Fresno Dam.) Only one boat ramp remains usable; the other one, at nearby Kremlin Bay, now sits 50 feet from the water. “It gets like it is now, it puts our fish in a real crimp,” Nelson says. “They’ve managed to survive, but anytime you have water, you have more life.”
Nelson jokes that recreationists like him are “a parasite” on the back of the Milk River irrigation system, but the reservoir and the river itself provide habitat for aquatic and riparian species, which in turn attract wildlife watchers, hunters and anglers. The reservoir hosts an average of 12,350 angling days every year, mostly locals, generating $1 million annually for the area. “The Milk River is a hidden jewel of Montana,” Nelson says.
With the siphon under construction, everyone downstream of the Fresno Dam now has to rely on what’s currently stored in the reservoir to get by—plus any rain and snow that might fall. In this region, that might not be much. Nelson says he hears people worrying aloud that the reservoir will dry up and all the fish will die, but he doesn’t think things will get that dire. “The fish will suffer, but they’ll survive,” he says.
And then there’s the people. The roughly 18,000 residents of Hi-Line towns including Havre, Chinook and Harlem count on the Milk River for their drinking water. Jennifer Patrick of the Milk River Joint Board of Control says that municipalities will have priority and definitely will receive their contracted amounts of water through next summer. But the siphon failure is still causing problems for Havre because of issues with its water treatment plant. Fresh St. Mary River water helped alleviate some of the problems by diluting contaminants
and reducing turbidity, but since June, they’ve had to manage without. The city imposed water restrictions on residents last summer, and officials say that’s likely for next summer, too.
“The worst-case scenario is that it’s a dry winter,” says Trevor Mork, director of Havre’s public works administration. “Then we’d begin the summer season on a fairly tight water conservation. There’d be no irrigation of lawn grass, very limited activities such as car washing.”
Mork says the city is looking into reviving its defunct municipal system of wells or tapping into smaller tributaries to get by without the St. Mary River infusion. “We’re trying to make sure we have our plans B, C, and D ready to go.” That kind of adaptability has become more and more important across the West, as drought fueled by climate change already challenges human systems built for a different time—and any failure leaves us especially vulnerable.
“I don’t think the Hi-Line would be what it is [without the Milk River Project]. There’s no other place for water besides the Milk River.”
Jennifer Patrick, Milk River Joint Board of Control project manager
Downstream
Out in the big-sky landscape east of Havre, fields full of neatly stacked hay bales line both sides of Highway 2. Here and there you’ll see a herd of cattle, or even
a few pronghorn. Small towns every 30 miles or so offer groceries and hardware stores. But this is primarily irrigator country. And nobody will feel the effects of the broken St. Mary Siphon more than those who rely on the Milk River to water their crops or feed their cattle.
Dennis Kleinjan’s family history on the Hi-Line goes back four generations. His great-grandfather and great-aunt Martha homesteaded along the Milk near Lohman, and he now grazes cattle, and grows alfalfa to feed them, on the same land. Kleinjan also works as a ditch rider for the irrigation system—he’s the one who physically opens the headgates to farmers’ fields in his districts when it comes time to water. “We’ve known for a lot of years that [the Milk River Project] was bad,” he says, but it was simply too expensive to get the necessary repairs done. “We’ve been Band-Aiding it for years. Everybody knew it was going to go.” That doesn’t make dealing with the failure any easier.
Here’s how it works when the system is running normally: In May and June, farmers receive their first irrigation from the Milk River. The Milk River Joint Board of Control works with the
Bureau of Reclamation to release the proper amount of water from Fresno Dam, which then winds its way through a system of canals to individual producers growing grass hay, alfalfa, and to a lesser extent, corn. Producers water their crops—using flood irrigation or more expensive pump-powered pivots—and then harvest their first hay cutting in June. The flow turns off in early July in the larger districts to dry out the algae that typically forms in the canals, then goes back on from mid-July into September for a second irrigation and cutting. If there’s enough water left, sometimes producers get a third irrigation and cutting in late summer.
This past summer, the first irrigation went smoothly. Then the siphon blew. The Hi-Line had to work with what was left in the depleted Fresno Reservoir and municipal water towers, plus any natural precipitation the region was lucky enough to get. The joint board ended up shutting down irrigation two months earlier than usual.
“The second [irrigation], due to the water shortage, we only irrigated 60,000 acres,” out of the total 120,000 acres across the region, says the St.
Ditch rider and Hi-Line farmer Kleinjan stands atop the diversion dam he operates on his family’s property along the Milk River.
Water flows through first diversion dam on the Milk River, just east of Havre. This dam is physically run by Dennis Kleinjan, and is located on his family’s property. Usually, splashboards on the right channel slow the flow of the Milk River and divert water through the gates on the left channel for the canal that provides water to ranchers and farmers along the Hi-Line. As the Milk River has slowed to a trickle, the splashboards have been removed, the gates have been closed and the canal has run dry.
Mary Rehabilitation Working Group’s Manoukian. Forget about a third irrigation. He estimates that cost the region $7.8 million in lost production. But that’s pocket change compared to what could happen in 2025 if rain and snow fail to recharge the reservoir.
“Next year if we don’t irrigate, we’d miss the growing season. I’ve estimated it’ll be more than $44 million in production lost.”
It’s possible that Mother Nature could lend a hand with a wet winter and spring. But historically, that kind of weather hasn’t been the norm on the Hi-Line.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” Patrick says of the mood among irrigators now.
Farmers have been forced to come up with emergency plans. “What I’ve decided to do is buy more hay for the winter of 2025, to replace what I believe will be a shortage of my ability to produce hay,” Manoukian says, a move that cost him an extra $11,000. He raises cattle and sheep and grows alfalfa for forage. “And I’m trying to capture whatever winter precipitation we have by planting a winter forage crop.”
“This year it’s survival mode,” Kleinjan says of his own operation. He plans to
keep a couple of fields in hay production rather than rest them as he’d intended. “I’m going to have less yield than I would like,” he says, estimating he’ll get about half the tonnage he’s used to growing. Kleinjan will also stockpile his hay rather than selling it to conserve the feed for his own cattle.
Ken Blunt, who uses Milk River water to irrigate his 45-acre hobby farm of alfalfa and grass hay just east of Malta, is bracing for a financial hit next year. He expects his profits from hay sales—his only income in retirement—to plummet. “Not much you can do,” Blunt says, echoing a familiar refrain across the Hi-Line this year: “Just hope it rains.”
On top of the potential for lost production, irrigators must also help foot the bill for siphon repairs. Producers may have to help pay back a state loan at the rate of $3.30 per irrigated acre for the next 50 years, absent any federal aid (details were still being finalized at press time). “Our water taxes are high enough,” Kleinjan says. “You add $3 an acre, all of a sudden, that’s a big hit.” He especially worries about newer farmers in the area. “There’s going to be some younger guys trying to get going; it’s
going to really financially hurt some of them.” Without much precipitation, he predicts, “It’s going to break some guys.”
How far does the break go? “All of us irrigators know what’s going on,” Kleinjan says. “The rest of the public? They don’t know where the water comes from. They don’t care. They’ve never had to care.” But this might be less and less true. As drought and hotter temperatures shift the weather patterns and waterways of an already-dry West, perhaps the St. Mary’s Siphon failure foreshadows what lies ahead for everyone in the region— not just farmers like Kleinjan.
“Everybody needs water,” says Iron Pipe of the Blackfeet Nation. “Right now, water is really life.”
Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan is a Montanabased writer and editor who focuses on climate solutions, public lands, and environment.
Dave Gardner is an adventure and lifestyle photographer based out of Montana. Whether it’s a swamp in Arkansas, a river in Idaho or somewhere deep in the mountains, Gardner loves to use his camera to tell stories of wild people in wild places.
The Milk River winds through the landscape near Malta, Montana, on the Hi-Line. Golden trees mark the end of the first summer of limited water due to the siphon failure.
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Coyote Returns
Words by Shelli Rottshafer | Photo by Daniel Combs
I just saw coyote laying down in the open field out front of Cid’s where during the summertime the community garden blooms.
Hunkered down he awaits the field mice. Yet being bright of day he is not too inconspicuous; and knowing his luck, he raises his head to peer ears pointed toward periwinkle, their triangle silhouette mimicking distant mountain peaks.
At Fechin House, Taos’s Art Museum, I read of a sad, sad time. Bosque Redondo, Hwéeldi, Fort Sumner. While interred there, those held captive created ceremony, the only way they could through their stories. Through re-membering.
In one, coyote is caught. But once set free those who witnessed, watched as he bounded West, toward original homeland. Predicting yet too, the internment return.
Once home, the remaining story was revised a slow healing, now captured within the bounds, zigs, and zags. A permanence tethered in weavings.
Blanketed upon the wavering horizon the moon’s curve still murmurs a will after a long, long journey.
Poet, educator and advocate Shelli Rottschafer completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico in 2005 in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 she taught at a small liberal arts college in Michigan. In summer 2023 Rottschafer began her low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University, Gunnison.
Photographer Daniel Combs, originally from Waterford, New York, has traveled the world as a sommelier and in the pursuit of capturing images through his lens. Together with their rescue pup, Combs and Rottschafer reside in Louisville, Colorado, and El Prado, Nuevo México.
A coyote wades through snow in New Mexico. Photo by Daniel Combs
Considering the Hunter and the Herd
Prioritizing coexistence through predator-friendly ranching
By Taylor Owens
To the naked eye, Thirteen Mile Farm might look like any other livestock operation in the West. Sheep graze green and golden fields before a mountainous backdrop, the occasional dog nipping at their heels. But this southwestern Montana ranch is unique in a critical way: it prioritizes predator coexistence.
As long as ranchers have been grazing livestock across the rugged landscapes of the West, they’ve contended with residents who were there before them: bears, wolves, and other predators that
can pose a lethal and potentially costly threat to ranchers and their stock. Some forward-thinking ranchers are proving that it doesn’t have to be a matter of us or them, but one of coexistence.
For Becky Weed, who owns Thirteen Mile Farm with her husband Dave Tyler, and has ranched in Montana for decades, predator-friendly ranching is more than just avoiding conflicts with coyotes and mountain lions; it’s about recognizing the larger ecological picture.
“Education about coexistence with predators was always just one piece of a
larger effort to figure out how to ranch as if nature matters,” she says, adding that while there’s no “silver bullet” to managing predator interactions, success comes from a deep commitment to understanding the landscape and modifying ranching practices to fit its rhythms. Being tuned in means knowing the terrain, local wildlife patterns and the seasonal changes that affect both predators and livestock.
Weed and Tyler raise sheep, sometimes cattle, and sell lamb and wool. They are nationally recognized for their predator-friendly ranching and humanpredator coexistence efforts.
“It wasn’t really a new idea,” Weed says. “People have been doing this for millennia, but it was sort of a reintroduction of the idea to the Intermountain West to some extent, and now it’s very common, and of course lots of people are doing a variety of things to learn to coexist with predators.”
Some of the effective strategies Weed has implemented on her small ranch include utilizing guard dogs, strategic timing of human presence, grass management strategies, and integrated pest management. All of these tactics are scale-dependent; there isn’t one simple solution for every ranch. But paying attention and learning through trial and error can work anywhere.
“If we are alert, we have a better capacity to protect ourselves,” Weed says.
Weed recounts a time 15 years ago when mountain lions were coming down from the mountains behind her ranch due to a disease affecting the deer population. The cats were killing sheep— both ewes and lambs.
“I did a number of things,” she says. “I’d take walks at unpredictable hours of day and night. We got a rechargeable flashlight that was kind of like a truck headlight. I could shine it a half mile down to the end of a field, and a lot of people say that unpredictable lighting can be very disruptive to cats, and I think it worked in our case.”
Left: Situated under the shadow of the Bridger Range, Thirteen Mile Farm was one of the first homesteads in Gallatin Valley. Photo courtesy of Thirteen Mile Farm Top: Becky Weed and Dave Tyler have owned Thirteen Mile Farm for decades. Photo courtesy of Thirteen Mile Farm Above: Thirteen Mile Farm is nationally recognized for their predatorfriendly ranching methods, including the use of dogs to protect livestock. Photo courtesy of Thirteen Mile Farm
“Education about coexistence with predators was always just one piece of a larger effort to figure out how to ranch as if nature matters.”
Becky Weed, owner of Thirteen Mile Farm
Weed acknowledges that her practices still draw rebuttal. “Nobody likes to have their animals harassed or killed by predators. There’s nothing fun about that.” Predators cause an estimated $232 million in losses to livestock producers each year in the U.S., according to a report from the United States Department of Agriculture. This cost is in part passed on to the government, which offers various reimbursement programs for depredation loss.
Predator-friendly ranching has been practiced since long before European settlers claimed stakes in what became the United States of America, but as the national sentiment during westward expansion leaned toward conquering nature over coexisting with it, such practices went out of vogue. In their place came lethal intervention, an alternative to predator-friendly ranching still practiced by many today—though this tactic may also now be in decline.
Wolf depredation of livestock, one of the more hot button ranching issues in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, dipped in Montana in 2023, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The state confirmed wolves killed 23 cattle, eight sheep and one livestock
guard dog throughout the year, with an additional six cattle, one sheep and one horse identified as probable wolf kills. The department reported cattle kills were down substantially compared to annual data from 2011-2022, as were sheep kills despite a previous uptick in sheep depredation. As a result, 31 wolves were killed in 2023 to prevent further
depredation, a significant decrease in the previous annual average of 60 wolf kills.
And yet, many ranchers are resistant to adopting coexistence-motivated practices and have strong feelings toward the larger creatures sharing the landscape. According to Hilary Zaranek, a rancher internationally recognized for her pioneering work in predatorlivestock conflict reduction, these acts of resistance may be more a byproduct of the industry than the issue itself.
“It’s primarily an issue of fear combined with other financial or emotional stressors on those ranches,” Zaranek says. “If you can address the emotional and the financial stressors, all of a sudden, the grizzly bear is really a non-issue.” She says ranching is not just a job, it is a way of life. Ranchers face many limitations in implementing predator-friendly changes, she adds, whether they’re generational or financial.
“I think that it’s hard when you’ve dedicated your life to believing certain values and in building a life around those values and get to be 70 years old and think, ‘Huh, now is a great time to completely change all of this,’” Zaranek says. “Ranches that don’t have a strong next generation coming back or a next generation that is thinking outside of the box, those are limitations.” For Zaranek, who ranches with her husband, Andrew, at J Bar L Ranch in Montana’s
J Bar L Ranch is located in Montana’s Centennial Valley, putting them in close proximity with large predators, such as bears. Game cameras on the property capture these large animals predating on livestock every so often. Photo courtesy of Hilary Zaranek
Centennial Valley, it’s a matter of re-envisioning the approach to wildlifelivestock interactions.
“Wildlife-livestock conflict really is solved currently through half of the equation, which is [to] manage the wildlife,” Zaranek says. “And Andrew and I really have focused on the other half of the equation, which is [to] manage the cattle.” For example, Zaranek practices herding cattle versus scattering them, which keeps the unit moving frequently. She says this is an effective change that didn’t require a fundamental overhaul of the operation.
“That’s an example of a change that we’ve made in our management that not only has shown to reduce vulnerability to wolf predation in particular, but it also has had a positive impact ecologically from the standpoint of soil and range management, as well as from effectiveness and efficiency of our riders,” Zaranek says, referring to range riders who patrol and monitor large areas of rangeland on horseback, overseeing the herd to check for signs of predators and ensure their animals’ safety.
Zaranek runs a large ranching operation with pastures ranging from 900 to 6,000 acres in diverse mountain
country. When cattle are scattered, she explains it could take all day for a rider to cover that country with the possibility of not seeing any cows. By keeping the cattle together in smaller areas and moving, riders can spend less than half the time to find all the cattle, and know if they lost something. “Riders are then better positioned to move them, to doctor them, to do anything that they need to do instead of spending all day riding just to find only 60 percent of your herd,” Zaranek says. “That’s an example of one change in management that has had this positive ripple effect in many areas, ecologically and economically on the ranch.”
Rather than focusing on the losses caused by predators, Zaranek points out that other factors, including poisonous plants such as tall larkspurs, are often the leading causes of livestock deaths. “The losses happen, but they are not significant compared to all of the types of losses that we experience,” she says. “And it’s not even ‘Manage the cattle to not have a depredation.’ It’s more of ‘Manage the cattle in the context of our larger ranch goals.’”
The business and financial sides of running a ranch are greatly affected
by year-to-year changes in conditions, including shifts in the natural environment, leading to varying levels of herd loss. “There’s just a lot of diversity within the different enterprises themselves,” Zaranek says. “We have a lot of flexibility to be buying and selling cattle based on what is happening ecologically on the landscape. We can take advantage of when things are good and where they’re good and when things are not good and where they’re not good.”
Ranching demands a deep connection to the land and constant adaptation. Zaranek has observed the behavior of both predators and cattle on her ranch, gaining a deeper understanding of how they interact. She recalls a day when she went to check on some cows and observed the cows chasing wolves. “I’ve had a lot of really special opportunities to actually witness cattle in relationship to different people handling them in different ways; grizzly bears interested in one food source versus other types of food sources; wolves that are hunted, wolves that aren’t hunted,” she says. “It’s through actually seeing it that you can’t deny that there’s more to the story.”
Taylor Owens is the Content Marketing Lead at Outlaw Partners.
Left: Hilary manages J Bar L Ranch with her husband Andrew. Photo courtesy of Hilary Zaranek Right: To reduce predation on cattle, Zaranek practices range riding, as well as herding. Photo courtesy of Hilary Zaranek
photo by Krafty Photos
In the summer of 2015, a coalition of residents and landowners in Paradise Valley, agency officials, the Park County commission and chamber of commerce, and other nonprofit organizations successfully halted the proposed Emigrant Gulch Mine from the irreparable harm it believed the extraction would bring to 75 acres along the base of Emigrant Peak just north of Yellowstone National Park.
Not only did the widespread opposition lead to the Greater Yellowstone Coalition purchasing the parcel in 2022 and transferring it to public hands, but the Yellowstone Gateway Protection Act was enacted to protect 30,000 surrounding acres from future mining proposals. While growth has become an inevitable part of the 22 million robust but fragile acres of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, conservation wins like this one are a reminder of the tireless, passionate and collaborative effort put forth by area nonprofits to keep some of the region wild.
“There’s a very strong element of that—a wild nature that still exists here,” says Max Hjortsberg, managing director of the Park County Environmental Council, a grassroots conservation organization based in Livingston, Montana. “I think that people see that as very much worth protecting and
Greater Yellowstone’s Frontline Protectors
Conservation nonprofits are crucial to the fight to keep the GYE wild
By Mira Brody
fighting to maintain, that presence in this area. And I think we still have a chance at doing that.”
PCEC has operated on such a belief since it was established in 1987 as an informal group of Park County residents focused on advocating for and celebrating wild places and wilderness in Park County. For decades, it’s remained an ardent source of advocacy for the land, water, wildlife and people of Yellowstone’s northern gateway community.
PCEC’s latest fight surfaced in October 2024 after the nonprofit filed a Freedom of Information Act request to confirm community rumors of a planned 90-acre development on the south side of Suce Creek near Livingston. Flex Capital Group, still a prospective buyer of the agricultural parcel as of Mountain Outlaw press time, has plans for a large destination resort complex, including 100 cabins, a central facility with a bar, restaurant, spa and event space on a parcel currently home to wildlife, agricultural land and recreation access to the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness.
After learning of the proposal, PCEC began working with elected officials, the county planning department, planning board and the community to find the most powerful response to development proposals of this scale that have become all
Top: The Madison Range from Echo Peak. Photo by Anna Wearn Far left: Vehicle-wildlife collisions have increased along critical corridors in the growing GYE, including U.S. Highway 84. Photo by Melissa Butynski Left: Suce Creek Road in Paradise Valley is the latest target for luxury development on agricultural land. Photo courtesy of the PCEC
than us.”
Protecting the GYE’s wildlife is a lift that requires many hands. Not far from Livingston in Bozeman, Montana, the Center for Large Landscape Conservation studies ecological connectivity in landscapes. Landscape fragmentation is a global issue, and through science, policy, practice and collaboration, the organization tackles what CLLC chief strategy officer Deb Kmon Davidson refers to as the “messy middles,” the land in between protected areas.
“It’s everywhere,” Kmon Davidson said. “Every single corner of the globe is dealing with fragmentation. Fragmentation from roads, fragmentation from human development in terms of housing and industrial agriculture.” The GYE is no exception.
Kmon Davidson spoke to Mountain Outlaw from Cali, Columbia, where she represented CLLC in CoP-16 (16th Conference of the Parties) to the Convention on Biological Diversity. CoP-16 convened 15,000 people from 96 countries to discuss the importance of connectivity and landscape/seascape conservation, and demonstrate successful implementation.
The day prior, CLLC gave a presentation to an international audience about work the group’s been doing along two major GYE corridors in Montana: U.S. Highway 191 in Gallatin Canyon between Bozeman and Big Sky, and Montana Highway 89 in Paradise Valley—two sites where vehiclewildlife collisions have greatly increased. CLLC is working on solutions; a “top priority” is a wildlife crossing at the mouth of Gallatin Canyon where 24 percent of all crashes are collisions with wildlife—more than double the statewide average of 10 percent. This wildlife crossing could become a reality by 2026. It was the global debut, she said, of a project that is very close to home.
CLLC’s GYE studies can be applied globally, but local celebrations are certainly in order. Custer Gallatin National Forest utilized a connectivity analysis produced by CLLC in its revised forest plan released in July 2020. The connectivity analysis identified important wildlife corridors that will now remain undisturbed by human activity such as heavy equipment, vegetation management, low flying helicopters, increased recreation use and structure development.
Additionally, in October of this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a “department-wide effort to support connectivity of wildlife habitat on working landscapes through the management of National Forests and voluntary conservation assistance on private agricultural lands,” according to a USDA Oct. 21 press release.
too commonplace in southwest Montana. Above all though, they’re giving a voice to those who don’t have one.
“We’re such a human-centric species,” says Erica Lighthiser, who also serves as PCEC managing director. “We talk a lot about conservation, even in terms of beautiful and open landscapes. I think a lot of our conservation organizations really need to—and they do—center around wildlife and center around the importance of species that are non-human. Unfortunately, nothing can speak for those species other
“There’s an acceptance and an awareness of yes, we are going to have more infrastructure, we are going to have more traffic. We’re probably going to have to build roads into some wild land areas,” Kmon Davidson said. “If we’re going to do that, let’s do it in the best way possible … that all comes down to knowing where the highest priority habitat is, trying to avoid that if you can, and if you can’t, then mitigating appropriately.”
On the southern end of the GYE, another organization is harnessing such increasing human traffic into support for nonhuman species. Each September, Jackson Hole One Fly Foundation hosts a fly-fishing tournament along the Jackson Hole stretch of the Snake River, gathering 40 teams of four fly
Top: Anglers during One Fly’s 2024 tournament along the Snake River. Photo by Neal Henderson Above: One Fly challenges tournament-goers to fish with one single fly.
Photo by Neal Henderson
fisherfolk each to raise money to support local efforts to restore, steward and conserve this critical watershed.
“If there are rivers prettier than the Snake as it flows through Jackson, particularly up in the park, I’d be hard pressed to tell you,” says Greg Case, board chairman of One Fly. “I’ve fished in a lot of places, but that remains one of the most breathtaking views.”
Case says that sense of wonder is key to the success of the nonprofit’s 38-year run and the hundreds of thousands of dollars they raise each year—this year’s event brought in nearly $500,000 through tournament entry fees, sponsors and the preceding auction event. Case estimates One Fly has raised more than $25 million since the organization’s inception. A large portion of the money is awarded to One Fly’s regional focused conservation partners, including Trout Unlimited, Henry’s Fork Foundation and Friends of the Teton River. Other dollars fund local scholarships, such as University of Wyoming’s Aquatic Ecology Scholarship, and the Jackson Hole Fly Fishing School, inspiring the love of fly fishing and river stewardship among the next generation.
“People tend to protect what they love and what they know,” Case says. “So the more we can do to introduce young girls and boys to the sport of fly fishing, hopefully the more participation we get from that next generation, and therefore they represent the next group to stand up and fight for the resource.”
Case, who lives in Philadelphia, participated in his 17th One Fly tournament this year. He said it’s an event that people from all over the world mark on their calendars annually, with participants and supporters from all corners of the U.S., as well as New Zealand, Australia and Europe.
From its headwaters in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks to its confluence with the Columbia River in Washington, the entirety of the Snake River will represent more than 65 percent of the nation’s remaining cold-water fish habitat by 2080, according to research projections by American Rivers. Conserving this life-giving waterway is critical to the livelihood of Yellowstone and fine-spotted cutthroat, whose habitats are threatened by warming waters due to climate change.
“To have the opportunity to catch native fish that have been there for millions of years since the last glacial episode, that Lewis and Clark encountered when they came across the country when it was all unknown territory to the Europeans … and see those views and be part of that environment for a couple of days is just incredible,” Case says. “I don’t know many people who aren’t moved by that experience.”
As the GYE faces a future of increased growth, PCEC, CLLC and One Fly are examples of the many organizations that have made the flanks of Yellowstone National Park their battleground, and believe in taking an active role in that inevitability in the little ways that they can—whether that’s supporting policy to keep development away from critical habitat and guiding responsible land use, funding stewardship to protect a critical species, or simply spreading a love of the landscape on a national level.
Learn more about the nonprofits in this story at largelandscapes.org, pcecmt.org and jacksonholeonefly.org.
Mira Brody is the VP of Media at Outlaw Partners.
Planning wildlife crossings along U.S. Highway 191
In November 2024, CLLC announced that they had submitted an application with the Federal Highway Administration by the Montana Department of Transportation that will, once approved, allow for the construction of a wildlife overpass at the mouth of Gallatin Canyon across U.S. Highway 191. With 10,000-16,000 vehicles passing through Gallatin Gateway—the only route available to Bozeman-to-Big Sky commuters— per day, the road is a growing hazard to animals attempting to access key habitats, specifically deer and elk.
“The assessment showed where actions are most needed to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions and maintain or improve wildlife’s ability to move across the road to access important resources and habitat,” said CLLC road ecologist Liz Fairbank, lead author of the 191/MT 64 Wildlife and Transportation Assessment.
Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program awards are expected to be announced in early 2025. If the 191 application is successful, a planning process for construction should commence in 2026. You can read more about this project by scanning the code below.
Conceptual rendering of how a potential overpass may look on the landscape. Courtesy of Jacobs Engineering group Inc.
15 YEARS OF OUTLAW
CULTURE
An overhead view shows the opening ceremonies at Saisko Village school in Basha Valley, Shigar District, Pakistan. This is a partner school of Iqra Fund. Read more on p. 126. Photo courtesy of Iqra Fund
‘JAMIE'S TURN’
Jamie Harrison stakes her own claim in Montana’s literary landmark
Words by Toby Thompson
Writer Jamie Harrison walks near Livingston’s poor farm on an early fall day.
Photo by Lynn Donaldson
Forget Beyoncé. Forget Taylor, too, and the possibility that tonight they and Kamala will triangulate at the Democratic National Convention in a superstar scrum that will disperse this crowd at Elk River Books to its flatscreens. That might scuttle Jamie Harrison’s celebration of the publication of her fifth novel in the Jules Clement mystery series, The River View. Ninety-odd fans are shoehorned between shelves of volumes here at Elk River in Livingston, Montana, to applaud the local writer’s recent offering. And they’re not just readers. Authors Gretel Erlich, Maryanne Vollers, Scott McMillion, Elise Atchison, and the biographer John Taliaferro, who will serve as interlocutor for Jamie on stage, are present. Surrounding everyone are books by the writers Thomas McGuane, Richard Brautigan, William Hjortsberg, Doug Peacock, Jim Harrison—Jamie’s dad—and even the part-time memoirist and novelist Jimmy Buffett, that have made Livingston a literary landmark. But tonight, it’s Jamie’s jam.
She’s a slight woman of 64 years with a wry smile and a bookish countenance. Seated onstage, she wears a maroon shirt and jeans, but no cowboy boots. “I’m overly sarcastic about cowboys,” she’s said. “I know people who are truly Western, and I completely respect them. But the vast number of people who come here and think they’re part of the West are talking about something that doesn’t really exist. I haven’t worn cowboy boots since I moved out here.”
That was 38 years ago, after careers in New York as a caterer and media person at Dean & DeLuca; a magazine writer (Rolling Stone and Us); and a would-be romance novelist, having written a 16th-century “bodice ripper” that didn’t sell. She fled for Livingston with her partner Stephen Potenberg, to a house at the foot of the Absaroka Mountains owned by painter/author, Russell Chatham. Which they rented—for $150 a month.
“We stayed two years,” she says. “The endgame to that was my becoming the managing editor to Clark City Press, Russell’s publishing house. In five years that folded and I was out of a job.” During the
next half-decade, she wrote four novels in the Jules Clement series, the republication of which, with her latest, is being celebrated tonight.
Inevitably there’d been a lag. “Of 24 years,” Taliaferro notes puckishly. “The last one was in 2000.”
Had she writer’s block? “No, I wrote two novels that didn’t sell,” she says. “One was set in New York, and then I wrote another Jules. I was writing screenplays of these books. I had no real confidence, too. It’s easier to write when you’re getting just a little bit of praise. But I did write two published books in between. So it wasn’t really writer’s block, it was no time. And no confidence. When somebody stops buying something, you just shrivel up. It’s hard.”
And beginning again? “I started by making Jules my age of 60-plus, but that didn’t work,” she says of the new novel. “Jules essentially is me. He’s an over-educated archaeologist who came back to his hometown, Blue Deer—which in reality is Livingston—because he missed it. His father had been a sheriff, and he thought maybe he could be a good cop. And make up for his father’s death somehow.”
Taliaferro says, “He’s an archaeologist. Perfect fit.”
“I wanted to be an archaeologist,” Jamie says, “but I sissy-ed out and got an English degree. Digging up bodies is innately interesting to me. I dig up a lot of people.”
Regarding the nature of mysteries, Taliaferro says, “It’s finding the grave. Jules’ effort to solve these mysteries is also his effort to solve himself.” He laughs. “I’m so glad Jules is back, because he’s made such great progress!”
The audience titters. Someone asks, “Can a genre novel be literary?”
“Sure,” Jamie says. “I really wanted to write mysteries, because A: I lost my job, and B: I’d read a lot of mysteries and they were all the really great ones. I thought I could do them, and,” she pauses, “quite frankly, I wanted as much as possible to avoid being compared to my father.” A beat. “Because that was a game I was never going to win.”
Jamie poses for a photo outside her house in Livingston, where she’s lived for the past 38 years. The daughter of famed write Jim Harrison, Jamie also spent time in Livingston as a child.
Photo by Lynn Donaldson
Jamie works at the table in her Livingston home. After a 20-year hiatus from her acclaimed Jules Clement mystery series, which is set in a fictional version of Livingston called Blue Deer, Jamie published the fifth installment, “The River View,” in August 2024. Photo by Lynn Donaldson
Few critics weigh Jamie’s work against her father’s, but most acknowledge the relationship, as Jim is regarded as one of the more important poets, essayists and fiction writers of his generation. He was widely praised by critics as the author of such novellas as Legends of the Fall, Revenge, The Woman Lit by Fireflies, the poetry volume, Letters to Yesenin, and the novel, Dalva, in which he wrote from the persona of a woman. The London Sunday Times went so far as to say, “Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him.” An outdoorsman, a bon vivant, a food critic and a gourmand of epic proportions, he was a hard act to follow. He died in 2016, at his desk, with an unfinished poem before him.
Jamie says that, as a child, “writing seemed like something you did as a calling. I read everything I could get my hands on and was very serious about that. But I didn’t want to be a writer.” She hesitates. “It was not a good way to make a living. My dad didn’t make more than eight or 10 grand a year until I was in college.”
“Writing seemed like something you did as a calling. I read everything I could get my hands on and was very serious about that. But I didn’t want to be a writer.”
–Jamie Harrison
She’s seated at a picnic table in the backyard of her Livingston house—a comfortable bungalow she shares with her attorney husband, Stephen Potenberg, and in past years her two sons, John 28, and Will, 34. Jamie and her younger sister, Anna Hjortsberg—who manages The Country Bookshelf in Bozeman—are executors of their father’s literary estate. Each of Jim’s 40-plus books remains in print. Three have appeared since his death. The sisters have editorial control of this fabled archive.
“We’re sorting out some last-minute copyright things,” Jamie says. “But we decide.”
Financial success for Jim Harrison did not arrive quickly. In the early 1970s, he quit teaching at Stony Brook University in New York to return to his home state of Michigan to write, eschewing other employment—not without consequence for his family.
“He’d won a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. But we really didn’t have any money,” Jamie recalls. “When I was in high school, I paid the electrical bills sometimes. I worked for a nursery down the street. I worked from the age of 13 on.”
Jamie’s mother, Linda King Harrison, was from a wealthier family than Jim’s, “so my grandfather
loaned us money. Friends loaned us money. But it was always a big deal when Dad got paid by Sports Illustrated for an article. I did go up to the mailbox looking for checks. But we didn’t miss meals. For one thing, we were living in Lake Leelanau, a tiny town in northern Michigan. You could charge at the grocery store. I remember signing off on the chit and getting up to $900 in credit there. We had a garden. We didn’t eat lavishly. But nobody starved. We had books and we had food, and we had Hearty Burgundy.”
Jim later wrote, in an essay titled “A Sporting Life,” that, “A few years back, when we were quite poor, lower-class by all the charts, we had a game dinner at our house … We ate, fixed in a number of ways, venison, duck, trout, woodcock, snipe, grouse, rabbit, and drank [two] cases of wine. I doubt you could buy the meal on earth.”
That sounds glorious, even rich. But as a teenager, Jamie had concerns not just about her father’s income, but about his mental health. “He was incredibly depressed,” she says, about his career and the hardships imposed upon his family. “I was worried that he was going to kill himself.” And of her family: “I remember being actively worried about people’s happiness, rather than whether we were going to eat.”
Despite this concern, Tom McGuane, Jim’s oldest friend, remembers Jamie “as a very lively kid, twirling her baton and imagining herself as a cheerleader. She was a wonderful child.”
In high school, Jamie won a National Merit Scholarship to the University of Michigan but could not accept it because of her father’s “nonexistent tax forms.” He hadn’t filed. “He was a truly selfabsorbed person,” she says. “But he worried about us and felt guilty.” His depression came to a head in 1972-73, during the composition of the long poem, “Letters to Yesenin.” Sergei Yesenin was a popular Russian poet who had hanged himself: “And what a dance you had kicking your legs from the rope,” Jim wrote. “Beauty takes my courage away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.”
Alcohol had always been Jim’s “reentry” vehicle from the loneliness of writing, but drugs, he admitted in his 2002 memoir, Off to the Side, had entered the equation. In the Key West tribute film, All That Is Sacred, which celebrates Jim’s, Buffett’s, McGuane’s, and Guy de la Valdene’s drug-spackled friendship, Jamie says, “If your father asked you to hide the cocaine, you hid the cocaine.” She adds here, “I remember cocaine being around from the time I was 12 or 13. At some point, I was delegated to bury the coke grinder out in the barn floor somewhere. I was doing cocaine too, by the time I was 17 or 18. I was everything in moderation. I’m
not Grace Slick, but I’m glad I’m alive.”
Jim’s poverty gamble eventually paid off. In 1977 Jack Nicholson, whom he’d met on the set of McGuane’s film, The Missouri Breaks, shot in Montana, staked him enough cash to write Legends of the Fall and two other novellas. The complete Legends appeared in Esquire magazine, and its movie version, starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, jumpstarted a lucrative screenwriting career for Jim. The family was out of debt.
“Altogether, I would say I had a happy childhood,” Jamie says. “Because it was we three or four against the world. We spent most of our time together. I would try reading what my parents were reading. Everybody would go to the bookstore together. Everybody went to dinners together. We all cooked together. It was, in a kind of weird way, idyllic.”
At the University of Michigan (from which she graduated with honors), Jamie studied English literature but felt she did not have the science to tackle archaeology. “I did the Great Books thing. I also had wanted to be an art history major, but looked around at the girls in pearls and realized I didn’t have the background, I didn’t have it, shall we say.”
After graduation, her plan was “not moving back
Below: Jim Harrison with his daughters Anna and Jamie and his wife Linda. Photo courtesy of Jamie
Left: Jamie’s father, Jim Harrison, at the Festival du Livre et du vin de Saumur in France.
Photo by Annie Gomiss
Harrison
Crosses and the nameadorned plaque of a brick monument honor the dead at the poor farm in Livingston.
Established in 1892 to house indigents, the aged, and the infirm, the poor farm appears in several of Jamie’s books. Photos by Toby Thompson
to northern Michigan. I’d found a place in Soho, a sublet.” She worked at the gourmet deli, Dean & DeLuca, for a couple of years, doing food chores and “writing its first catalog—with two-dozen ways of describing olive oil.” Those were the cocaine days in New York City. “That and AIDS.”
Burned out by 1987, she and Potenberg moved to Livingston and Russell Chatham’s house on Deep Creek. She spent five years working for him at Clark City Press before that endeavor crashed and she felt sufficiently liberated to tackle the Jules Clement mystery series.
Those novels were positively reviewed. The New York Times wrote of the novel, The Edge of the Crazies: “A sparkling, caustic first novel … In this madly original debut, Ms. Harrison speaks up in a fresh animated voice to say something worth saying about the festering animosities of small minds cooped up in small towns.” And of the next, Going Local, the Los Angeles Times wrote: “What seems characteristic of the best present crime writing is surpassingly true of Jamie Harrison … she is also writing social
history as accurate in its essences as a road map and generating a most admirable work of literature.”
The series of four sold respectably and spiked her career arc.
In addition, there was something placid about her new home, Livingston, a town Jim had visited yearly since 1968 to hunt and fish with McGuane, and one she had visited only twice as a child.
“I think I was 13 the first time I came out here. And I absolutely fell in love with the smell of the air, with everything. I’ve always been interested in the idea of women who ran away. It’s reinvention. It’s running into something. It’s not always cowardice.”
She snorts. “I’ve always been fascinated by people who can pick up and start again.”
The Livingston poor farm and potter’s field appear in several of Jamie’s novels, including what she calls her two “literary ones,” The Widow Nash and The Center of Everything, which are stunningly good, have won awards, and deserve essays unto themselves. McGuane has called them “grounded, original and moving,” with “a moral center and steadiness that are hers alone.” They involve women who have escaped from difficult men or have a heady preoccupation with the past. This afternoon a crisp wind blows through the potter’s field’s white crosses. Jamie steps around them, intently studying the sunken graves.
“I don’t know what my poor house interest is about,” she says. I guess it’s because they have them in Michigan too. I’ve always lived in places where the past is sort of fascinating. I’ve always liked graveyards, and potter’s fields are everywhere. What happens to the lost people? Not good things. I am politically angry enough to want to poke at that, too.”
She leaves the small cemetery, its tall grass shimmering, and walks to a brick monument erected by the county. This poor farm had been established in 1892 to house indigents, the aged, and the infirm. Between that date and 1924, its cemetery held at least 111 people, most of their graves unmarked. Jamie scans the monument’s list of names, many of them European in origin, but distinctly Montanan.
“I’m surprised I didn’t use any of these for my novel,” she says.
In The River View, Jules has quit the police department and is trying to understand what motivated his father’s death—a murder. Jules works as a PI and as an archaeologist, identifying graves at Blue Deer’s poor farm, so that a road might be constructed through it. The River View is, in part, about property grabbing—real estate. “The book is about greed, about land. Everybody wants a river
view. The few people who have it are not particularly fortunate—they’re up on the poor farm.”
In The Center of Everything, Jamie wrote, “From the poor farm, perched between the Absaroka Mountains and the river below, you would have had the best view possible of the town that didn’t want you, the thousands of people who didn’t care, the whole world you didn’t own … if you were ill and had no relatives to care for you, you were given to the care of the county, which fed you, clothed you, gave you a bed, and did its best to tend to your medical and psychological needs.”
Jim had needed little more than caregiver attention near the end of his life. He was a financially comfortable and well-respected author. His name, in critical circles, was sacrosanct. His books sold admirably, here and abroad. Now, as someone at Elk River’s event had quipped of literary success, “It’s Jamie’s turn.”
The critiquing of Jim’s manuscripts from high school on, her partial editing or proofing of them and her collaborations with him upon potentially rewarding screenplays was finished. Also done was the care, with sister Anna, of both their aging parents—no small task. Watching Jamie study the poor farm’s graves, one is reminded of what she’d said earlier about her parents’ deaths—her mother’s in late 2015, her father’s in early 2016: “My mother got sepsis and was in the hospital for four months. She had an infection that they never traced. My dad had shingles, which was what killed him, basically. Six years of pain and drinking through it.”
He’d succumbed to a coronary, alone at his casita in southern Arizona. “I left him on a Wednesday, and he died on Saturday. He had wanted me to stay. So I felt horrible, obviously. I went down the next day, and I think Anna got in on Monday. As McGuane said later, ‘He was not a candidate for long-term care.’ Dad was not okay at all after Mom died, and he wasn’t going to get okay. But when I saw him there in Arizona he was smiling. I have to say, that was nice to see.”
Offering nothing further, the wind tangling her hair, she strides past the gravesites toward the car.
Toby Thompson is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Positively Main Street, his biography of Bob Dylan, and Riding the Rough String: Reflections on the American West. He has written for publications as varied as Esquire, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Outside, and Men’s Journal. He is a part-time resident of Livingston, Montana, and teaches nonfiction writing at Penn State.
“I’ve always lived in places where the past is sort of fascinating. I’ve always liked graveyards, and potter’s fields are everywhere. What happens to the lost people? Not good things. I am politically angry enough to want to poke at that, too.”
–Jamie Harrison
Jamie sits in the back of her car with one of her dogs at the poor farm in Livingston. Photo by Lynn Donaldson
‘The River View’ by Jamie Harrison
A long-awaited return of the critically acclaimed Jules Clement mystery novels
By Maggie Neal Doherty
Twenty-four years after publishing the fourth book in her celebrated Jules Clement series, Livingston novelist Jamie Harrison has gifted fans with the long-anticipated fifth installment, published in August of 2024. The newest book, The River View is packed with all the rural Montana mystery, generational conflict, and chilling one-liners that the series has been known for—and then more.
“There is a central demoralizing fact of life that no matter how you leave it, by choice or illness or accident, intact or in shreds, your mortal shell will become someone else’s problem,” Harrison writes in The River View. Indeed, death remains a central plot motivator in the latest volume, but the circumstances for her stalwart Jules Clement have changed since the last book, Blue Deer Thaw Jules, now the former sheriff of the small southwestern Montana town of Blue Deer, is working as an archeologist and begrudgingly, to make ends meet, toiling as a private investigator. Although he’s left the force and is determined to focus on his wife and baby, dead bodies continue to give him problems.
Harrison, who seamlessly blends literary fiction with features of the best mysteries, introduced the world to Jules Clement in the series’ opener, The Edge of the Crazies, published in 1995. Jules is
a native of Blue Deer—a fictional small and weird town infused with shades of the author’s own Livingston: unrelenting powerful wind, clueless Yellowstone tourists, and a hotel that resembles the iconic Murray. It’s hard to make a living in this mountain town east of Bozeman, and Harrison, an occasional Hollywood scriptwriter, blows through, intensifying the caseload. For all the resemblances with Livingston, it’s safe to say Blue Deer has a much higher rate of crime.
In the first book, Jules has returned home after spending his 20s abroad as an archeologist. He surprised his family and friends when he switched careers and found himself elected as sheriff. It’s the
same line of work that killed his father, Ansel, who was shot to death during a traffic stop in 1972. In Harrison’s first four books, Jules solves confounding cases with his trademark level-headed demeanor peppered with a sense of humor, a presumed macabre byproduct of working with the dead. Jules strives to be like his father, fair and open-minded, and he lives up to these aspirations— mostly. His youth is littered with reckless behavior, and until he falls for Caroline, a fellow deputy, his romantic exploits are infamous. Not much escapes the attention of a small town.
After shooting a man in book four, Blue Deer Thaw, Jules quits. The death wasn’t without cause: The victim killed another officer and wounded Caroline. What troubled Jules wasn’t the actual death. “He quit because shooting the man and watching him bleed out caused him no remorse, and he knew he’d never get that song out of his head again,” Harrison writes in The River View. Jules wasn’t traumatized; he was terrified of his own volatility. At the end of Blue Deer Thaw, Jules and Caroline left town.
The River View picks up a few years later after they’ve returned home with dreams of building a house on the ancestral Clement plot along an idyllic bend in the Yellowstone River. Jules has forsworn the badge but Caroline returns
to law enforcement only to suffer beneath the current acting sheriff, a blundering drunk who only complicates matters. Like the previous novels, The River View is an episodic tale, revealed in a fraught six-day period where Caroline tries to solve the suspicious death of a local priest amid frantic reports of “crazy Russians” running amok between Blue Deer and Gardiner. Jules can’t escape trouble, either. He finds himself embroiled in a property dispute with his neighbors, and his contract with the county to survey the historical remains of a potter’s field isn’t without headaches. As if the exhausted new dad didn’t have enough to deal with, his mother is requesting he investigate the one case he’d rather avoid, the shooting of his father when Jules was 13 years old. They know how Ansel died but not why. Despite the two-decade hiatus between books, Harrison offers Jules no reprieve.
The River View is Harrison’s seventh novel. In between books four and five of the series, the daughter of literary legend Jim Harrison published The Widow Nash, a historical novel. Also set in Livingston, the 2017 book garnered Harrison a Reading the West Award and a spot as a finalist for that year’s High Plains Book Award. In 2021, she published a contemporary family saga titled The Center of Everything. Also set in her hometown, Harrison uses Livingston’s dynamic and unforgiving Yellowstone River as a feature of both healing and destruction in all her books. To commemorate the return of Jules Clement, her publisher, Counterpoint Press, has reissued new editions of the previous four books.
The landscape of the high plains in southwestern Montana is as much a character as Jules himself. The Crazy Mountains on the setting’s northeastern horizon are perhaps an aptly conditioned (and named) range to motivate its residents and tourists alike to act poorly. Freak late spring snowstorms kill; floods wipe out property boundaries that will surface in bloody tensions for future generations; and the wind—oh
the wind—it’ll drive anyone crazy. Distinctive crimes, some of them the kinds that can happen in any town despite its size, and others that can only occur in the cauldrons of Yellowstone, are the hallmark of this engrossing series. Despite the break between Jules and her other novels, Harrison returns to Blue Deer with her wry and absurdist humor. Her sentences often pack a punch, like this quip from the latest: “The nurse named Marina thought she’d rarely seen such a polite suicide, or such a bad marriage.” For such a small town, Blue Deer has more than its share of suicides and bad marriages. The Montana that Harrison writes of isn’t the potent mythical landscape boasting stereotypical heroic cowboys or other highly dramatized tropes featured in popular TV shows like “Yellowstone.” Rodeos, cattle and trophy homes are showcased throughout the series set in the 1990s, but Harrison applies a more realistic—if not caustic—treatment to her characters. Blue Deer is a place with packed bars, parents who beat their children, and an underfunded and understaffed sheriff’s department trying to keep the peace in a county that dwarfs the size of most states clinging to the coast of the Atlantic.
Blue Deer is beautiful and filled with people Jules loves, which is why he returned, twice now, but it’s also tragic.
The River View brings such themes home with emphasis on Jules’s greatest tragedy and the one he’s long avoided. He can’t ignore his mother’s desire to learn about Ansel’s final moments before the shotgun fired at close range. Jules’s nemesis returns to Blue Deer, rendering any avoidance of his father’s death impossible. Jules may have surrendered his badge, but that doesn’t mean he’s entirely free from the dead.
Maggie Neal Doherty is a freelance journalist, opinion columnist and book critic and lives with her family in Kalispell, Montana. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Washington Post, LA Times, SKI, and more.
Rocks, ice and the other ins and outs of Montana’s growing winter pastime
Words by Ednor Therriault | Illustration by Halle Hauer
n a misty day in Scotland during the Little Ice Age of the 1500s, a shivering Scotsman muscled a large stone out onto the frozen surface of a pond and sent it skidding across the ice. “Hmm,” he thought, (or more likely, “Aye,” he thought), “What if a lad were to fashion some kind of target or goal over there, and teams could take turns sliding stones back and forth in a game of skill?” He noticed that the stone’s path had a faint arc to it, something of a curl. His logical next step was to set upon inventing beer.
While this scenario may not hold up in court, it’s generally accepted that curling has its roots in Scotland; a squarish rock with “Stirling 1511” etched into its surface was recently found when a pond in Dunblane was drained. In the ensuing five centuries, the sport became standardized and has grown steadily, especially in Canada. In the last few years, curling’s popularity in the U.S. has risen quicker than a kilt in a windstorm, due in part to Team USA’s dramatic victory in the 2018 Olympic final over Sweden to bring home the gold.
Curling is hot during Montana winters with established clubs in most bigger towns, many of them working toward the goal of a dedicated ice facility. So what’s attracting so many Montanans to this weird-looking sport that some call a cross between shuffleboard and chess, with a little sweeping thrown in? For one thing, it’s curling’s egalitarian appeal.
“As soon as you come out to an event, you’ll see all these body styles, all these different delivery methods. It’s very adaptive and inclusive,” said Harmen Steele, president of the Missoula Curling Club and secretary of the Dakota Territory Curling Association. The participants who show up at local ice rinks for learn-to-curl events bear him out. Married couples,
parents and children, old timers, bearded hipsters, people of all abilities and ages will compete against each other. The ice is a great equalizer.
To boot, curling is a gentleman’s game. Honor is everything. There’s a refreshing lack of animosity between the competitors. Opponents shake hands before and after every match, and good shots are celebrated while bad shots generate zero trash talk. After a match, teams will usually gather over a beverage to socialize. “I did a lot of other sports when I was younger,” Harmen said. “A lot of toxic culture. Now, I wouldn’t want my kids doing any of that [stuff]. Curling is so friendly. There’s a camaraderie.”
But why is there so much yelling? And what’s with the sweeping? Before I say much more, let’s get our footing on this slippery sport. Each team (or rink) has four players, one of whom (the skip) calls the strategy. Eight innings (ends) are played, with each player throwing two 20-pound stones (rocks) per end. Opponents alternate their throws from the same end, pushing the rock toward the center of the 12-foot-wide target (the house) at the other end of the 146-foot long court (the sheet). A stone must stop inside, or at least touch, the house to score. A team gets a point for every stone closer to the footwide bullseye (the button) than the opponents’ closest rock. And there’s a bit of defense involved: Players can attempt to place guard rocks in front of their potential scoring rocks to prevent the opponent from blasting them out of the house with their last salvo (the hammer).
Tweaking the amount of curl and speed on the stone is the job of the sweepers. This sudden, furious sweeping might be the most befuddling part for us non-curlers. I mean, that’s the
kind of sweeping I do when I hear my wife pulling into the garage and I suddenly remember that I’d promised to clean the kitchen floor. Well, it’s for more than just drama. The thrower usually puts a slight rotation on the stone at release, causing it to curl left or right. At the hollered directions of the skip (“Go! Hurry hard! Stop!”), the sweepers try to make the rock travel farther and/or straighter by sweeping directly in its path, melting a bit of the ice surface and reducing friction under the stone. Early curling brooms featured wood handles and long bristles, much like you’d see on a witch vehicle. Short-bristled push brooms eventually came into vogue, along with lightweight, carbon-fiber handles. Nowadays the broom head is a cushioned pad with a durable fabric covering that’s slightly rough. Imagine a Swiffer that would scratch the hell out of your Pergo.
Side note: In 2015, a scandal known as Broomgate rippled through the curling world. It involved a high-tech broom head arms race that resulted in brooms that were a little too good, actually degrading the ice during the games. It was a powder keg that created deep factions in the genteel culture of curling, and very nearly put an end to the sport. There’s a CBC podcast that lays it all out in a breathless narrative that rivals the best Tom Clancy spy novel.
Curling ice is incredibly specialized, right down to how much particulate is in the water. Before play starts, the ice is given a pebbled surface, like the skin of a football, by spraying droplets from a hot water tank. This gives some grip and uniformity to the rock’s travel. The tips of the “pebbles” are shaved off by a contraption called an Ice King, which looks like the love child of a rototiller and a snowblower. Even the shavings from that are carefully swept away. Ice must be kept as clean as humanly possible to provide a consistent surface for a rock. In an arena that hosts several hockey games a week, that’s a huge challenge.
Most curlers would agree that there are two versions of the game—one played in a hockey arena, the other in a curling facility as seen at the highest levels of the sport. Arena ice, as it’s called, is so full of ridges, dips, and other irregularities left by skate blades and the Zamboni that it’s akin to golfing in a cow pasture. Curlers must “read” the deformities in the ice surface during a tournament (called a bonspiel). The team that learns the ice first, they say, will win the bonspiel.
Indoor ice that’s not routinely chewed up by figure skaters, hockey players and the Zam allows the sport to be played in its purest form. While observing a recent bonspiel in Butte, I overheard a female curler talking between matches about her first experience on dedicated ice. “I played in Minot [North Dakota] last year, and my god. It was insane. The shot that you’re trying to make can actually happen. It’s night and day.”
Harmen explained strategy and technique at the bonspiel as we watched the playdown among seven Montana teams over the three-day event. I remarked on the empty bleachers, asking why there were almost no spectators.
“Well,” he said, “It’s cold in here.” He explained a dedicated facility would have a warmed area for viewers to watch on big screens or through the glass. Missoula is currently the club closest to realizing their own dedicated
The line across the ice at the back of the house. Stones which cross this line have been thrown with too much “mustard” on the “hot dog” and are removed from play.
It’s the stone closest to the button.
(Also see: “Tequila” by the Champs.)
A stone placed in position to protect another stone, like the father of a teenaged girl in most John Hughes movies.
Shockingly, this has nothing to do with marijuana. A hogged stone is a victim of weak sauce. It doesn’t reach the far hog line and must be removed from play.
What you do with the brush. There is no dustpan. The long rectangle of ice where a curling game is played. Size is minimum 14 feet and 2 inches wide and 146 feet long. (Coincidentally, the same size as a Costco sheet cake.)
Kind of like the foul line in bowling, the rock must be released before crossing it. The thrower may slide across, but doing so in bowling is a foul. Mark it eight, Dude.
The line that passes through the center of the house parallel to the hog line and backline.
The one-foot circle at the center of the house. Apparently, the term “bullseye” was already taken.
The house comprises a 12-foot ring, 8-foot ring, 4-foot ring and a button. Unlike your in-laws during the holidays, everybody wants to go to this house.
Also known as a rock, this granite piece is what you’ll find yourself yelling at as it slides from one end of the sheet to the other.
Also known as the broom, it’s used to sweep the ice in front of a moving stone.
ADDITIONAL TERMS
BONSPIEL - A curling competition or tournament. From the German: “a curling competition or tournament.”
CURL - The amount of curve in the rock’s path as it slides along the ice. Curling, get it?
END - An inning or side, when each team has thrown eight stones and the score has been decided. A curling match has six or eight ends.
HACKS - The footholds at each end of the ice from which the stone is delivered. Also refers to a curler who uses the same jokes at every bonspiel. (“That hack needs some new material.”)
SLIDER - The slippery shoe.
TAKE OUT - Removal of a stone from the playing area by hitting it with another stone.
facility, with plans to throw the first rock down that sweet ice by the next winter Olympics.
This fall I got the opportunity for some practical education at Missoula’s Grizzly Ice Rink, where Harmen showed me the basics of delivering the rock. A curler wears a grippy rubber footie on one foot and a slick slider on the other. In the delivery, the thrower angles their broom handle across their back to serve as an outrigger, providing balance as they put most of their weight on the sliding foot directly underneath them, dragging their other foot behind, and holding the rock’s handle in their throwing hand. Once set, they kick firmly off the hack, the C-shaped block attached to the ice. Their momentum carries them forward, and they gradually take their weight off the rock, releasing it before they cross the hog line. By now they’re balancing on three points—their left foot, broom handle, and trailing right foot. When done with proper form, they’ll look like a hood ornament.
That’s the idea, anyway. When this couch-trained, middleaged writer assumed the position, I felt like I had a golf shoe on my right foot and my left was on a banana peel. Harmen guided me into position at the hack and placed two rocks in front of me. “Don’t even throw the rock,” he said. “Just kick off, keep your weight on your left foot, and hold yourself up with both rocks. You’re just going to glide. See how that feels.” I crouched, looking around to see who was making popcorn. It was my knees. I put my slippery left foot beneath me and gripped the rock handles, carefully balancing my weight over the two rocks while my right foot found the hack. “Good,” said Harmen. “Now slowly push off.” I pushed off, trying to drag my right foot behind me like I’d seen the other curlers do. My left foot squiggled wildly as I slid behind the rocks, trying to lower myself. Next thing I knew I was face down on the ice, legs and arms splayed out like a frog ready for dissection. The rocks were heading for parts unknown. My quadriceps in both thighs were screaming in pain, strained from being suddenly called into use. My right ankle hurt. My pride was throbbing.
Harmen helped me up. “Don’t worry,” he said, trying to suppress his laughter. “It takes a while to get this part down.”
I’d love to tell you that I mustered my courage and swallowed my pride enough to give it another go, but my once-dormant body parts were giving me a clear message: No más. I thanked Harmen and left the ice to sit in the penalty box and watch the rest of the club go about their practice session. My respect and admiration for these athletes grew immensely. I decided to stick to shuffleboard.
Ednor Therriault has been criss-crossing Montana for 25 years, poking around for interesting stories. His program "Finding Montana" is one of the most requested from Humanities Montana’s Speakers Bureau, and he’s published eight books about Montana and its national parks. His latest title, Big Sky, Big Parks, was released last year on TwoDot. He lives in Missoula with his wife, Shannon, and tends to go into semi-hibernation after Halloween. Halle Hauer is a Bozeman-based graphic designer and illustrator, drawing inspiration from the stunning scenery and diverse activities abundant in Montana.
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Giving Voice to a Quiet Revolution
Background: A watercolor-style illustration inspired by the Karakorum Mountains. Image generated with AI. Below left: Warmed by a traditional stove, middle and high school students in rural Hushe Valley, Gyanche District, study in a blended gender classroom where girls and boys sections study together. Photo courtesy Iqra Fund. Below middle: Genevieve Walsh discusses ongoing social mobilization efforts in summer 2023 with Iqra staff Nasreen Tabassum and Nureen Fizza in the potato and wheat fields above Hushe Village, Gyanche District. Photo courtesy Iqra Fund. Below right: The traditional village core and masjid of Machulu Village, Gyanche District, with the K6 peak group, elevation 23,891 feet, towering overhead. Photo courtesy Iqra Fund.
From the mountains of Montana to the Karakoram, a girls’ education movement is growing
Words by Bay Stephens
Editor’s Note: A source in this story, DC, is referred to only by initials due to conflicts with his positioning in a region that condemns work advancing girls’ education.
Biting cold blew through the tiny northern Pakistani village of Hushe, a mere 27 miles as the crow flies from K2, the second tallest peak in the world. It was winter in 2011, and the towering mountains of the Karakoram shadowed the village much of the day.
Genevieve Walsh had spent time in Hushe before, and in villages like it around the Gilgit-Baltistan region, but this was her first winter visit. It was a recon trip of sorts, to see about partnering with the local community to provide schooling for the girls of the village. Walsh didn’t speak Balti, so a male translator acted as a linguistic liaison for her.
The people in this remote Muslim village welcomed her warmly, but for Walsh, something was lacking. “Are there any girls here, or women here, who can speak English to help translate?” she asked around the village, hoping to better connect with the women.
No, none of the women speak English, the male leaders told her.
On one of her first afternoons in Hushe, Walsh walked along the trails between homes. She passed three young girls, giggly and shy. She recognized one as Nureen Fizza, a girl of 13 or 14 whom she’d met earlier in a meeting with the translator.
“As-salamu alaikum,” Walsh greeted them with the traditional Muslim greeting meaning “peace be upon you.”
“Wa-alaikum-salaam,” the girls greeted back. And peace unto you. Walsh practiced a few words in the girls’ native language of Balti. They giggled and responded, but soon Walsh’s vocabulary ran out. She bid the girls farewell and walked on. Then from behind her, in perfect English:
“How are you finding your stay in our village, ma’am?”
Walsh whipped around.
“You speak English?” she asked.
“Yes,” Fizza said. “We’ve been learning. Do you want to come to my home for tea?” The girls brought Walsh inside and introduced her to their mother and grandmother. The women sat around and talked for more than an hour.
“Do any of the men know you speak English?” she asked Fizza. “Because I’ve been asking.”
“We’ve been learning, but we don’t tell everyone,” Fizza said. “It’s better if we just keep it quiet.”
Fizza was one of the few girls in the village attending school with mostly boys. Walsh began to grasp the power of this young generation of educated girls. She was struck by how much they honored their fathers, brothers and uncles in this traditional setting. As Walsh put it, these girls knew “this change that is happening, it needs to go slowly. … It couldn’t be this loud explosion.”
In those days, they called it a quiet revolution.
This 2011 encounter occurred just after Walsh and her partner had founded Iqra Fund, a nonprofit aimed at building self-sustaining school systems in the mountains of Northern Pakistan. The organization has since grown significantly, having established 20 village schools for grades K-8 around Gilgit-Baltistan, enrolling 4,098 students and supporting 173 teachers. Via scholarship support, Iqra Fund is also seeing 70 first-generation women through university. Fourteen Iqra Fund-supported students are now their communities’ first female teachers. Three are employed as community health professionals, bringing local healthcare— especially female healthcare—to these remote mountain communities for the first time in their histories.
The region is changing rapidly, in no small part due to the role of Iqra Fund’s community-led, sustainable education model. As the region faces rapid warming due to climate change, increased tourism and geopolitical tensions, the organization is equipping a generation of leaders who will see their villages through the complexities of the future.
“I have so much gratitude for the path that my life has taken to be able to do this incredible work in service to so many children and families,” Walsh said. “It
wasn’t always easy, but it was always the clear next step.”
Walsh describes herself growing up as the kid who didn’t fit inside the box. She was hyperactive, curious, always the dirtiest kid in class at the end of the day. She regards her younger self as impulsive, ready to try new things, which in young adulthood evolved into decisiveness and a thirst for adventure.
In a nutshell, when a woman is educated, she becomes the tide raising all ships.
She chose to pursue a teaching degree while at Montana State University in Bozeman because she thought she could teach internationally and get paid to travel. She studied abroad in Holland and student-taught in a Maori village in New Zealand where students rode barefoot on horseback to class, and
where she boar hunted with the chief. Here, Walsh experienced a deep sense of connectedness to land and community. Her time with the Maori people impacted her deeply, and Walsh carried the experience onward.
Walsh later began teaching for The Traveling School, a Bozeman-based organization that takes high-school girls abroad for a semester of school. Walsh led groups in South America, then South Africa, and even arranged for a semester in the Maori village where she’d student taught.
While teaching these girls abroad, Walsh said she came to believe that “one of the most powerful forces on earth is the adolescent girl,” especially in a supportive environment. Walsh describes this period in her life as stepping through open door after open door. “I was trusting that there was a path for me,” she said. “That every experience I’d had was leading to something next.”
In 2007, Walsh thought she would do another Traveling School semester when she started seeing DC, a former Bridger Bowl ski patroller, mountaineer and local avalanche forecaster.
“He said, ‘Hey, I’m heading to Pakistan in a couple months to go on a climbing expedition. Do you want to tag along?’” Walsh recalled.
Left: Masherbrum Peak, elevation 25,659 feet, looms above Iqra Fund’s first partner school community, Hushe Village, at the end of the road in remote Gyanche District, Gilgit Baltistan. Photo courtesy Iqra Fund Right: Iqra Country Director Ghulam Muhammad leads a planning session with the Village Education Committee in Sultanabad Village in Skardu District, 2024. Photo courtesy Iqra Fund
The Karakoram Range, host to four of the world’s 14 peaks over 8,000 meters, had opened up to Western climbers in the ’70s, after active hostilities in Kashmir between India and Pakistan subsided somewhat—although the region remains disputed to this day. Mountaineers flooded to the expanse of rugged and unclimbed peaks. DC began climbing there in 2000 during his off seasons from avalanche forecasting. In 2004, he had partnered up with mountaineering legend Steve Swenson, who’d been active climbing in the Karakoram since 1980. Both climbers had built relationships with the Balti people, volunteering time and money to support girls’ education in the region.
In 2007, Walsh joined DC, Swenson and another climber named Mark Richey on their trip to Pakistan to climb Latok I. She was the only woman on the expedition. As the group made their way from lowland cities up into the mountains, local women whisked Walsh away from the men at every stop. Through translators, they told her about their lives and struggles. Walsh learned that many of the girls were married off before they’d even had their first period, bearing children when they’d scarcely left childhood themselves. She learned not to ask how many children each woman had had, but how many were
still alive. Questions swirled in Walsh’s mind. She needed more time with these kind, proud and capable people.
When she parted with her group on that trip, Walsh extended her stay in Pakistan to explore for several more weeks. On her eventual flight home, she sketched out a proposal for a doctorate: “A Case Study of Educational Needs, Obstacles, and Opportunities for Girls, Women, and Teachers in Remote Pakistan.” Walsh was granted funding to spend the next four years there building a body of research for her PhD.
She found that barriers to education— cultural, social and religious— compounded with a shortage of qualified women teachers, and limited community support for girls’ education. Through interviews, surveys and field observations, Walsh theorized that directly engaging communities, training teachers and implementing culturally sensitive education would all move the needle immensely for Balti girls. GilgitBaltistan didn’t need more schools— plenty stood empty of children, instead sheltering goat herds or crops—the region needed an educational system, which required money.
Despite swearing she wouldn’t start a nonprofit at the end of her research— “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life fundraising”—it became apparent that no one else would. If she returned
to academia with a shiny doctorate, she would be turning her back on the people she’d come to love and respect. So in 2011, she and DC co-founded Iqra Fund, received their first donations, and hired their first teachers in Hushe. In Islam, Iqra means to read or gain knowledge, and is believed to be the first word revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the Quran. It is also the name of a young girl, Iqra Afzal, who had inspired Walsh on her first trip to Pakistan.
Iqra Fund’s first priority was addressing access. If families had any means to send a child to school, they tended to choose sons over daughters. In Balti culture, sons remain part of the family, while daughters marry into another family. Educating boys was an economic calculation made necessary by the poverty of the region: If a son could earn more because of an education, some of that would come back to the family; any earnings a daughter realized would benefit someone else.
“But they didn’t realize another house will come to their home as a daughter,” said Ghulam Muhammad, the country director for Pakistan, who has been with Iqra Fund since 2012. If all the women in a community are educated, every family they marry into will see the benefits of that education. So Iqra Fund provided the means for all children— boys and girls—to go to school, which
Pakistan
the organization recognizes as a human right, as well as the best way to ensure girls receive their education. Families no longer had to choose. To boot, a mountain of research clearly defines the importance of educating girls.
“When girls are educated, child and early marriage rates decrease, families are smaller and healthier, infant and maternal mortality rates go down, wages go up, and GDP grows,” as articulated on the Iqra Fund website. “Educating girls is also one of the top means of addressing climate change.”
Girls also tend to come back to their communities after completing their education, while it’s easier for Pakistani men to work in big cities for higher pay. In a nutshell, when a woman is educated, she becomes the tide raising all ships.
After enrolling 100 percent of a village’s children, the next priority was quality, Muhammad explained. Some parents weren’t convinced of the value of education. They hadn’t received one, and the teachers in the schools that did exist frequently didn’t show up. With the power of the purse, Iqra Fund was able to seek out, vet and hire high-quality teachers in a sufficient ratio for students to thrive.
The last hurdle was sustainability. To build school systems that can outlast even the organization itself, Iqra Fund needed the communities to take ownership of the system. They couldn’t be Western schools air-dropped into the mountains. They needed to be Hushe’s school, the Machulu’s school, and Basho’s school.
“We work in these very traditional, rural regions, and everything we do … from the way that we dress to the way we speak to the way we are collectively working to protect the honor of young women—that’s vital to those relationships and sustainability,” said CJ Carter, strategic planning director for Iqra Fund. “There is no Iqra Fund without the public partnerships and social trust.”
Part of the sustainability equation includes partnering with the government to put as many teachers on their payroll as possible, even if
Belqis
during
first visit
Fund's
Photo courtesy Iqra Fund Above: Bano, pictured in 2023. Photo courtesy Iqra Fund Below: Sakina Batool, the first local Lady Health Worker for the entire Basha Valley, returning to the girls' hostel for a health and hygiene workshop with current scholarship students (2023). Photo courtesy Iqra Fund
Iqra Fund helps pay their salaries. This way, if Iqra Fund was suddenly no longer able to operate in the country, the education system would endure.
Slowly, the organization gained the trust of communities, and grew up alongside its first crop of students. Initially, the goal was to provide K-8 education, but when the girls were in 8th grade, their communities pushed for 9th and 10th grades as well. Then 11th and 12th, and so on.
“Education, I must say, it is not an easy job,” Muhummad said. “It is a very long process.”
But in letting communities cast the vision and lead the way, Iqra Fund has successfully supported the first generation of educated women for many remote Balti villages. And scholarships have allowed for the next step, attending high school and college in the city of Skardu. Iqra Fund’s current initiative is to build a high school in the valley of Basha, where it educates a high concentration of students, along with transportation to school from up and down the valley. The organization hopes to build a critical mass of educated women in Gilgit-Baltistan, with this first generation paving the way for the next, until a culture of scholarship blankets the region. Walsh envisions the day when Iqra Fund can step completely out of the way because the Balti people have everything they need to continue the cycle. Currently, of Iqra Fund’s more than 70 staff members, only two are non-Pakistani: Walsh and Carter.
Education in the region may not yet be self-sustaining, but changes are already evident. The first group of Iqra Fund-supported girls are now entering the workforce. Nureen Fizza is now on staff at Iqra Fund as a social mobilizer while she wraps up her BS in chemistry. She remembers that day 13 years ago when she met Walsh, and ponders an alternate reality without Iqra Fund.
“In my village, there are many girls my age who are working in the field and getting married,” Fizza said. “They have three to four children also, so they have many challenges.
Top:
Bano, one of Iqra
first students from Hushe Village, Gyanche District, smiles. This photo was taken
Walsh’s stay in in January 2012. Belqis is the daughter of Ali Khan, one of the basecamp cooks from Walsh’s
to Pakistan.
As compared to those girls, I am very thankful to Iqra Fund for their generous support.”
Belqis Bano, the daughter of the basecamp cook from DC and Swenson’s mountaineering expeditions, is now a scholarship student studying to become a doctor and achieve her definition of success.
“I think when people are able to help other people and when they make other lives [better], I think this is success,” Bano said.
And Sakina Batool, an Iqra Fund scholarship recipient from Basha Valley, has graduated and is the first female health worker in the area, delivering prenatal care to local women in the region for the first time. Her elders will not start meetings without her.
Many IF Girls, as the organization calls them, have become teachers—the first need for these communities was women to teach the girls. But the horizons expand with each class. Fizza will be the first chemistry lecturer. Madiha Noor will be the first software engineer. Amina Hanif will be the first woman owner of a mountain guiding company. And each of these pursuits will undoubtedly benefit their communities in one way or another.
As Walsh puts it, “A girl’s education is a community’s future.”
As for funding, much comes from the mountaineering community and the Pakistani diaspora. After learning
about Iqra Fund and its work in their homeland, many Pakistani-Americans have joined the movement as donors and board members. This was the case for Saima Machlovi, a neuroscientist in New York City who was born downriver from Hushe in the tiny village of Machulu.
“Since I’ve been on the board, everyone in the village knows about it,” Machlovi
"A girl’s education is a community’s future."
Genevieve Walsh, Iqra Fund CEO and founder
said. “So every time there’s a problem they would call me or they would tell my parents about it, and they are like, ‘Hey, do you think Iqra could help here?’ and we’re like, ‘Let’s look into this.’”
Iqra Fund has a $1 million operating budget. According to Walsh, 80 percent comes from 20 percent of the donors. And more than 50 percent of funding flows in during Ramadan when many Muslim donors give Zakat, an obligatory form of charitable giving. Zakat funds are earmarked for girls from
underprivileged backgrounds, a tool for social mobility in remote Baltistan.
In the face of a rapidly changing world, the importance of education cannot be understated. As Walsh explains, empowering these girls gives their communities a seat at the table in a very geopolitically important region. Pakistan is a nuclear power, regularly at war with India, another nuclear power. And its other neighbors, Iran and Afghanistan, haven’t exactly been scions of peace. Additionally, Gilgit-Baltistan is home to the largest volume of glacial ice in the world outside of the poles, providing water to some 270 million people downstream.
“Education for us here is the lynchpin to the future of the region, and I would argue the nation,” Carter said. “I see the people living in these headwaters as the guardians. And without the toolkit, that’s bad for all of us.”
With every Balti girl who completes her education, the revolution grows. And while it started with girls like Nureen Fizza learning quietly among the boys, Iqra Fund has helped to give the movement a voice and a foothold. But the Balti people will be the ones sounding the trumpet from the mountain’s top.
Bay Stephens writes from his home in Avon, Colorado, where he's lucky enough to ski patrol in the winters and trail-build in the summers.
Left: Naila Atiqa, Iqra Fund's program manager, conducts a workshop in 2024 for high school girls and boys in Hushe Village, Gyanche District. Co-education is a new concept in the region and was navigated through cultural protocol and approved through Iqra Fund partnerships with local leaders. Co-education has greatly expanded the number of young women and men who can now study in the remote mountain areas. Photo courtesy Iqra Fund. Right: Walsh poses with excited primary school students in a new government school partnership in Machulu Village, Gyanche District, 2023. They had just celebrated the new partnership with two newly hired teachers, school supplies and uniforms for students. Photo courtesy of Iqra Fund
Cutting-Edge Craftsmanship
New West KnifeWorks
By Taylor Owens
Located in the shadow of the Teton Range, New West KnifeWorks has been crafting exceptional knives for nearly three decades. What started as one man's passion project has grown into a revered brand known for creating some of the finest kitchen tools in the world, blending cuttingedge performance with handcrafted detail. With the recent opening of their new store in Big Sky, New West continues its journey from humble beginnings to international recognition, remaining rooted in the values of craftsmanship, dedication, and a love for the process.
"I was living in Jackson Hole, working in kitchens at night while being a ski bum during the day," Corey Milligan, founder of New West KnifeWorks, said. "I always loved cooking and the tools. I started messing around to see if I could make a knife—not just functional, but attractive."
At a time when the kitchen knife market was dominated by utilitarian German black-handled and white-handled commercial knives, Milligan sought to reimagine what a kitchen tool could be: an object of both beauty and precision.
"This was back in the day when we didn’t have the Internet,” Milligan recalled. “I bought a book [on how to craft knives], and that’s how I started.”
Milligan then took his handmade knives to local art shows around Jackson Hole, and soon after, began selling them at
craft shows across the country. His self-taught endeavor has grown into a 27-year legacy.
"It’s been a slow, steady, incremental quest to make the finest knives in the world,” Milligan said. “And today, I think we’re close."
Their journey is marked by international milestones; after a decade of making blades in Japan, the company moved production back to the U.S. and built its own factory in Victor, Idaho.
"We learned a lot from making blades in Japan, but moving manufacturing back to the U.S. was huge,” Milligan said. “We now have so much more control by doing everything in-house."
While each knife is finished by hand, the production process involves state-of-the-art technology and superior materials.
"To make the finest knife in the world, you need precision machine tools and hand skill. It’s a combination," Milligan explained. "We use these precision tools to make the parts, and then each knife is assembled and finished by hand by an individual maker. It’s not accurate to say they’re 100% handmade because of the machines we use—but it’s the mix of technology and craftsmanship that allows us to make the best knives."
New West KnifeWorks’ flagship blades are crafted from particle metallurgy steel, a material that offers unparalleled
performance. While in traditional wrought steel, the harder the material, the more brittle it is, but this steel provides what Milligan calls “the Holy Grail” of sharp tools.
"It’s the highest performance steel anyone’s ever made kitchen knives out of," Milligan said. "It has incredible edge holding, it’s super tough, and it has high stain resistance.”
The particle metallurgy steel is sourced from Syracuse, New York, and meticulously shaped and refined in the Idaho factory to create blades that are as beautiful as they are functional.
The craftsmanship behind each knife is a process of precision and care, involving around 15 hand-finished steps.
"We start with flat pieces of steel, and then in our factory, we have a giant grinder that precision grinds the blade’s bevel," Milligan said. "We use CNC routers to shape the handles, and then an individual maker assembles the knife. The handle and blade are riveted and glued together, and there are several hand-finishing steps, including sharpening and polishing the blade."
The result is a high-performance knife that’s both a kitchen tool and a work of art.
One of New West KnifeWorks’ most iconic designs is the Teton Edge Santoku, a knife that captures both the functional and artistic essence of the brand.
"It has a silhouette of the Teton mountain range on the side of the blade,” Milligan said. “Not only does it look cool, but the edge helps keep food from sticking to the knife. It’s our best-seller and a great representation of where we’re from."
With stores in Big Sky, Montana; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Park City, Utah; Denver, Colorado; and Napa Valley, California, New West KnifeWorks has firmly established itself as a leader in culinary tools. Each store resembles an art gallery as much as a cutlery shop. Hand-forged knives are framed on the walls
while custom kitchen blocks are arranged on pedestals like knife sculptures. Milligan puts the same meticulous consideration into the design of the stores as he puts into every blade.
"At this point, we’re big enough. I like to say I’m in it for the love and the glory," Milligan said. "We’ll keep growing just enough to keep momentum going and keep people excited. But for us, it’s all about focusing on creating new, cool products and continuing our legacy of craftsmanship."
New West KnifeWorks’ reach goes beyond home kitchens, with notable chefs and culinary professionals including chef Gabriel “Gator” Gilbeau, the chef on the TV show Yellowstone, choosing their knives for both personal and professional use.
For New West, the future is about continuing to innovate while staying true to the values that got them here. Every knife is backed by a lifetime guarantee, with free sharpening for life, ensuring that each piece remains a trusted tool for generations.
"It’s art, it’s performance, it’s American-made, and we offer a lifetime guarantee," Milligan noted. "Everything we make is built to last, and our customers know they’re getting something truly special."
Whether you’re a seasoned chef, a passionate home cook, or an outdoorsman looking for a reliable tool, New West KnifeWorks has something for everyone. Their products offer a unique blend of performance, beauty and heritage that resonates with anyone who appreciates quality craftsmanship.
Check out New West KnifeWorks at one of their locations or visit them online to explore a collection of knives that will elevate your culinary experience.
HISTORY
136 Feature: Full Steam Ahead
144 Report: The Will to Remember
150 Look Back: 25 x 50 x 100
A helicopter pilot flies over the newly-formed Earthquake Lake near West Yellowstone in the days following the 1959 earthquake. The photo is facing west and the landslide is shown at the far end of the Madison River Canyon. Read more about preserving Quake Lake stories on p. 144. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey
Middle:
commons Bottom: The visionary behind the Great Northern, James J.
with his son and successor Louis W. Hill
circa 1912. Credit: Library of Congress
Background: BNSF tracks on the Hi-Line near Cut Bank, Montana, 2022. Credit: Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress
Top: Great Northern Postcard, circa 1900. Credit: Blaine County Museum
The “Empire Builder” passenger train, circa 1947. Credit: Wikimedia
Hill (left),
(right),
FULL
STEAM AHEAD
How James J. Hill and the Great Northern built Montana’s Hi-Line
Words by Brenda Wahler
Grandpa Knute’s pocket watch sits on my fireplace mantle.
My mother inherited the watch and impressed its importance upon me: “Grandpa made his trains run on time,” she said. Even though they were of different generations, Knute was probably the kind of train engineer liked best by James, J. Hill, the “Empire Builder” himself: driven, intense, focused—and on time.
Long before my grandfather began his career on the tracks, Hill forged the future
of the Northwest out of a dream to connect Seattle to St. Paul, and in the process connecting northern Montana to the world.
On September 16, 1889, Hill made history by merging a spiderweb of branch railroads with the Saint Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba to become the Great Northern Railway. On November 8 of that year, Montana territory became a state. That same month, so did Washington, North Dakota and South Dakota. Idaho followed in 1890. The connection between
the railroad and statehood for every territory between Minnesota and the Pacific Coast was no coincidence.
Montana Territory grew slowly from 1864 into the 1880s as steamboats and mule trains transported essential goods. The north-south Utah and Northern Railway, controlled by the Union Pacific, was the first railroad to reach Montana. It chugged over Monida Pass in 1880, reaching Butte a year later. The east-west Northern Pacific finished its transcontinental line along the southern half of the territory in 1883. With railroads, the riches of the Treasure State moved faster into the wider world, but with a catch: a rate pool agreement between the UP and the NP that artificially jacked up freight rates. Also, neither line reached the northern half of the territory where the Missouri River’s steamboats were becoming a relic.
Canadian-born Hill broke the monopoly. As a young man, he leveraged a series of freight and coal businesses into railroad stock. When Hill and his associates formed the Saint Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway in 1879— the SPM&M for short—Hill became a multimillionaire. But his dreams were bigger; he envisioned a transcontinental railroad superior to those already in place: betterengineered, safer, faster.
Hill visited Montana Territory in 1884 at the behest of an old Minnesota friend, Paris Gibson,
who was planning a city near a series of cascades known as the Great Falls of the Missouri. Hill purchased shares in Gibson’s township company and scouted a rail line. Hill also befriended Copper King Marcus Daly of Butte and Helena banker C.A. Broadwater. Daly desperately needed cheaper freight rates to haul copper from Butte and Anaconda. Helena was the gold mining and banking center of the territory, where Broadwater, on his back foot against the Northern Pacific, faced fierce competition. With Hill already locked into a rivalry with the Northern Pacific, it was a no-brainer to help his Montana allies create the Montana Central Railroad. Broadwater’s crews began grading a railbed in 1886 to connect Great Falls, Helena and Butte, and waited anxiously for Hill’s iron to arrive.
Hill’s line needed to cross Native land and military reserves from Fort Berthold in North Dakota to Fort Assinniboine near present-day Havre, then go over the Continental Divide. To get permission, he lobbied Congress for a right of way in 1886. Such legislation was usually pro forma, but the Northern Pacific and Union Pacific convinced President Grover Cleveland to veto the bill. After enduring months of outrage from Hill’s companies and Montana’s investors, Congress and Cleveland reconsidered and new legislation passed in February 1887.
Hill’s easement ran across northern Montana, following the
Great Northern Railway and proprietary lines, circa 1891. Credit: Leventhal Map & Education Center
Statue honoring John F. Stevens, who located Marias Pass for the Great Northern. Credit: Library of Congress
Missouri River and then the Milk. The railroad could claim additional land for resources and place depots every 10 miles. The stations received names like Harlem, Malta, Kremlin, Inverness, and Glasgow—it’s rumored that postal clerks threw darts at a world map.
The Sweet Grass Hills Treaty ceded another 20 million acres of Native land to the Federal Government, cramming the Lakota and Dakota Sioux, Assiniboine (Nakoda), Gros Ventre (Aaniih), and Blackfeet (the Piikáni and Kainai signed the treaty) onto three reservations. Popular legend asserts that, unlike the Northern Pacific, Hill built the Great Northern without federal subsidies. However, historian Frederick Hoxie looked at the land deals and called the Great Northern “the most Indian-subsidized railroad in America.”
As Congress wrangled railroad legislation, and surveyors planned a route from Minot, North Dakota to Fort Assinniboine, Montana, Hill spent the severe winter of 1886-1887 organizing. He imported steel rails from Germany, while contracting lumber for bridges, trestles, and 3 million railroad ties. He bought 600,000 bushels of oats to feed 6,600 work horses. Hill scheduled railcars with construction crews, supplies and equipment to be in the right places at the right time. As historian Michael Malone wrote, “His genius lay precisely in his ability to master detail while fashioning broad vision and strategy.”
Broadwater and Daly were pleased. Helena allegedly held more millionaires per capita than any city in America and Butte led the world in copper production. But as Hill platted the track left to be laid toward Seattle, Gibson presented a conundrum: He wanted Great Falls on the transcontinental
[Hill] imported steel rails from Germany, while contracting lumber for bridges, trestles, and three million rail ties. He bought 600,000 bushels of oats to feed 6,600 work horses. Hill scheduled railcars with construction crews, supplies and equipment to be in the right places at the right time. As historian Michael Malone explained, “His genius lay precisely in his ability to master detail while fashioning broad vision and strategy.”
As 1887 dawned, Hill drove construction relentlessly west. Spring came late, and crews specially graded the roadways so that prevailing winds blew away the snow. Eight thousand workers graded 100 miles a month until the final two months of the construction season, when the pace doubled. Hill raced back and forth between St. Paul and the construction terminus in his special car, personally supervising progress. Rails reached Fort Assinniboine in September 1887, Great Falls in October, and Helena in November. In total, the SPM&M crews laid down 940 miles of track in 1887, 643 of it between Minot and Helena. Hill claimed his crews laid more mileage in a shorter time than any railroad in history. In 1888, Hill finished the challenging route from Helena to Butte. In 1889, preparing to push further west, he gathered the alphabet soup of the SPM&M, Montana Central, and multiple lines throughout the Upper Midwest, creating a single corporate entity: The Great Northern Railway.
mainline and lobbied Hill to trace a looping route bordering the wheat country of Montana’s Golden Triangle—roughly where US Highways 87 and 89 run today. Hill wanted to drive a straight line across the prairie, leaving the Montana Central as a branch.
Top: St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba construction crew near Fort Assinniboine, 1887. Credit: Montana Historical Society Above: Laying rail across the prairie, 1887. Credit: Minnesota Historical Society
[During World War I], the GN still needed workers, and decades before Rosie the Riveter, women took over railroad jobs in wartime.
The decision hung on finding a pass over the Continental Divide. Surveyor A.B. Rogers located a pass southwest of Great Falls in 1887, but Hill heard Native accounts of another, above the Marias River drainage. He handed the task of finding it to his most talented civil engineer, John F. Stevens. With the soul of an explorer, Stevens set off from the Blackfeet Agency in December 1889 with handmade snowshoes and a Ql ispé (aka Kalispel or Pend d’Oreille) guide. Walking all night on the final moonlit climb so as not to freeze to death, they reached 5,214-foot Marias Pass on December 11, 1889.
The pass shaved 200 miles off Gibson’s preferred route. The father of Great Falls fumed, but in the spring of 1890, Hill headed due west. A settlement on the Milk River called Bull Hook Bottoms, north of Fort Assinniboine, became the staging ground for the Great Northern’s Pacific push. In 1891, Hill’s rails crossed Marias Pass and Bull Hook Bottoms became Havre.
The Great Northern opened northern Montana to the world. The region even got a new name: the Hi-Line. While
Hill laid iron to Spokane, John Stevens located another key pass across the Cascades. The ceremonial final spike was driven at Scenic, Washington, on January 6, 1893. The line from St. Paul to Seattle was complete.
Worldwide advertising attracted homesteaders who filed thousands of claims. While dryland farming broke hearts and pocketbooks, the GN’s little Hi-Line towns with their impressive names survived and, from time to time, even thrived. Farm supplies came in, crops went out. Processed ore left the mines of southwestern Montana, and coal shipped from Belt and Sand Coulee. Transcontinental freight moved rapidly to and from the coast.
While the Montana of today is famous for its scenery and wild lands, Hill loved raw tonnage and was indifferent to passenger rail. In 1890, he scoffed at tourism, declaring, “We do not care enough for Rocky Mountain scenery to spend a large sum of money in developing it.” However, scenery was a game piece in the GN and NP rivalry: The Northern Pacific built a branch line from Livingston to Cinnabar in 1883 to bring tourists to Yellowstone National Park.
When the NP expanded its Yellowstone line to Gardiner in 1903, it threw down a gauntlet the GN could not ignore. Hill’s talented third-born, Louis Hill, was inspired by the Rocky Mountain scenery his father ignored. He became president of the railroad in 1907. Throwing the clout of the railroad behind conservationist George Bird Grinnell, Louis lobbied Congress for the creation of Glacier National Park, which was established in 1910. He also took leave from the GN to personally direct the construction of Glacier’s famed lodges; and a GN subsidiary was the park concessionaire until 1960. He considered the Blackfeet a tourist draw, even using them in promotional images.
In 1915, a year before James Hill died, my grandfather began working for the railroad.
At 21 years old, Knute was a rangy Minnesota Lutheran with youthful brawn and energy. He started as a fireman, tasked with the grunt work of shoveling coal to power steam engines. At family gatherings 50 years later, he still extolled steam power over electrodiesel locomotives. Knute next became a brakeman. His domain was the caboose, from
Women, shown here in Great Falls circa 1918, replaced men on the Great Northern during World War I. Credit: National Archives
Knute Johnson (right), the author’s grandfather, rose from coal-shoveling fireman to engineer on the Great Northern. Pictured with his brother Sam, early 1920s. Credit: Wahler collection
Northern Logos 1914, 1921
1936.
railroad promoted
“Rocky”
which he monitored the well-being of the entire train. He spoke fondly of cabooses and, luckily, passed away before end-of-train devices replaced them. When a court decision struck down Montana’s law requiring a manned caboose on every train, I could almost hear him rolling over in his grave.
Knute took authorized leave when America entered World War I in 1917. The GN still needed workers, and decades before Rosie the Riveter, women took over railroad jobs in wartime. Knute was gassed in the trenches of France and returned to America with lung damage and tuberculosis. The Great Northern took him back anyway. He rose to become a train engineer, even as he struggled with his health. He stayed “on the boards” of the GN until his retirement in 1948.
Meanwhile, Louis Hill’s love of Glacier National Park inspired the company mascot: “Rocky” the mountain goat, who first appeared on the logo of the company in 1921 and survived every round of corporate rebranding through 1970, when GN became part of the Burlington Northern (now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe) Railway. Rocky also became a cartoon and one of my earliest memories of the Great Northern. My first train trip was on the GN’s famed Empire Builder passenger line. My mother and I traveled from Havre to Spokane when I was 4 years old. A child of the prairie traveling west, I was fascinated by thick forests of fir and spruce, viewed on a cloudy day through a rain-splattered window. Rocky saved me from boredom. He was everywhere, from the children’s menu in the dining car to the freight cars we passed. It’s poignant to realize I’m the last generation who watched droplets roll down a vibrating water glass and sink onto a Rocky drink coaster.
I rode Northern Pacific’s line only once, in the early ’70s, when it was branded Amtrak. By then the GN and NP had merged, their rivalry settled. Rocky was retired, and I was a middle-schooler, too cool for cartoons. Still, I missed the goat.
As the GN logo faded from freight cars, a piece of Montana history and part of my own story disappeared. Yet, when I hear a Helena expat sing, “I’m an engine driver/On a long run” in an ode to writers, engineers, linemen, and moneylenders, I wonder if James Hill’s spirit still travels the Hi-line from depot to depot, overseeing the route that cemented his legacy.
A lifelong Montanan, Brenda Wahler is an attorney in her day job as well as an independent historian, freelance writer and horsewoman. On a perpetual journey in search of the authentic American West, she authored Montana Horse Racing: A History and Marcus Daly’s Road to Montana as well as articles for numerous periodicals.
Hidy, Ralph W., et al. The Great Northern Railway: A History. University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 2004.
Malone, Michael M. James J. Hill: Empire Builder of the Northwest. University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
EXPERIENCE THE EMPIRE BUILDER TODAY
Modern travelers can retrace James J. Hill’s route on Amtrak’s Empire Builder passenger train. While the authentic run is east to west, it’s 13 hours from Williston, North Dakota, to Sandpoint, Idaho, so seeing all of Montana in daylight is a challenge unless you make it a round trip. amtrak.com
If you travel by car, U.S. Highway 2 mostly parallels the railroad from North Dakota to Columbia Falls, Montana. Farther west, it gets complicated, but with a good paper map that shows both rail lines and secondary roads, you can get to the Idaho line. The route has changed a bit over the last 100 years, but sites such as Railfan Road at trains. com have tips on obscure secondary highways and back roads that follow the original line.
Great
and
The
tourism to Glacier National Park and adopted
the mountain goat as the company mascot. Credit: Great Northern Railway Historical Society
Martin, Albro. James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1991.
IN THE SEARCH OF GOLD
ESCAPE TO PARADISE
It’s hard to imagine a more perfect combination than thrilling daytime adventures in Paradise Valley followed by the cozy comforts of Sage Lodge at night. As winter approaches, the excitement grows with opportunities for wildlife watching and cross-country skiing in Yellowstone National Park, and unwinding in a hot tub beneath the star-filled sky.
While Paradise Valley’s wild, rugged beauty is its signature, there’s so much more to discover at Sage Lodge. Savor a hearty meal in our Montana-inspired dining outlets, indulge in well-deserved pampering at The Spa, or relax with a cocktail on the patio, taking in the breathtaking views of Emigrant Peak.
The Will to Remember
65 years later, Big Sky filmmaker prepares to release film illuminating
By Bella Butler
the stories of Earthquake Lake
It’s late for wildfire in southwest Montana, but on this unseasonably warm October day a veil of smoke drapes the broken hillside rising from the banks of Earthquake Lake. The smoke settles into the phantom space on the slope where earth used to be before a massive earthquake in 1959 triggered a landslide, damming the Madison River below and causing a night of terror for dozens of unassuming people camping in the canyon. The carbon-diffused light casts eerie shadows down the rubble that eventually spill into the dark water. From across the canyon, Big Sky, Montana-based filmmaker Chris Kamman gazes solemnly at the collision of modern disaster and
past calamity, respecting the place as he always does with reverence for its beauty and for the stories it holds, some of which are buried with bodies beneath a semi-truck sized boulder next to where he stands.
“Essentially these boulders are their headstones,” he says, seemingly haunted
by his own words.
Cars with out-of-state plates whiz by on U.S. Highway 287 below the Earthquake Lake Visitor Center where Kamman and I parked, and I wonder if the people in them have any idea what this place is. Do they know that the lake to their left was once a river before 80 million tons of rock came barreling down the mountain at 100 miles per hour in less than a minute? Do they know that pieces of guest cabins floated on the surface
On a warm October day in 2024, Earthquake Lake near West Yellowstone, Montana, is cloaked in smoke from a nearby wildfire. Ripples across the lake show where filmmaker Chris Kamman sputtered his boat, one of the ways he’s explored the area for a film he’s making about the stories related to this area stemming from the historic 1959 earthquake that created the lake. Photo by Micah Robin
Memorial Boulder sits on the hill above the Earthquake Lake Visitor Center as a tribute to the 28 people killed by the earthquake, some of whom are buried beneath it. Photo by Micah Robin
of the floodwater while camper trailers drowned underneath? Do they know 28 people died here in what was, at the time, the second largest earthquake to occur in the Lower 48 in the 20th century, and that some of them are still here? Perhaps not—65 years is enough time to wash some stories away. It’s enough time to forget. But Kamman’s determined to remember. And he’s spent years making a documentary so that others can remember, too.
Kamman, 39, wasn’t there for the earthquake—he wasn’t even alive. But he remembers the first time he ever saw the lake. He was 10 years old and traveling through the area with his family, and a bald eagle was perched on top of one of the many lifeless skeletonlike trees that jut out of the water.
“I just remember thinking [this place] had special power to it,” he said. As an adult, he moved to Big Sky and started making films under a brand he founded, Skylab Media House. Much of his work was anchored on the slopes of Big Sky Resort, but as a storyteller he felt compelled by the beautiful and haunting lake just 65 miles south. He decided to take on a documentary about the earthquake around the 60th anniversary in 2019 as a passion project. He loaded camera gear in his 1993 Ford F150 truck and with camera assistant Micah Robin in tow, traveled to the visitor center for the anniversary event. With many survivors present, Kamman recorded their stories outside in the wind, an imperfect setup that yielded tragic and resilient accounts of the fateful night of Aug. 17, 1959. One of those stories was Anita Painter Thon’s.
Now 77, Painter Thon is a greatgrandmother, but she’ll also always be the 12-year-old girl who was shaken awake by an unfathomable disaster.
That August in 1959, Painter Thon’s parents had taken her and her two sisters on a road trip from their home in Ogden, Utah, to Yellowstone National Park. With their brand-new trailer in tow, the family toured the park, feeding cookies to bears out the window of the car (remember, it’s 1959). Painter Thon remembers the wild thermal landscape made her mother nervous.
“She was very anxious, and she told us that with all the hot pots and geysers and everything like that, it’s funny that they don’t have more earthquakes,” Painter Thon said. “She told my dad and us that she wanted to get out of there before the whole place blew up.”
Her father had heard about a place near West Yellowstone on the Madison River that offered excellent fishing, so after their Yellowstone visit, Painter Thon’s family found a spot right by the river at Rock Creek Campground. Painter Thon remembers the details of this evening with color. She describes butterflies and dragonflies buzzing through the air, and moonlight shining across the camp as they ate a steak and potato dinner. One might wonder if she would recall such vivid details were it not the last night her family would ever be all together.
Later, in the bed she shared with her twin sister Anne, Painter Thon was shaken awake by the swaying trailer, and a deafening roar thundered around them. She wondered if it might be a train, and tried to recall if there had been a set of
Top: This photo shows the road that ran east to west along the north shore of Hebgen Lake. The road was significantly damaged by the earthquake and the seiches that followed the earthquake. The north end of Hebgen Lake dropped relative to the south end, which caused the lake to tilt. This tilting caused the water in the lake to rock back and forth creating waves known as “seiches.” These seiches, combined with the earthquake, caused smaller landslides which resulted in sections of the road falling into Hebgen Lake. NPS Photo Middle: The after-effects of blasting at the Golden Gate Canyon area of Yellowstone National Park. Blasting operations were used to break up large rocks and boulders into smaller, more manageable rocks that could be moved more easily. The road was completely blocked by rockfall that occurred during the earthquake and aftershocks. NPS Photo Bottom: Yellowstone National Park organized an inspection of the park following the earthquake to assess damage. This photo shows the inspection group stopped at Golden Gate Canyon. They are standing on boulders that fell from the mountainside and blocked the road. This photo was taken before the blasting efforts mentioned above. NPS Photo
tracks on the way in the canyon. Dishes flew out of the cupboards as the trailer rocked violently in the darkness. People screamed in the distance. When the movement stopped, Painter Thon and Anne looked outside to find they were in the Madison River. They stepped out of the trailer and water rushed up to the waists of their matching white flannel pajamas.
“That vision has stayed in my mind of looking back at that trailer in the dark with the full moon shining down, and it was just demolished,” Painter Thon said.
Painter Thon and Anne eventually found their other sister, Carol, and later their mother and father, who were both critically injured. Tootie Green, a
carve a dirt path above the north shore of Hebgen Lake the day following the earthquake to allow vehicle
the
where survivors were trapped. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey Top
the
Ranch
by Emmett J. Culligan (founder of the famous water softener company). The building was directly on top of the Red Canyon
courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey Bottom left: This photo shows the West Yellowstone Airport which, at the time, was a threesided hangar. Victims suffering the most severe injuries were transported from the Madison River Canyon to the West Yellowstone Airport via an Air Force helicopter the day following the earthquake. This photo shows a victim being transported on a stretcher as well as haybales inside the airport which were used as makeshift beds. After arriving at the West Yellowstone Airport, victims waited to be transferred to an airplane that then took them to the Deaconess Hospital in Bozeman. NPS Photo. Bottom right: A Piasecki H-21 Workhorse rescue helicopter from the Hill Air Force Base in Utah hits the ground in Montana. This is the helicopter mentioned above that was used to transport victims from the canyon (at Refuge Point) to the West Yellowstone Airport. NPS Photo
young registered nurse who was also staying at Rock Creek that night, treated many injured people, including Painter Thon’s parents, but Green’s bed-sheet tourniquet wasn’t enough to save Painter Thon’s mother. After a helicopter rescue successfully transported her to the hospital in nearby Bozeman, Painter Thon’s mother succumbed to her injuries. Painter Thon’s father survived.
When Painter Thon tells me this story 65 years later, her voice trembles as sobs catch in her throat. It’s painful still, but like Kamman, Painter Thon believes in the power of breathing life into this tragic tale of loss. Since the
50th anniversary, which was the first time she returned to the site, Painter Thon has come back on Aug. 17 every year. She and her husband explore the area, investigating where her family’s camp may have been, and she thinks about the 19 people who were buried alive, including children as young as 18 months old. Painter Thon has written three books related to the quake, including a memoir, Shaken in the Night; The Twenty Eight, an attempt to memorialize each of the lives lost; and Princess: A Dog’s Tale, an account of how her dog, Princess, made it back to her family after the earthquake. Much of
Painter Thon’s life has been remembering the story of Aug. 17, 1959, and sharing it with others. Yet she has a hard time articulating why it feels important to remember. It’s a purpose so intuitive it’s impossible to put words to. This story seems to tug at people this way, begging to be fossilized in the same way the landscape—and some of the victims— will forever bear its scars.
Thirty-three-year-old Ellen Butler, another source featured in Kamman’s documentary and the manager of the Earthquake Lake Visitor Center, has played her own part in preserving the story. Like Kamman, Butler has no
Top left: A Cadillac is overturned on a road near Hebgen Lake in August 1959. Roads near the earthquake’s epicenter suffered significant damage during the earthquake and aftershocks which made rescue efforts difficult. A bulldozer was used to
access into
canyon
right: This photo shows
Blarneystone
which was owned
fault. Photo
direct tie to the event itself, but she’s stirred by that same mesmerizing force that inspires her to invite others into its history. From her base at the visitor center, which offers a picture of the geology, human stories and present ecology of the quake site, Butler guides trips throughout the landscape, educating visitors through immersion in the petrified tragedy and wonder of the area. She also curated historical images for the 2022 photo book, Earthquake Lake, an installment of the Images of America series.
“It’s getting even more clear now why it’s important to remember, because we’re at 65 years and there are so few people who do remember it,” Butler says, adding an intention to maintain the memories after the remaining survivors have passed.
This is certainly true for Kamman as well, and using video has allowed him to capture the visceral experiences that come through when people like Painter Thon tell their stories. He adds that this story is an especially visual one, with the marred landscape and paradoxically beautiful and haunting scenery coming through in a medium like film.
Kamman says he feels some pressure to get the documentary right, but he’s paid the story the most valuable form of respect: time. From multiple trials of rigging homemade underwater cameras to investigate the drowned remains beneath the lake, to lengthy interviews with survivors, to quiet solo time spent on the lake itself sputtering around in his tiny boat soaking up the essence of the place, Kamman is now a part of this story himself.
“It’s a reminder of how fragile things are and how out of control this world really is, and how we don’t have a say about most things that happen. Tragedies happen. Great things happen. Things can change in the snap of a finger,” Kamman said. “ … Especially things like where we are right now at the slide, you can come and touch what happened that night, and you can hear the voices of the people. I think it just reminds me … of how crazy stories are out there in
our backyard.”
Kamman plans to screen his film in late 2025, but for now, many of those cars keep cruising by on U.S. 287, perhaps wondering about the eerie lake and broken mountain. Many of them are on their way to or from a Yellowstone vacation, Butler says, and they might stop at the visitor center looking for
a bathroom. And hopefully they’ll learn something.
“We have to make sure people know what happened there and know that sometimes landscapes are more than that,” Butler says. “There are stories to be told.”
Bella Butler is the managing editor of Mountain Outlaw.
Kamman restarts the engine on his boat on a Quake Lake exploration.
Photo by Micah Robin
25 x 50 x 100
Journey through Greater Yellowstone’s Past
Words by Fischer Genau
One hundred years ago in the U.S., alcohol was illegal, all movies were silent, and women had just been granted the right to vote. Much has changed since then. The modern West has become a place of rapid progress, but hindsight in this storied region reveals a panoply of significant events, many of which render the present in a critically contextualized light. A quarter way through this 21st century, Mountain Outlaw is looking back 25, 50, and 100 years in the Greater Yellowstone area to remember where we’ve been—and perhaps better understand where we are and where we’re going.
History in Perspective
Fischer Genau is a writer and filmmaker whose work invites us to look closer at the world around us and the world inside. He lives in Bozeman, but his heart still resides with the lakes of his homeland back in Michigan.
MONTANA’S MASS EXODUS
In 1925, a wagon hit the road in eastern Montana adorned with a sign that read: “20 miles from water, 40 miles from wood. We’re leaving old Montana, and we’re leaving for good.”
While much of the country would be remembered around this time for the Roaring ’20s, Montana in 1925 saw a historic mass exodus. Thousands of homesteaders had moved West to work the land by the end of World War I, but drought, heat waves, and great clouds of grasshoppers wreaked havoc on their fields. After watching their crops wither, many of these would-be farmers limped back eastward. Between 1919 and 1925, approximately 2 million acres of land ceased production and 11,000 farms were vacated. Montana was the only state during the 1920s to lose population, and with the Great Depression on the horizon, the Montanans who remained were just getting acquainted with the resiliency they’d need to survive.
Drought refugees leave Glendive, Montana for Washington. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress
1975 2000
GRIZZLY BEARS
LISTED AS THREATENED SPECIES
By 1975, grizzly bear range in the Lower 48 had dwindled to just 2 percent of the bruins’ historic habitat. Their population was at an all-time low—fewer than 1,000—and the federal government finally took action. On July 28, 1975, the grizzly bear was listed as a threatened species in the Lower 48, making it illegal to “kill, capture, harm, harass, import, or export a grizzly bear anywhere in the Lower 48 States, or to sell any parts or products of grizzlies in interstate or foreign commerce,” according to the rule published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Recreational hunting was still allowed but limited to 25 bears per year. Since 1975, grizzly bear numbers have increased to at least 1,923 in the Lower 48, according to a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service report, inspiring recent calls for them to be delisted as a threatened species, and subsequent rebuttals demanding this protection be upheld.
FIRES RAGE IN THE WEST
The West’s wildfire season in 2000 was one of the worst on record. Roughly 1.1 million acres burned in the Northern Rocky Mountains during a year of widespread drought, causing Montana Gov. Marc Racicot to declare a state of emergency and President Bill Clinton to grant Montana a Presidential Disaster Declaration. The Bitterroot Valley fires accounted for half of the burned acreage in Montana and were the subject of perhaps the most famous wildlife photo in history: Taken by fire behavior analyst John McColgan and titled “Elk Bath,” the shot shows two elk seeking shelter in the East Fork of the Bitterroot River.
Wildfires in the Western U.S. in 2000 caused more than $2 billion in damages, killed four firefighters, and brought in firefighting teams from as far away as Australia and New Zealand. But this abnormally dangerous year would quickly become the standard. In the past 25 years, wildfire seasons have become more severe, illustrated by the new 10-year average of 7.2 million acres burned annually in the state of Montana alone.
“Elk Bath.” Photo by John McColgan
A grizzly bear walks through the forest in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Jim Peaco/NPS
Trial Lawyers for Justice
Defending the Vulnerable & Holding the Powerful Accountable
By Taylor Owens
In a world where legal battles often feel like David versus Goliath, the team at Trial Lawyers for Justice has made it their mission to represent those who need it most: the everyday people, families and individuals who have been wronged and deserve justice. Led by a passionate and fearless team of trial lawyers, TL4J fights for what’s right, ensuring that the voiceless are heard, the overlooked are seen and justice is served—even when the odds are stacked against them.
While public perception of trial lawyers can sometimes skew negative, casting them as opportunists chasing settlements, the work done at TL4J tells a different story. It’s a story of sacrifice, of standing up for the vulnerable, and of transforming lives through the power of the law.
"We don’t just want to win cases; we want to change the world," Nicholas Rowley, founder of TL4J, said. "It’s about standing up for the little guy when nobody else will."
That ethos runs deep in the firm, whose mission goes beyond legal victories and into the realm of societal change. Every case they take on is not just about compensation for the wronged—it’s about holding powerful entities accountable, ensuring that no one is too big to face justice.
TL4J was co-founded by Nicholas and Courtney Rowley. Nicholas has achieved over $3 billion in verdicts and settlements, building his reputation as a leading national
trial lawyer. His experiences have shaped him into a relentless advocate for injury victims. Courtney, equally passionate, champions the jury system and has authored several books on trial law, including Trial By Woman. She focuses on representing ordinary people in cases of personal injury, wrongful death, and other significant issues.
For those who come to TL4J, the legal system can often feel overwhelming. Clients aren’t just fighting for justice— they’re fighting for their lives, their families, and their future. Whether it’s a wrongful death case, catastrophic injury or corporate negligence, TL4J steps in as the last line of defense for people who have nowhere else to turn.
"There’s this perception that trial lawyers are greedy or manipulative,” Rowley said. “The truth is, we are the last line of defense for people who’ve been wronged and need a voice.”
TL4J does this with a focus on compassion and care, ensuring that every client feels supported through what is often the most difficult time of their lives.
TL4J has won numerous high-profile and record-setting cases, particularly in personal injury, wrongful death, and medical malpractice. Some of their notable successes include: a $131 million verdict for a car accident victim injured by a driver who was over-served at a bar; a $74.5 million award for a birth injury case involving medical
malpractice; $275 million and $857 million against Monsanto, for three families affected by PCB chemical exposure; $45 million for a young girl who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident; and $60 million against Tesla for a motorcyclist injured when a Tesla employee caused a crash.
These are just a few of TL4J’s impressive victories, showing their strong commitment to representing individuals and families rather than corporations or insurance companies.
The work isn’t easy. In fact, it’s often a grueling process that demands incredible personal sacrifice.
"You have to sacrifice a lot to do this work," Rowley said. "I’ve given up a lot of family time, missed a lot of life events, but it’s for a purpose—it’s for something bigger than me."
That sacrifice is part of what drives the team to go above and beyond for their clients, not just in the courtroom, but also in life. They understand the emotional toll legal battles can take, and they work tirelessly to shoulder as much of that burden as possible for their clients.
One of the distinguishing aspects of TL4J’s practice is its willingness to take on corporate giants. From powerful corporations to influential individuals, TL4J has no qualms about going head-to-head with some of the most well-resourced adversaries in the world. Their team has stood in courtrooms across the country, representing clients in complex, high-stakes trials where the other side often assumes their resources will prevail.
That’s where TL4J thrives.
can change the world.”
The courtroom, for TL4J, is not just a place of legal argument—it’s a stage for storytelling.
"At the end of the day, trial work is storytelling,” Rowley said. “You have to connect with the jury on a human level and make them understand the injustice that’s happened."
This ability to convey the emotional and human elements of a case is what wins trials, particularly in cases where massive corporations or influential individuals are involved. TL4J attorneys are experts at stripping away the corporate façade and showing juries the real, human suffering that’s occurred as a result of negligence or wrongdoing.
"You have to sacrifice a lot to do this work. I’ve given up a lot of family time, missed a lot of life events, but it’s for a purpose—it’s for something bigger than me."
"When you’re facing someone like Elon Musk and his company, they think they can crush you with their resources,” Rowley said. “But when you stand in front of a jury and tell the story, the truth prevails.”
– Nick Rowley
What truly sets TL4J apart is its approach to each case.
"Our firm operates differently—no billable hours, no quotas,” Rowley said. “We do what’s right for the case and the client, and we focus on the human aspect rather than just the legal one."
It’s a rare philosophy in the legal world, where the pressure to churn out billable hours and settle quickly often overrides the pursuit of justice. For TL4J, it’s about more than just winning—it’s about making a lasting impact.
Many law firms avoid taking cases to trial due to the inherent risks and unpredictability of the process. However, TL4J takes the opposite approach.
"You can settle cases all day long, but when you take a case to trial, you can change the law,” Rowley said. “You
The cases that TL4J takes on have a far-reaching impact. They not only provide relief for clients and their families but also create a ripple effect of accountability across industries.
"Until you see what happens to a family that’s been destroyed by corporate greed or medical negligence, you won’t understand what we do or why we fight so hard,” Rowley said.
It’s this fight that can create industry-wide change, setting precedents and inspiring reform.
For the attorneys at TL4J, every victory in the courtroom is a victory for justice, for fairness, and for the principle that no one—no matter how powerful—is above the law.
"We’re not just fighting for compensation for our clients," Rowley said. "We’re fighting to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
In addition to his courtroom successes, Rowley is also an accomplished author and educator. He has written several books on trial law, sharing his unique approach to advocacy, trial preparation, and storytelling in the courtroom.
Rowley’s passion for mentoring the next generation of trial lawyers extends beyond his written work; he also hosts exclusive retreats for trial attorneys in Big Sky, Montana. These retreats offer an immersive experience where lawyers from around the country can learn from his expertise, refine their skills, and deepen their understanding of compassionate, client-centered legal practice.
In a world where justice can feel like a rare commodity, TL4J ensures that the scales are tipped in favor of those who need it most. They are tireless advocates for their clients and relentless in their pursuit of what is right. And through their unwavering commitment, they are changing the world, one case at a time.
$10 from each item purchased goes directly to the Center for Large Landscape Conservation and their Hwy 191 Wildlife Crossings Project.
HONORING THE Queen of the Tetons
How can the death of the world’s most famous grizzly inspire the same coexistence that her life did?
By Brigid Mander
FEATURED OUTLAW
“The Cathedral Group: 399 and quadruplets.” As spring takes hold in the valley, Grizzly 399 and her four cubs forage on the fresh growth amid the sagebrush. Towering above them in the distance is the Cathedral Group: Teewinot Mountain, the Grand Teton and Mount Owen comprise the formation that climbs some 7,000 feet from the valley floor. Photo by Thomas Mangelsen
OOn October 23, 2024, wildlife photographer and Wilson, Wyoming resident Savannah Rose received a text from a friend reporting that a grizzly bear had been killed by a car the previous night on a highway south of Jackson. Rose felt her breath catch in her throat, hoping it wasn’t grizzly 399, a favorite subject of hers and her quarter-million social media followers—and the world, for that matter. But a phone call to her friend, a national park biologist, confirmed the worst: The Queen of the Tetons was dead.
“It was gut-wrenching,” Rose told Mountain Outlaw just days after the accident. “I know she didn’t know me, but she was so dear to me. It hit me like a friend’s sudden death.”
As the news spread from the Jackson Hole valley throughout the world, many who knew of 399 shared Rose’s despondence. A collective acute grief eventually made way for the emptiness that comes from an untimely death, especially one with the ignominy of a vehicle-wildlife collision.
For the reality is, this wild 28-year-old grizzly bear, a member of a native species which white settlers had nearly succeeded in extinguishing barely over a century ago, was a beloved part of life in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Her many superlatives—a barometer for her species recovery, an economic driver, a mother, a celebrity and a catalyst for coexistence—made her inarguably the most famous bear in the world, but also an ambassador to humans, for her offspring and her fellow grizzlies as well as all interconnected wildlife of the iconic GYE. Many of her admirers now hope the call to respectful coexistence inspired by her death can be as resounding as that of her life.
A CELEBRITY, A MOTHER AND AN ECONOMIC DRIVER
When 399 was born in the winter of 1996, grizzly bears had been federally protected as threatened by the Endangered Species Act for just over two decades. She was tagged and collared in 2001 as female grizzly No. 399 for tracking and identification by researchers. For the next couple years, she lived a quiet life, monitored and known mainly by biologists, and was the first bear known to have taken up residence in Grand Teton National Park since attempts to exterminate the
bears more than a century ago.
That changed in 2006 when globally renowned, Wyomingbased wildlife photographer Thomas Mangelsen noticed 399 near Oxbow Bend in Grand Teton. Mangelsen noted the mama bear was consistently spending time in areas visible from the road, even savvy enough to look both ways for cars before crossing the roads with her cubs. Ostensibly, 399 had deduced she and her young offspring were safer from male grizzlies— known to kill cubs not their own so they can mate with the female—if she stayed near roads and humans. Mangelsen was intrigued, and throughout the following years, he and conservation writer Todd Wilkinson documented and shared her image and stories.
For wildlife tourism, a 399-and-cubs sighting became a magical objective. Professional and amateur photographers snapped cumulative millions of images. Although her first known cub had died during its first summer, her next set of three cubs, born in 2006, stepped into the limelight with her. In 2007, 399 attacked a hiker who surprised her and her thenyearling cubs on a carcass, knocking him down and biting him. The hiker, who survived with minor injuries, pleaded for mercy for the bear as wildlife officials considered “removing” her from the population (agency speak for killing the bear).
Dr. Chris Servheen, who was at the time in the middle of his 35 years as the grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was the decision-maker on whose word 399’s fate hinged. He declared the bear had acted naturally, and 399 was left alone. Servheen may have had no idea then of the implications of that decision, but it proved to be an important inflection point in which the human right to recreate in bear territory no longer always trumped the bear’s right to live. Two of those cubs, however, were eventually killed by humans anyway: one by a hunter outside the park and one for predating on unattended livestock within the GYE. The surviving female of that litter, grizzly 610, is now nearing 19 years of age. She went on to have her own cubs, and like her mother, has spent time visible to humans, garnering her own following of wildlife watchers, despite being known for a less serene and tolerant demeanor toward the masses than 399.
From then on, throngs of admirers hung on every move 399 made. Her chosen proximity to humans opened a window through which people could watch individual bears living their own wild lives. People witnessed 399 teach her cubs to cross
Grizzly 399 stares into the lens of wildlife photographer and Wilson, Wyoming resident Savannah Rose’s camera. In an Instagram tribute Rose wrote after 399’s death, she said: “You met me in my world, and I got lost in yours.”
Photo by Savannah Rose
rivers, to hunt and navigate around the humans who gathered for her roadside spectacles. Word spread far and wide of the legendary bear that tolerated hordes of humans looking at her. People traveled from around the world to see her. Her fans and paparazzi caused “bear jams” of hundreds of cars. Wildlife managers gave up on the idea of hazing the bear from the road and instead hired more staffers to manage the people so 399 could get her grizzly bear business done. And her business was hot news: 399 is out of her den! 399 has one cub this year! 399’s small cub was killed by a hit-and-run driver; she has removed the little body from the road, laid it under a tree, and has been wailing by the roadside all day. 399 was seen on Teton Pass! 399 is safe in her den for the winter. 399 is too old for any cubs, but wait, now she has four cubs! An adult son of 399 was killed for human-caused conflicts. 399’s daughter, 610, has adopted one of her younger siblings from 399. 399 and her cubs got into unsecured beehives. Five grizzlies walked through downtown Jackson last night (399 and her four giant cubs) with a police escort to ensure the bears’ uneventful passage and safety through town. There was a book. Then another book. A PBS special. People couldn’t get enough of 399. Then, in 2023, 399 became the oldest female grizzly in the GYE to have a cub, utterly delighting her legion fans. This further cemented her identity as a mother, having 18 known cubs over the span of her 28-year life, and at one point raising four cubs at once, which is rare.
It’s a wonder that in a world where European settlers so ruthlessly worked to tame the environment for human consumption, booming visitation to watch a mother grizzly roadside reveals a craving to be near wildness, and to gain a connection to something bigger.
Such intimate observation also shifted a standard research stance to avoid humanizing wildlife.
“Anthropomophization is supposedly a no-no, as if animals cannot have feelings or thoughts of their own,” Mangelsen told interviewers from PBS Nature after 399’s death. “Jane Goodall began the path to debunk the idea animals don’t have their own feelings, and the story of 399 is a really sentient story.”
For the younger generation of wildlife advocates like photographer Rose, born the same year as 399, the idea animals have no feelings is a total fallacy. “399 addressed people’s separation from wild spaces, and awareness of wildlife,” Rose said. “People want to connect with animals, and she bridged this in a way that taught thousands of people that grizzlies are sentient, intelligent beings. She was still a grizzly. I saw her hunt and kill elk calves, and discipline her cubs brutally, but she was a very special animal. It’s wonderful to love someone just for what they give the world, and people’s relationships with her were beautiful.”
It was the unique combination of wildness and a pointed tolerance for humanity which made 399 such an impactful ambassador for wildlife and wild places.
“I fell in love with her because she is a very personable bear,” said Trevor Bloom, a botanist with the Bridger-Teton National Forest which borders Grand Teton National Park, and a longtime wildlife guide. “She made it easy to watch, and it’s nice to see animals where you know their stories. It makes it easier for us to relate to them; it’s hard to understand and care about wildlife if you have no experiences with them.”
While there’s no exact figure quantifying the economic impact of 399’s allure, tourism is the second largest industry in Wyoming and growing, closing in on $8 billion a year. In 2022, almost 2 million overnight visitors came to Teton County, pumping $1.65 billion into the local economy. A recent National Park Service study also reported economic impacts specific parks had on gateway communities in 2023, with Grand Teton visitors spending an estimated $738 million in local gateway regions, supporting a total of 9,370 jobs and generating $936 million in economic output. The study found visitors to Yellowstone spent $623 million in gateway regions, supporting a total of 8,560 jobs and producing $828 million in economic output. It’s hard to disentangle these figures from one of the parks’ top allures—wildlife—and even more specifically in many instances, 399.
It’s a wonder that in a world where European settlers so ruthlessly worked to tame the environment for human consumption, booming visitation to watch a mother grizzly reveals a craving to be near wildness, and to gain a connection to something bigger.
A BAROMETER FOR RECOVERY
Historically, grizzly bears inhabited the western half of North America from central Mexico to Alaska and played a key role in healthy ecosystems. Native Americans have lived with grizzlies as neighbors for thousands of years, familiar with both their peaceful side and their ferociously protective side. Tribes had varying views and legends around grizzlies, but common threads were an association with courage and strength,
protection and healing, resilience and wisdom. Some legends suggest people who possess bear medicine have the courage to stand up and fight for what is right.
Biologists at the USFWS estimate prior to 1800, upwards of 50,000 grizzlies lived in the Western U.S. between the modern borders of Mexico and Canada. Like wolves, bison and Native American tribes themselves, the presence of grizzlies on the landscape was a perceived obstacle to homesteaders and their domestic livestock as they pushed west looking for land and resources. A purposeful campaign to eradicate grizzly bears was launched in the 1800s, partly funded by a government-bounty program, which resulted in the widespread shooting, poisoning and trapping of the bears.
By the 1930s, grizzlies occupied just 2 percent of their traditional range and only approximately 2 percent of their former population remained. By the time early conservationists in the 20th century mobilized to prevent complete extirpation, there were fewer than 800 grizzlies in the Lower 48. These remaining individuals were confined to disconnected, small areas of wilderness and conserved lands like Yellowstone National Park, where the last remaining individuals of other species that had been hunted to near extinction in the same 100 years were also found, such as trumpeter swans and bison. The GYE had just 136 living grizzlies in the 1970s.
Researchers, particularly John and Frank Craighead, who became famous for studying the Yellowstone grizzlies in the 1960s, advocated for the bears’ intelligence and their critical role in the ecosystem. The Craigheads coined the term Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which today refers to an approximately
22-million-acre area surrounding the 2.2 million acres of Yellowstone National Park. Grizzlies received federal protection under the newly ratified Endangered Species Act in 1975 but remain incredibly vulnerable to human activity.
As grizzlies recovered, 399 was the first grizzly known to reside in Grand Teton National Park where she would emerge from her den each year near Pilgrim Creek. Her lifespan marked much of the period of a slow grizzly recovery.
“[399] is representative of the reoccupation of the whole Jackson valley by grizzly bears, and even south of there—that all happened during her lifetime, and all her offspring are contributing to that,” Servheen, now retired from the USFWS, told PBS Nature. “She taught us grizzly bears are not this demon species that some people like to think of them as—that they are always out to get you or kill something. She could navigate an amazingly complex environment of people in the park, and residences outside the park. She was a symbol of wild nature reoccupying some of the most beautiful country left in the United States.”
According to the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, a multiagency government group founded in 1983 that oversees the established geographic areas of grizzly bear recovery, under protection of the ESA grizzly populations in the U.S. climbed slowly from less than 800 to about 2,200 today. States such as Wyoming, Idaho and Montana are now advocating to replace federal delisting with state management, which would open the bears to trophy hunting seasons. But this has been a massive conflict in recent years, where both sides have battled it out in courtrooms—and sometimes in the comments of social media
Grizzly 399 and cubs roam roadside in Grand Teton National Park as eager fans take photos from the pavement. Photo by Patrick/Adobe Stock
posts about 399.
At the time of 399’s death, at least 68 other grizzlies in the GYE population had been killed in 2024, all but one due to human causes, according to IGBC data. Delisting opponents cite these deaths, slow population growth and the fact connectivity between populations has not been reached, as bears in the GYE remain isolated from other populations.
Human conflicts such as livestock depredation remains a challenge with grizzlies on the landscape. Some ranchers claim there are too many bears, while wildlife advocates say there’s too much livestock grazing on public lands in otherwise functioning ecosystems. For Servheen, who is now the president and board chair of the Montana Wildlife Federation, delisting grizzlies is no longer the right path forward. Previously, biologists and scientists made wildlife management decisions at state agencies to work toward healthy wildlife populations. But when states allowed for extensive, politically driven legislation and policies that opened hunting opportunities for wolves after their delisting, it sparked dire concern among wildlife biologists on the fate of grizzlies.
“Increased political interference from state legislatures over biologists, and recent, regressive policies in the states put grizzlies at the greatest risk,” Servheen said, citing Idaho and Montana’s 1800s-style management, including bounty killings meant to dramatically reduce wolf populations as an example. “When politics supersede science, things go badly for the wildlife.”
The recent, rapid rate of development of private lands in wildlife habitat in the GYE is also a tremendous threat to all wildlife, including grizzlies, according to Servheen. “The cumulative effect of all this development is compromising huge areas of grizzly bear habitat. All these areas are now being filled with people, and they also want to recreate in adjacent public
lands, endangering the wildlife,” he said.
Such development is also what gives way to increased traffic, which has detrimental impacts on sensitive ecosystems, as evidenced by 399’s death. Migratory and wintering ungulate populations also suffer tremendously, usually with little public attention. Even in Jackson, along a stretch of Broadway where speed limits are lowered to 30 mph to protect wintering mule deer crossing the five-lane road to connect habitats, drivers speed. The bodies of vehicle-killed mule deer that tried to cross can be seen crumpled on the sidewalk in winter. In the state of Wyoming alone, more than 7,500 big game animals are reported killed on Wyoming roads each year, an average of 21 individuals a day.
“What happened to 399 reflects the problems of our community; it was a symptom of the sickness of overdevelopment,” Rose said.
In recent years, the state of Wyoming has poured resources into identifying and building wildlife over- and underpasses around the state, and in Teton County, recent crossings have been built where mule deer, elk and moose often cross. Twelve more slated for construction in Teton County will be built in order of critical priority. (The spot where the elk which led to 399’s death was killed is the third lowest priority crossing on the list). Taylor Phillips, a wildlife guide and owner of Eco-Tour Adventures, founded WYldlife for Tomorrow, a nonprofit through which businesses donate to Wyoming Game and Fish’s funding for projects like wildlife crossings and habitat restoration. “We have an incredible responsibility to protect our ecosystem, and show people what we value,” Phillips said.
Amid solutions, increasing development remains an issue. According to Luther Propst, a Teton County commissioner and former conservation attorney, the huge profits developers
Jackson, Wyoming sprawl butts up against some of the wildest land in the country. Photo by Christopher Boyer/Kestrel Aerial
can reap in Teton County and intense pressure for growth in a desirable place to live, visit or own a trophy home is an insidious problem. Spaces for small businesses and the homes of contributing local residents are continually lost to multimillion-dollar luxury homes and short-term rentals, and while the total population of Teton County isn’t growing, the vast number of service jobs is exploding, creating an unhealthy socioeconomic situation for humans. For wildlife, it is critically dangerous, as soaring worker traffic combines with vehicular deaths, loss of habitat and connectivity.
“It’s harder for wildlife advocates to fight this kind of threat versus threats of yesteryear, like logging and mining,” Propst said. “More hotels, tourism and high-end and trophy home building have real impacts. They require a lot of workers to keep these things going, which creates a mainly low-wage workforce serving these industries, who often are commuting in and out through wildlife corridors.” Indeed, the Subaru that fatally struck 399 was driven by a late-night commuter leaving Jackson after working his job to return home in an outlying community.
When news of the famous bear’s death shot around the world, tens of thousands of fans mourned, many posting tributes on social media. The story was picked up by The New York Times, ABC, CNN, USA Today, The Washington Post, the AP newswire and many other national outlets. Foreign media covered the story. Federal and state wildlife managers and land managers felt compelled to make public statements, including Chip Jenkins, superintendent of Grand Teton National Park, where the bear spent most of her life.
“The grizzly bear is an iconic species that helps make the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem so extraordinary,” Jenkins
said in a news release. “Grizzly bear 399 has been perhaps the most prominent ambassador for the species. She has inspired countless visitors into conservation stewardship around the world and will be missed.”
A CATALYST FOR COEXISTENCE
Although the vehicle that struck and killed 399 was deemed not at fault, the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office kept the driver’s identity tightly sewn up due to a flood of angry communications and hateful online comments. Thousands worried over the fate of Spirit, the year-and-a-half-old cub with 399 when she was killed. Biologists assured the public the cub’s chances of survival were very good. A makeshift memorial in Jackson’s Town Square enshrined 399, made up of piles of notes, mementos, tributes and calls to act against potential delisting of grizzlies from the ESA. People asked the governor of Wyoming’s office to declare flags be flown at half-mast. The office declined—respectfully.
People were grieving, but they were also angry. They were angry that authorities reportedly knew grizzlies were around the highway and took no action to warn drivers; angry that grizzlies were feeding on the carcass of a road-killed elk that should have been removed by authorities; angry that in just the last decade, a once-quiet scenic byway frequently crossed by wildlife has exploded with constant construction- and serviceindustry traffic, a downstream effect of Jackson’s ballooning development. And yet, if channeled into efforts to better coexist
Grizzly 399’s cubs safely cross the road with the help of park rangers. Photo by Patrick/Adobe Stock
with grizzlies, this anger, combined with action, could bring a silver lining.
In 2011, wildlife biologist Jenny Fitzgerald was hired as a bear ranger in the park, part of the growing battalion of National Park Service employees on the 399 team. “That was the year 399 and 610 were out with five cubs total. It was my job to know where they were, manage crowds, stop traffic, and move humans,” said Fitzgerald, who later worked for the park service in California studying mountain lions, including P-22, another famous wild animal.
In 2012, P-22 was discovered living in Griffith Park near the white Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles. He had miraculously survived crossing both Interstate 405 and U.S. Route 101, two of the busiest highways in the world, but was then isolated in a small habitat and cut off from potential mates by the traffic. P-22’s life in the park and unsuccessful search for a mate enthralled people around the world. In 2022, at roughly 12 years old, he was euthanized after sustaining severe injuries from a vehicle strike, but documentation of the big cat’s life had already educated millions of people about wildlife and the impact of human development on them.
P-22’s legacy galvanized support for the world’s largest wildlife overpass, the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing. Currently under construction over the 10 lanes of the 101, it will connect the Santa Monica Mountains to the Simi Hills. It’s too late for P-22, but the crossing will allow mountain lions and other animals safer habitat connectivity. Scheduled for completion in 2026, the nearly $100-million project received $44 million in private donations from people inspired by P-22’s story.
Fitzgerald is now executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, a nonprofit which advocates for wild animals and protection of wild landscapes. “399 was this experiential catalyst—she made people care about grizzly bears as incredible, wild, sentient beings,” Fitzgerald said. “How can we capitalize on her legacy, to honor what she did for her species, and humanity’s connection to wild animals, and to coexist with wildlife? After all, if Jackson is so passionate about our wildlife, we need to be a flagship example for other places.”
In Teton County, during and after 399’s forays south of the park through residential areas in Wilson and Jackson, lax rules around wildlife attractants changed quickly. Constant human failure to secure trash properly forced Teton County to mandate new, self-locking cans in 2022. Chicken coops and apiaries had to be secured with barriers like electric fencing, and a recent push to allow bees and chickens in town limits was denied. New fruit-bearing trees are prohibited, and existing ones must be harvested completely of fruit. To give the regulations actual teeth, Teton County recently hired two compliance officers to investigate residences and issue warnings, with a final step of $750 per day penalties for noncompliance.
“Discussions at the town and county had been going on for years about this—but 399 walking through downtown
was a big catalyst,” said Tanya Anderson, who holds the newly created position of ecosystem stewardship administrator for the Town of Jackson. Area groups have stepped up to support these efforts, like Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, which sells self-locking cans at cost to residents.
“Coexistence in the GYE is the most important part of 399’s legacy,” said Wyoming Wildlife Advocates Executive Director Kristin Combs. “Having regulations is a big part of protecting bears and wildlife. People need to be faced with adverse consequences. [Since the county announced such consequences], my phone has been ringing off the hook with people trying to get into compliance.”
Most onlookers hope the outpouring of emotion over 399 will continue to have a positive impact for wildlife.
“We don’t want to forget about the wildlife when the pressures of the world are just to always make more room for humans,” said Bridger-Teton National Forest’s Bloom. “I hope 399’s legacy will be to educate more people on coexistence, on the Endangered Species Act, and bring attention to the magnitude of the problem of wildlife getting killed by cars every day.”
•••
After the furor and sadness from her death, 399’s vast following became stuck on one logistic: what would happen to her body? A few floated the idea of taxidermy, but the majority of people reacted to this option like stuffing a beloved relative. Thousands of her fans pleaded publicly for her body to be returned to the earth. The USFWS remained mum on the subject until a Nov. 1, 2024 news release. In it, the agency announced it had honored the legacy of 399 by cremating her body. Officials then returned her ashes to Grand Teton, where they were spread at Pilgrim Creek.
Grand Teton’s Jenkins released another statement: “399 will always be part of this special place,” he said. “However, there is still work to do to ensure her descendants and all grizzly bears continue to thrive in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. It’s up to all of us to make sure they do.”
These are unprecedented events in wildlife management: a grizzly cremation, the somber spreading of ashes, and condolences offered by officials. But then again, nearly everything about 399 was unprecedented. She paved a path for wildlife and reminded humans how rich a shared world is—and could be. As grizzlies expand beyond protected federal lands, county governments and communities in and around the GYE must decide what they value, and how they are willing to act and adjust human behavior to protect those values. This would be the most unprecedented honor to 399’s legacy of all.
Brigid Mander is an adventure and conservation journalist based in Wilson, Wyoming.
It was the unique combination of wildness and a pointed tolerance for humanity which made 399 such an impactful ambassador for wildlife and wild places.
Grizzly 399 sits with two of her four cubs. Photo by Jonathan Steele/Adobe Stock
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