2022 Summer Mountain Outlaw

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SUMMER 2022

SPECIAL EDITION

The ACTION ISSUE A COLLABORATION WITH MOUNTAIN JOURNAL

The Butterfly Effect...

ONE SMALL CHANGE CAN MAKE A BIG IMPACT

REDEFINING

PA R A D I S E

We’re not sure a more perfect combination exists – adventures by day across Paradise Valley, followed by the comforts of Sage Lodge by night. With Sage Lodge as your basecamp, you can enjoy fly fishing on the Yellowstone River, private spring creeks, or in nearby Yellowstone National Park. And while Paradise Valley is known for its abundant, blue-ribbon waters, there’s also more to enjoy at Sage Lodge. Grab a hearty Montana-inspired meal in the Fireside Room or The Grill, pamper yourself at The Spa, and kick back with a cocktail on the patio while taking in breathtaking views of Emigrant Peak.

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P H O T O : D AV I D M A R L O W

M I L L E R - RO O D E L L . C O M

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When celebrating Montana traditions, think Montana Whiskey Co.

Times change.

If you love it, protect it, and toss good whiskey in the cooler while you’re at it.

Enjoy Responsibly.

Wearing britches and catching cutthroats, circa 1934. Montana Whiskey Co. founder’s grandmother and great aunt with the day’s catch.

Find us and learn more at MontanaWhiskeyCo.com

BRED TO LOVE. TRAINED TO PROTECT.

MEET SVALINN WEEKLY AT THE BIG SKY FARMERS MARKET AND AT PBR JULY 22 & 23.

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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S OUTBOUND GALLERY

24 Through the Years: Yellowstone National Park at 150 ACTORS

44 Shane Doyle: Land of the Burning Ground: Crow names for Yellowstone 46 Scott Bosse: A River Essay 48 Thomas Spruance: Prologue to Ripple Effects 52 Lyn StClair: The Power of Art and Place ADVERSITY

66 Water: Where are the salmon in the Salmon River?

82 Wildlife: Safeguarding the Grizzlies of Tom Miner Basin 102 Development: How to protect wildlife migration corridors 108 Wildfire: One wildland firefighter’s trip back to life ACTION

122 Preservation: A River Runs Through It: Two writers take on the film that changed fly fishing 123 Looking Upstream 128 Looking Downstream 138 Visitation: National Parks and the post-COVID effect of tourism 144 Localization: How the Pitchfork Ranch is making a case for locally produced food 148 Design: Learning to build, and live, responsibly in Greater Yellowstone FEATURED OUTLAW

156 Ryan Busse worked in the firearms industry.

Now, with his book Gunfight, he’s battling the industry that brought him in.

LAST LIGHT 170 Our reality: An aerial view

Looking west through wildfire smoke over Taylor Creek with No Man Ridge faint in the distance, July 26, 2021. PHOTO BY CHRIS KAMMAN

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Owned and published in Big Sky, Montana.

PUBLISHER Eric Ladd

GRAPHIC DESIGNER ME Brown

EDITORIAL EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, VP MEDIA Joseph T. O’Connor

SALES AND OPERATIONS CEO Megan Paulson

GUEST EDITOR Todd Wilkinson, Mountain Journal

COO, VP FINANCE Treston Wold

SENIOR EDITOR Bella Butler

VP SALES E.J. Daws

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Gabrielle Gasser

MEDIA AND EVENTS DIRECTOR Ersin Ozer

ASSISTANT EDITOR Tucker Harris

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT LEAD Patrick Mahoney

COPY EDITOR Carter Walker

CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGIST Mira Brody

CREATIVE ART DIRECTOR Marisa Opheim

SENIOR ACCOUNTANT Sara Sipe

Visit outlaw.partners so meet the entire Outlaw team.

SENIOR DESIGNER Trista Hillman

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Kathy Hart Archenbach, Scott Bosse, Matt Crossman, Shane Doyle, Steven Hawley, Brigid Mander, Emily Reed, Lori Ryker, Thomas Spruance, Lyn StClair, Toby Thompson, Brooke Constance White, Mark Wilcox CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS/ARTISTS Charles Belden, Thom Bridge, Rod Crossman, Hunter D’Antuano, Lynn Donaldson, Kelsey Dzintars, Lizz Eberhardt, Abi Farish, Jacob W. Frank, Della Frederickson, Audrey Hall, Neal Herbert, Dan Ing, Louise Johns, Chris Kamman, Richard L. Lake, JP Clum Lantern, John M. Maclean, Zach Montes, Thomas Moran, Tom Murphy, Gregory Nickerson, Adam Pecht, Dave Pecunies, Holly Pippel, Emily Reed, Michael Ruebusch, Carl Schrim, Lyn StClair, Paul Warchol, Bob Wick, Mark Wilcox, Jim Younk, Cynthia Zimmerli

F E AT U R E D CONTRIBU TORS

EMILY REED grew up on the fringes of the prairie and alpine landscape of Wyoming. A conservation scientist by training and a storyteller by passion, she’s drawn to stories that illuminate modern-day life in the West where humans and nature intersect. When she's not working you can find her wandering the West with her dog or in her home studio with a paintbrush in hand.

LYN STCLAIR found a love for art as soon as she could hold a crayon and began her professional art career at age 11 composing animal portraits. Her work has won numerous awards and can be found in collections around the world. Twenty years ago, she moved to the Greater Yellowstone area where her favorite subjects could be found right in her backyard.

MATT CROSSMAN is a freelance writer who covers travel, adventure and NASCAR. In pursuit of stories he has jumped out of an airplane, hiked with U.S. Army Green Berets and played Santa Claus (twice on that last one). He lives in St. Louis with his wife and two daughters.

Read more of his work at mattcrossman.com.

SHANE DOYLE of the Crow/Apsáalooke Nation, is a cultural consultant based in Bozeman, Montana. His work includes archaeological and genetic research, curriculum design, environmental advocacy, performance art production, and Plains Indian-style singing. He lives in Bozeman with his wife, Megkian, and their five children.

Subscribe now at mtoutlaw.com/subscriptions.

Mountain Outlaw magazine 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 and Bozeman, Montana, as well as Jackson, Wyoming, and the four corners of Yellowstone National Park.

To advertise, contact Ersin Ozer at ersin@theoutlawpartners.com.

OUTLAW PARTNERS & Mountain Outlaw P.O. Box 160250, Big Sky, MT 59716 (406) 995-2055 • media@outlaw.partners © 2022 Mountain Outlaw Unauthorized reproduction prohibited

CHECK OUT THESE OTHER OUTLAW PUBLICATIONS: explorebigsky.com ON THE COVER: The monarch butterfly evokes beauty and transformation.

Traveling as far as 3,000 miles each year to find the perfect hibernating conditions, the monarch embodies strength and an ability to metamorphize. To many of us, action takes change and change does not come easy, but it is critical to growth and survival. Like the “butterfly effect,” even the smallest action can have a massive impact. ILLUSTRATION BY KELSEY DZINTARS

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Teton Valley

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Our remote, rural valley may take a little extra effort to navigate, but the rewards are great.

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SUMMER IS A CELEBRATED AND POPULAR TIME OF YEAR IN TETON VALLEY. Here are a few tips for navigating peak season, while being a great visitor:

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TA K I N G A C T I O N : The Butterfly Effect

In the recent Academy Award-nominated film Don’t Look Up, humankind meets a dismal end when it fails to heed the warnings of scientists about an incoming comet that threatens to destroy Earth. While the movie was satire, many saw it as commentary on a series of issues, including the impacts of climate change and degradation of nature, often met by some with denial, indifference or apathy.

Todd Wilkinson, founder of the nonprofit online journalism organization Mountain Journal, and I have been working for decades to effect change through journalism. And we’ve combined forces here to turn your head; to show that change is incumbent on us all. We must take action. But what?

And how?

The concept for this special edition of Mountain Outlaw, called “The Action Issue,” began as a conversation between the two of us and publisher Eric Ladd: We publish stories about important issues and have been doing so for years. Why don’t people take action to change issues they care about? Or, more aptly, what would inspire our readers to take action?

“Kaizen” is the Japanese word for “improvement” and espouses the idea that small, incremental—yet concrete— changes can bring about action. A similar concept applies to the “butterfly effect”: Even the smallest of actions can catalyze major change. They might even change the world. Indeed, some have.

The year 2022 marks the 150th anniversary of Yellowstone National Park. We wanted to assemble this magazine to mark that milestone and allow us to reflect on issues in our region.

We’ve worked with our contributors to conclude each story with a specific call to action. It’s a bold move and we’re moving full-bore, from climate change to saving wildlife and protecting our waters, confronting wildfire and development pressure that is fast changing the nature and culture of this place.

Inside these pages, we hope you’ll find a story that calls to you and inspires you to act. Perhaps it will be the tourist Support our partner, nonprofit media outlet Mountain Journal: With a donation of $150 or more, receive a signed copy of Todd Wilkinson’s groundbreaking new book Ripple Effects.

The view from Lower Falls, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Neal Herbert / NPS PHOTO

spectacle that is the grizzly bear-watching scene up Tom Miner Basin north of Yellowstone that Wilkinson writes about. He also penned a companion piece to veteran scribe Toby Thompson’s story on the 30th anniversary of the epic film A River Runs Through It. Thompson’s piece was written in 1991 during its filming in Livingston, Montana, and looks ahead at how this movie might change the Treasure State. Wilkinson’s is a reflective view at how Montana has in fact changed, for better or worse. Cause and effect.

“It’s said that you can’t time travel,” Wilkinson says, reflecting on these before-and-after stories. “Toby sets the pace, mood, tone, and delivers us into the past. And then you can travel through time [for Part 2] and take stock in changes and issues that have arisen—not all of them bad. If we had been courageous, how could my story have been different?

That's why this Action Issue is so interesting—and so daring.”

Our Featured Outlaw, Ryan Busse, author of the 2021 book Gunfight, recognizes that firearms are a part of Western culture and, as a former gun industry representative, bravely dives into the sparsely populated middle of a divisive topic.

What inspired him to write a book about it? What led him to act? What do we do with what we now know?

We need not mummify the past, wrote Managing Editor Bella Butler, for while painful at times, aging comes with wisdom and evolution. Instead, we ought to use these stories of adversity, of actors and of action to move forward with intention.

This special edition of Mountain Outlaw, produced in collaboration with Mountain Journal—should cause all of us to think. And that’s what we’re doing here: handing you a collection of powerful stories and visuals we hope will motivate you to make a positive difference.

The writers, editors, photographers, artists and designers in “The Action Issue” realize that change is inevitable. So is moving forward. But we decide the direction to steer our future. Action is the rudder.

Joseph T. O’Connor Editor-in-Chief

Todd Wilkinson Guest Editor Founder, Mountain Journal

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3-3-3

We’re doing some things well in Greater Yellowstone, but there is still much to do to protect this special place. Here are some quick hits: three “wins” in the GYE, three “works in progress” and three “big ideas” we should consider. – The Editors

3 WINS: National parks Turning 150 this summer, Yellowstone is the first national park in the world and origin for what writer Wallace Stegner called America’s best original idea.

Wolf reintroduction Wolves were returned to Yellowstone in 1995 restoring the full original complement of large mammals present in the ecosystem in 1491, the year before Europeans arrived on the continent.

Free-flowing Yellowstone The Yellowstone River, which runs for 700 miles, is the longest undammed river in the Lower 48. Despite numerous attempts to dam it, the Yellowstone still flows wild and free because of citizen defenders.

3 WORKS IN PROGRESS: Diversity, equity and inclusion For thousands of years, Greater Yellowstone has been the traditional homeland for more than two dozen Indigenous tribes. Many still feel unwelcome to public lands administered by land management agencies.

Wildlife bridges Major—and lethal—obstacles to safe wildlife passages in Greater Yellowstone are busy highways and interstates. Montana and Idaho are lagging behind leader Wyoming.

Keeping people on the land Ranchers and farmers are woven into the fabric of the rural West and are the social infrastructure that holds covmmunities together. Private land protection groups and local land trusts have protected millions of acres through conservation easements. We need more.

3 BIG IDEAS: 1. A Common Vision: Fragmented thinking results in fragmented landscapes. Greater Yellowstone needs a bio-economic-regional blueprint that unites federal and state land management agencies, 20 counties and several dozen cities and towns behind a goal of protecting nature, as has been done on Lake Tahoe and Chesapeake Bay. 2. Urban Growth Boundaries: The best way to control exurban sprawl, which has massive impacts on wildlife, skyrocketing costs of services and firefighting expenses, would be to erect urban growth boundaries around cities and towns to protect habitat, open space, farms and ranches. It’s already happened statewide in Oregon.

3. A Land Consumption Tax: Amid exploding growth, implement a real estate transfer tax. Since the arrival of the COVID pandemic alone, more than $6 billion of real estate has changed hands in popular destination areas. A modest tax would raise many a large sum that could incentivize private land protection.

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THROUGH THE YEARS Yel lowstone Nationa l Park at 150

On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act establishing America’s first national park “ … for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”

This summer, we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Yellowstone, watching each year as millions explore this sacred land. Nearly 5 million visitors toured Yellowstone last year alone, breaking the 2016 record of 4.2 million. At Mountain Outlaw magazine, it got us thinking: How can we honor this wondrous place?

We decided to take you on a generational photography tour of Yellowstone, from when the park’s gates first opened to families in horsedrawn carriages to its formative years in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s when park rangers still patrolled on horseback. We end the journey with images from today’s Yellowstone, where a post-pandemic world seeks its fresh air and pure wildness in record numbers.

The following imagery captures a piece of Yellowstone, created “ … for the benefit and enjoyment of people.” This same inscription lives on the Roosevelt Arch at the North Entrance to the park in Gardiner, Montana.

Yellowstone offers an opportunity for us all to connect with nature and be inspired to protect one of the world’s wildest places so that generations to come may still enjoy it.

– The Editors

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Tourists viewing bears feeding in 1910. JP CLUM LANTERN / NPS PHOTO

150 years

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TOP: Army bicyclists on Mammoth Hot Springs Terraces taken around 1896. NPS PHOTO BOTTOM: Ranger Ted Ogsten and Chief Ranger Sam Woodring with coyote pelts in 1927.

NPS PHOTO

early years

1872 1944

"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of A merica in Congress assembled, That the tract of land in the Territories of Montana and Wyoming, ly ing near the headwaters of the Yel lowstone R iver ... is hereby reser ved and w ithdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sa le under the laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apar t as a publ ic park or pleasuringground for the benef it and enjoy ment of the people..."

- Yellowstone National Park Act, 1872

CLOCKWISE: Early visitors at Handkerchief Pool in Black Sand Basin from around 1923. CARL SCHRIM / NPS PHOTO President Theodore Roosevelt at Mammoth Hot Springs in 1903 or 1904. NPS PHOTO Bears being fed from garbage carts. NPS PHOTO

middle years

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LEFT: A large group of people fishing off of Fishing Bridge in 1962 before it closed to fishing in 1973 due to the declining cutthroat trout population. MILLER / NPS PHOTO RIGHT: Boy holding an 8.5-pound rainbow trout caught in Rainbow Lake in 1947. NPS PHOTO

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"The establishment of the Nationa l Park Ser v ice is justif ied by considerations of good administration, of the va lue of nat ura l beaut y as a Nationa l asset, and of the ef fectiveness of outdoor l ife and recreation in the production of good citizenship."

–Theodore Roosevelt

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COUNTERCLOCKWISE: Ranger patrol on horses for President Gerald Ford's visit at Old Faithful in 1976. CYNTHIA ZIMMERLI / NPS PHOTO Preparing to anesthetize a grizzly bear with an M-99 in 1970.

RICHARD L. LAKE / NPS PHOTO A helicopter removing the anesthetized grizzly bear in 1970.

RICHARD L. LAKE / NPS PHOTO Park employees using a siphon to clean Morning Glory Pool. DAN ING / NPS PHOTO

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present

day 2000 2022

“Creating the nationa l park System was one of the best ideas that the Federa l Government ever had, and Montanans are for t unate to have a slice of the oldest park in our back yard. Yel lowstone’s signif icance as an impor tant area for the histor y and traditions of Triba l Nations throughout the West dates back far beyond its designation as a nationa l park , and in the 150 years that fol lowed ... It ’s my honor in the Senate to help champion our nationa l parks so that we can preser ve them for generations to come.” –U.S. Sen. Jon Tester Large crowds gather at Old Faithful in 2015.

NEAL HERBERT / NPS PHOTO A group of bison surround a car as they walk along the road towards Lamar Valley in 2019.

JACOB W. FRANK / NPS PHOTO

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CA LL TO AC T ION:

Yellowstone Forever, the official nonprofit partner of Yellowstone National Park, protects, preserves and enhances the park through education and philanthropy. YF hosts a number of Field Seminars, which run from May through October, and include opportunities to learn about wolves, bird migration, Mammoth Hot Springs, and nearly everything else park related, even bugs in the stream for you fly fishermen and women. Visit yellowstone.org for more information.

COUNTER CLOCKWISE: A wolf makes its way through the sage brush. PHOTO

BY TOM MURPHY

A teepee was installed at the North Entrance of the park next to Roosevelt Arch as part of Yellowstone’s 150th anniversary celebration.

JACOB W. FRANK / NPS PHOTO The Super Flower Blood Moon illuminates a geyser eruption at Old Faithful in May of 2022.

PHOTO BY DAVE PECUNIES

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Montana MOUNTAIN

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Superintendent Cam Sholly (right), stands at the North Entrance to Yellowstone’s teepee installation event with Shayne Doyle of the Apsáalooke tribe and cultural consultant (middle), and Jason Baldes from the Eastern Shoshone tribe (left). PHOTO BY JACOB W. FRANK / NPS

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ACTORS

The people making a difference

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Making Meaning and Medicine in the Land of the Burning Ground Indigenous placenames reveal an ancient Yellowstone

BY SHANE DOYLE Yellowstone National Park has been a shared homeland for dozens of distinct tribal nations since time immemorial, and the list of Indigenous placenames in and around the park indicates a long and rich connection still cherished today. Although many historic and cultural factors have combined to diminish our contemporary understanding of Native American history in Yellowstone, my nation, the Apsáalooke, or Crow Tribe, has a substantial oral tradition and written record of our names and experiences all throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

A deeper look into the ancient stories behind the Apsáalooke placenames in the park reveals an important and dynamic relationship between the people and the place. Reflecting on these names, stories and other cultural artifacts that are a part of the Land of the Burning Ground, as we refer to Yellowstone, five predominant themes emerge: Today’s Yellowstone was historically: 1) A central intertribal trade zone; 2) The source for raw and rare materials; 3) A spiritual and ceremonial hearth; 4) A land link to ancient origin stories; 5) A seasonal foodbank. As a foundational setting for their ancient way of life, Yellowstone could not have been more significant to the Apsáalooke people.

HUNTER-GATHERER-TRADERS The Nez Perce Trail: Apupanníile/Nez Perce Road

The Apsáalooke and their many neighbors throughout the region flourished as hunter-gatherer-traders, so much so that they developed a sophisticated sign language to overcome their linguistic differences. Plains Sign Language crossed the Continental Divide and was practiced by Plateau Tribes including the Nez Perce. The annual Apsáalooke-Nez Perce rendezvous was such an ingrained tradition, the tribes began influencing one another’s sense of fashion, with generations of men in the mid19th century opting to cut their bangs short and sculpt them into a pompadour with bear grease.

Sheepeater Cliff: Baáhpuakooteete/Wonderful rocks

Recognized as the only tribe whose primary home base was inside the park year round, the Sheepeater people were the originators of one of the region’s most prized trade items: the bighorn sheep bow. Using their knowledge of local thermal resources, the Sheepeater community perfected the art of soaking bighorn sheep horns in the acidic hot pots to make them pliable, then cutting them with obsidian blades and forming them to dry.

They shared this technique with some of their Apsáalooke trade partners, as well.

BLACK GLASS, WHITE CLAY Obsidian Cliff: Shíiptachawaxaawe/Ricochet Mountain

Ricochet Mountain is the most important archaeological site in Yellowstone National Park, and the Apsáalooke people cherished the exceedingly rare and utilitarian black glass that gleamed in the sunlight. Yellowstone obsidian has been found throughout North America, including hundreds of pounds in the Hopewell Native American burial mounds of Ohio.

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Paint Pots: Alashipiiwishe/Where there is some mud

The Crow collected acidic mud from the Yellowstone Paint Pots and utilized it for many purposes, including to whiten tanned bison hides for tipis or clothing. Early fur trappers commented on the quality and beauty of the traditional bleachedwhite Apsáalooke lodges, and oral histories mention the use of minerals to color clothing green, blue and orange.

GOING WITHOUT WATER Mammoth Terraces: Dappiish Iilápxe/Fringe’s Father

The Yellowstone Park area is believed to be highly spiritually charged, and following their ceremonial traditions, many Apsáalooke people sought power there through praying and fasting without food or water. The Fringe was an Apsáalooke medicine man who performed this ceremony at the Mammoth Terraces and was blessed with the ability to doctor wounds. It was believed that the water spirits of the place adopted him as their spiritual son, hence the name, Fringe’s Father.

Yellowstone as a tipi-Shoshone pass: Bilíaliche/Like a tipi door

When journeying into Yellowstone from the East Entrance in Cody, Wyoming, the canyon opens like a massive tipi door, the Shoshone River flowing swiftly through it toward the rising sun.

Just as Apsáalooke lodges are always positioned with their doors opening to the east, the Land of the Burning Ground does as well. It was at this sacred doorway, on a promontory point high above the mouth of the canyon, that many Apsáalooke chiefs fasted for medicine dreams and received sacred medicine.

EARTH AND SKY

explains the growling and rumbling sounds that emanate from these mysterious holes in the earth.

Liberty Cap: Hísshishtawia Isbachípe/Red Woman’s Digging Stick

According to Apsáalooke and Blackfeet mythology, Red Woman’s Digging Stick fell from her giant hand during ancient times when the world was becoming what it is today. Settling upright in front of Mammoth Terraces, the limestone stick was used long ago to dig roots by the monstrous Red Woman, whose hand remains visible in the night sky and is better known in the Western world as Orion the Hunter.

Dragon’s Mouth: Chíilape/The Bull, Mud Volcano: Isbíia/ The Mountain Lion

Another Apsáalooke and Blackfeet star story explains the origin of the Dragon’s Mouth and the Mud Volcano. The Morning Star was once a man on earth before he returned to the heavens, but while on the ground, he rescued the people from a giant bison bull who was capturing people by sucking them into his stomach.

He transformed the giant bison into the Dragon’s Mouth and placed a mountain lion nearby to keep watch over the bull. This

FLORA AND FAUNA Yellowstone River: Iichíilikaashaashe/Elk River

The river flowing from the Land of the Burning Ground was known as the Elk River for good reason: it provided a migratory pathway for some of the largest elk herds in the world. Bison also migrated north and south along the Elk River, and archaeologists have identified more than 60 miles of rock drive lines in the Paradise Valley, a remarkable example of extensive infrastructure by a culture that left behind very little else.

Hell Roaring River: Aashchixxuá/River That Laps Over Itself

Here along the River that Laps Over Itself, the Apsáalooke people found a wealth of medicinal and edible plants, including broom weed, sweetgrass, horse mint, yellow and black tree lichen, chokecherries, juneberries and wild strawberries, along with raspberries, turnips and carrots.

Iichíilikaashaashe

Dappiish Iilápxe

Hísshishtawia Isbachípe Aashchixxuá/ Shíiptachawaxaawe Baáhpuakooteete

Alashipiiwishe Apupanníile

Chíilape Bilíaliche

CALL TO ACTION

Support the new Intertribal Interpretive Center at Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park this summer, and the All-Nations Teepee Village in Gardiner, Montana, from August 20-27. These projects are organized by Bozemanbased Mountain Time Arts, which produces creative public art projects that enliven relationships to the history, culture and environment in the Mountain West. Visit mountaintimearts.org for a schedule of events and projects, and to find information about how you can support MTA.

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Swift Water A River Essay

BY SCOTT BOSSE

I was born as snowmelt high on

a mountain slope where wolverines and grizzly bears tread. Some of my earliest human inhabitants called me Cut-tuh-o'gwa, or “swift water.”

Today I am named after a white man who, in turn, was born on a distant continent and never laid eyes on me.

In my highest reach below the lake that also shares my name, I slither through meadows of sage and sedge, twisting and turning upon myself like a coiled snake, preparing to strike out on my 120-mile journey.

The life force of my current here is barely perceptible and my crystalline appearance reflects the cotton clouds sailing across an ocean of sky.

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Venture into my headwaters and you will encounter the deep solitude that has vanished from most of my reach. Close your eyes and listen, and you will hear the faint trickle of my movement, the rustle of the wind in the lodgepole pines, and perhaps the primeval croak of sandhill cranes ricocheting off the hillsides. Look in the mud beside me and you will find prints of all kinds, from tiny frogs to massive moose that bed down in my willowy fringes.

Where I emerge from the wilderness in a maze of willows, I start to encounter anglers casting for trout in my opalescent pools and beneath my undercut banks. Wade

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into me here and I run clear and cold, my body sustaining stoneflies, mayflies and caddisflies that fatten the trout during the short growing season. Except for the ribbon of asphalt that follows much of my course, I appear much the same way I did after the glaciers receded 10,000 years ago.

Further downstream, below the confluence of my most tempestuous tributary, my pace quickens and the buff-colored limestone cliffs to the east soar to greater heights. There are houses and lodges scattered along my banks now, and their antiquated wastewater systems leak pollutants into my waters through hidden

Treat me with respect and humility, and I will continue to provide for you, even as the climate changes. Abuse me or take me for granted, and I will break.

I am the Gallatin River.

“Upper Gallatin” painting by Rod Crossman

groundwater connections. When the sun warms me during the summer months, neon green algae carpets my gravel bottom, suffocating the underwater insects upon which my fish depend.

At the next major tributary junction, my color and chemistry begin to change. Until recently, I always welcomed the surge of snowmelt coming off the pyramidshaped peak to the west. But today it is tinged with nutrients, chemicals and pharmaceuticals that signal the wholesale transformation of a oncewild landscape. They promised they would do things differently here, that they would take care not to pollute the streams or harm the fishery

they profess to love. But I wonder if they are capable of reigning in their excesses before I, too, am transformed beyond recognition.

Further down the canyon, I flow past the bighorn sheep that gather at their usual mineral licks. The number of anglers increases to the point that nearly every fishable run is occupied, even in the depths of winter. Joining the hordes of anglers are flotillas of colorful rafts filled with people hooting and hollering as my waves crash over them. There is a giant rock in the middle of my channel that I used to completely immerse during my highest flows, but today its top half stays dry most years. Paddle hard left and you can avoid its danger.

Miss a stroke and I will send you into the boulder garden below. While I have taken a few human lives here, I have given life to thousands more who come here to reconnect with their youth and the wild.

As I continue northward past where the buffalo roam, I spill into my namesake valley where I finally exhale in the cottonwood forests that embrace me for the remainder of my length. Here, I deposit my bedload of polished stones, agates and petrified wood on gravel bars where treasure seekers can find them. But with each passing mile, more of my flow is diverted into ditches to grow crops and lawns in sprawling new subdivisions. By the time I meet my two brethren to form the mighty Missouri, I am a shadow of my former self.

Some people believe it the purpose of a river to serve humanity, to provide water for drinking, irrigation, recreation, and other uses. Since the beginning of time, that is what I have done for those who live within my watershed. But I am more than your servant or your amusement park. I am a mirror that reflects how you choose to live on this land. Treat me with respect and humility, and I will continue to provide for you, even as the climate changes. Abuse me or take me for granted, and I will break. I am the Gallatin River.

Call to Action

To help protect the Gallatin River and 19 other iconic rivers in Montana, call Sen. Steve Daines at (202) 224-2651, and Rep. Matt Rosendale (202) 225-3211, and ask them to support the Montana Headwaters Legacy Act. Visit healthyriversmt.org for more information.

Scott Bosse is an avid angler and boater who has lived in the Gallatin Valley for 22 years. He is the Northern Rockies Director for the nonprofit American Rivers.

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ANATOMY OF A WAKE-UP CALL

An excerpt from conservation activist Thomas Spruance’s prologue to Todd Wilkinson’s new book, Ripple Effects: How to Save Yellowstone and America's Most Iconic Wildlife Ecosystem

BY THOMAS SPRUANCE

We continuously tell ourselves there’s no point in changing. Either we are too old to make a difference or too young to alter our present trajectory. Once upon a time, I subscribed to this belief, too.

I recently read a quote on mountainjournal.org that came from Dennis Glick, a community conservation expert from Livingston, Montana, who has been tracking the epic changes bearing down on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the last best wildlife-rich ecosystem in the Lower 48. “Many people have relocated to Montana and Wyoming and Idaho from Colorado ski resort towns because their once intimate connection to nature has vanished from the bustle that has overtaken those places in the Colorado Rockies,” Mr. Glick was quoted as saying.

I am one of those people and here is my confession: I am a recovering seeker of the American dream who pursued it blindly, without reflecting on my own impacts and what they meant for vanishing wild places. If all of us became more ecologically aware, we could stop repeating the pattern of thoughtless destruction, but it will require inconveniencing ourselves. More difficult is that we push ourselves out of our comfort zones and see nature as being far more important than ourselves.

I, too, was drawn to wild places, as you no doubt are. At the age of 9, my father introduced me to the wonders and beauty of the wilderness as his father had done for him. After fly fishing for salmon on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, Canada, and hiking endless trails above that river for many summers, I was “hooked.”

But it was more than just the love of the wilderness and fishing. My grandfather, who designed our 100-year-old ancestral home in the historic Brandywine River Valley of Delaware, had built his life based on a love of nature.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, many believed wild places existed to provide habitat for the animals we hunted. They existed to serve our desires, according to the conservation ethic advanced by Theodore Roosevelt and others. Little thought was given to the survival of the non-hunted animals that certainly had their own intrinsic worth as creations of the same evolutionary processes that gave rise to us, and which we are incapable of engineering.

My father continued a family tradition of supporting conservation by placing the 25 acres which surrounded our home under conservation easement. His gesture left an imprint on me. It’s in my genes because in the late 1970s I built my own little lodge in Eagle-Vail, Colorado, 2 miles west of Vail. The skiing was great, but it was the summer trout fishing, the hiking, backpacking and the tranquility of the surrounding wilderness that really drew me to the area. The highlight of my first Christmas there was watching a herd of elk wander through my front yard.

Of course, Eagle-Vail appealed to many others who came.

What followed was an incredible expansion of development around my once-wild home. The meteoric growth included more than 12 golf courses stretching down the valley, shopping centers replacing grasslands where elk herds had grazed, and then the opening of Beaver Creek and Arrowhead ski areas.

I never saw another elk. I doubt the skiers who come in winter and the mountain bikers who throng there in summer reflect much on what they are not seeing, or what’s been lost.

Once a place is covered in human infrastructure, its wild

essence can never be regained. And the fact is, most wild places have gone in that direction.

Although my magazine publishing business in Vail continued to prosper, and my home was rented out to those who longed to experience the “magic of the mountains,” the ceaseless wave of development ate at the core of my original mountain-living dream. I sold my home in Eagle-Vail and started visiting Big Sky, Montana, with my son Preston who was then 9 years old.

I was on a quest to find an area that would not turn into another Vail. Indeed, there is a prevailing conceit that if a place gets destroyed, all we need to do is pack up and move on to a less-developed place. Sadly, many great places have disappeared and I’ve had a personal awakening that the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is, in very real ways, the last one standing.

I wanted to pass along to Preston a home in a town surrounded by wilderness and all the wonders that would come with it—including the indescribable feeling of entering a world that belongs to nonhuman life forms. Greater Yellowstone is a region still sustaining creatures that have vanished from almost everywhere else.

Conservation starts with doing what you love and letting that love transform you into a protector.

Avid fly fisherman and president of the Spruance Foundation, Tom Spruance believes the key to saving the ecosystems around Big Sky and other booming mountain towns relies on something called the ripple effect. PHOTO COURTESY OF TOM SPRUANCE

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Conservation starts with doing what you love and letting that love transform you into a protector. Preston’s very first Montana trout was a brown caught on the Firehole River in Yellowstone National Park.

At first, Big Sky looked and felt like something special: “the place.” But instead of buying another home immediately, I joined some local organizations whose missions were to preserve the natural essence of the Gallatin River, liquid gem of the Big Sky area. As a member and contributor to several environmental/ conservation organizations, I planned to assist in fundraising and promoting sensitive development in an effort to prevent the calamity I witnessed in the Vail Valley. Our many summer and winter visits gave me the opportunity to experience firsthand the thoughtless path Big Sky was taking.

Unfortunately, I began to observe the conundrum facing many local business owners and their families.

The promise of personal financial gain that came with growth and development outweighed the need to maintain the “wild things,” which had created the appeal in the first place and brought the development.

A divisiveness grew within the community, between those who supported more growth and those who wanted to maintain the extraordinary sense of place, its wildlife and tranquility.

Hiking the trails around Big Sky, Preston and I noticed wildlife being overrun by off-road bikers and ATVers who did not notice the animals they were displacing. The decline in wildlife watching was disheartening and I realized the problem wasn’t my inability to see animals, but the question of why they were being displaced.

History was repeating itself and that pattern is spreading across Greater Yellowstone and the Rockies.

I decided not to purchase a beautiful riverfront lot near Red Cliff just south of Big Sky, an investment that likely would have been very profitable. But financial profit was not my motive. Call me crazy, but I wanted to leave a natural legacy for Preston, and that meant reflecting on my own impact. You may think this is just another tale of paradise being lost.

My conservation work in helping to rescue Yellowstone cutthroat trout from an invasion by nonnative lake trout taught me the importance of getting involved and prevailing, when all seemed lost, over a seemingly insurmountable challenge.

Sadly, many great places have disappeared and I’ve had a personal awakening that the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is, in very real ways, the last one standing.

We need to rally; all of us. Now is the time for mountain communities who share and value the wildness of wilderness to step up. Whether you are liberal or conservative, as I am, we all have a responsibility to consciously make space for nature in our lives.

As a dad, businessman and self-proclaimed steward of our precious wildlands, I hope my legacy will be as one who left the natural wonders of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem better than I found them. We have to open our eyes or we’re going to lose this priceless ecosystem and once it’s gone, no amount of money will enable us to ever bring it back.

Call to action:

Read Wilkinson’s Ripple Effects: How to Save Yellowstone and America's Most Iconic Wildlife Ecosystem to learn more about the wonder of—and the importance of protecting—the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. And take time to learn for yourself: Give back to nature, take a walk in the woods. Get together with family and support something outside of your comfort zone.

The promise of personal financial gain that came with growth and development outweighed the need to maintain the “wild things,” which had created the appeal in the first place and brought the development. PHOTO

BY MICHAEL RUEBUSCH

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StClair’s spring 2007 encounter with wolves in the muted earth tones of a snow-free March landscape inspired her oil-stretched-on-canvas painting “Out of the Blue.” This piece depicts an alpha female from the Hayden Valley Pack.

The Power of Art and Place

BY LYN STCLAIR

StClair moved to Montana to be immersed in the place that inspires her work: the landscape and wildlife that make this place special. “Stink Eye” depicts a bison in oil on a cradled panel.

On the way to the mailbox with the puppy,

movement catches my eye. A herd of 15 or so bighorn sheep sees us and starts to bunch up in the pasture, ready to run. I freeze and tell the puppy to sit. The sheep stop and line up along the fence, facing us, fascinated by the little dog. We start to move again, cautiously. I don’t want them to run and waste energy. They calmly move on and we head back to the house.

From my easel, I have looked out the windows of my Paradise Valley home to see black bear, deer, elk, bighorn, long-tailed weasel, and an assortment of other wild things both furred and feathered.

This is the reason I have chosen to live here; to be immersed in the place that inspires my work.

Since childhood, when I started selling animal portraits drawn from life, personal experience has driven my work. In the tradition of many of my art heroes, including wildlife and landscape painter Carl Rungius, I started out using captive animals to paint subjects that were not readily accessible to me.

That unease deepened early on when I was drawing a snow leopard from the Denver Zoo. It bothered me that I did not know what the rocks would look like in the cat’s natural habitat. Like Rungius, again, I followed my artist heart to wild places.

North American wildlife became my focus and I began traveling to observe my subjects in their

world: coyotes meandering the Sonoran Desert; barred owls hunting in Vermont; collared lizards in Arizona; wading birds working Florida waters; scissortail flycatchers in Texas; Steller’s eiders in the Aleutians; and Ross’ gulls at the top of the world in Barrow, Alaska. The only problem? It never seemed enough to spend days or even weeks in an area; there was always so much more to learn. Gradually, I narrowed in on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

In 2002, after a decade of semi-annual trips to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, I moved to Montana. With 30 years of experience behind me, I’ve only scratched the surface of what can be learned about this area and its wildlife.

During my time here, I have been fortunate to watch generations of bear families and to see changes in the area since the reintroduction of wolves. I love to see the colors of the landscape change with the seasons and with weather shifts.

But I’ve also seen the devastating impacts of climate change, habitat loss and drought. The painting on the easel at the moment is inspired by a recent encounter with wolves in the muted earth tones of a snow-free March landscape; the same time last year, I watched that pack frolicking in deep snow.

The hard work of innumerable hours in the field is rewarded by the thrill of seeing things I had not imagined or had only read about: a tiny grizzly

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cub catching a ride on its mama’s back across a melt-swollen spring river; a grizzly and coyote playing together; a coyote hunting with a badger. I watched a fox teaching her kits to hunt with lessons that become increasingly complex each week.

Years of observation have taught me that individual bears may have different foraging and hunting techniques that are dependent on the unique flora, fauna and geography of their territory. When you spend enough time in a place, you find an ebb and flow to the creatures, the plant life, even the land.

“Wildlife watching” is a bit of a misnomer. To really study wildlife means spending most of the time not watching wildlife. Once in Yellowstone, while the paparazzi scoped bears just down the road, I lingered alone where I’d seen a fox. Five full days for a few brief encounters with the fox was worth every minute of waiting.

Much of what I learned about my subjects has come from listening quietly in their habitat, following their tracks, or watching how other species react to their presence. Magpies have “told” me where to find bobcats; elk have pointed to bear; and my own horses have alerted me to a cougar. Even my

housecat has called my attention to weasels on the deck with her interpretive weasel dance.

It isn’t just the creatures, however. I want to know the colors and textures of snow, the relative heights of local plants compared to the animals and when specific wildflowers bloom.

I want to know that my subjects are in the right habitat for the season: animals in correct coat, birds in proper plumage and plant life in suitable foliage. From my perspective, all that time observing is vital to the work, even when the resulting painting is a simple portrait or contemporary interpretation.

There are as many ways to approach subject manner as there are artists. For me, the experiences are what inspire my work.

Each painting is story of a personal encounter and holds a piece of my soul. Swirled into every brushstroke are the nonvisual experiences that accompany wildlife encounters: the crisp chill in autumn air; the sometimes-relentless wind; the bitter cold of 30 below zero; the glitter and gurgle of fresh water over streambeds.

Some of the most extraordinary moments have yet to make it to canvas. But these are at the heart of my work and contribute to my understanding of the wild world around me.

Call to Action: Visit the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming—the only museum in America dedicated solely to this medium—to support wildlife art and its preservation. This summer, NMWA is celebrating its 35th anniversary. Visit wildlifeart.org to learn more.

“Icon” is inspired by StClair’s 2005 encounter with Grizzly 211, also known as “Scarface” after battles left deep scarring on the right side of his face. The large bear ranged across Yellowstone National Park through his 26th year in 2015 when he was fatally shot by a hunter north of the park.

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Stockman Bank has a long history of supporting Montana.

The bank was first established by Coffee’s grandfather, Bill Nefsy, who purchased a small cattle ranch south of Miles City in the late 1930s. Over the years, his ranch grew, but when he began looking for an operating loan, he was declined by the banks he reached out to, saying they didn’t do agriculture loans. In 1953, when the opportunity presented itself, Nefsy purchased controlling interest in the Miles City Bank and decided it should be a bank for all, including local business people, farmers and ranchers.

Bill Nefsy, founder of Stockman Bank, was a cattle rancher in Miles City, motivated to create “a bank for all.” PHOTOS COURTESY OF STOCKMAN BANK

PHOTO BY THIERRY DEHOVE

Today, Stockman is a full-service financial institution offering a full suite of banking services, state-of-the-art online and mobile banking, wealth management and insurance services. It is Montana’s largest agricultural bank and one of the state’s largest commercial and real estate lenders. Yet despite the growth, Coffee says the company remains dedicated to its founder’s mission: to serve honest, hardworking Montanans from every walk of life, throughout Montana. “We remain independent and committed to traditional, western values, the power of local management and decision-making and homegrown community service,” he says.

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Bison Jam in Hayden Valley. NPS PHOTO / Jacob W. Frank

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ADVERSIT Y

The challenges facing our region

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The Middle Fork of the Salmon River swirls through a rock boulder garden in the Frank Church Wilderness. PHOTO BY JOHNMICHAEL/ADOBE STOCK

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RE: REQUEST FOR COMMENT ON SALMON AND THE SALMON RIVER

BY STEVEN HAWLEY

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Wild Chinook salmon swim through shallow waters. Through the 1950s, the Middle Fork yielded an estimated 48,000 Chinook annually.

PHOTO BY RANDIMAL/ADOBE STOCK

Author’s note: In March of 2022, the Biden Administration’s White House Council on Environmental Quality offered an opportunity for the public to email comments on what should be done to restore salmon to the Columbia River Basin. In keeping with the theme of this issue of Mountain Outlaw, I’ve filed this “comment” with the belowlisted email address for CEQ and strongly encourage anyone who loves fish and rivers to do the same.

Greetings, White House Council on Environmental Quality staff member or intern: First, I’d like to express my gratitude for your service to our nation through your work. As I’m sure you’re aware, CEQ was created with the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969. Its mission is to ensure that federal agencies fulfill their environmental stewardship obligations.

Through the years, living up to these standards has proven difficult to achieve, much less maintain. Thank you for 68

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taking on such a formidable challenge.

I’m writing to you from a bar in Stanley, Idaho. This town is nestled in a high-alpine valley 6,250 feet above sea level. To the west, the massive jaws of the Sawtooth Mountains dwarf this little outpost. In every other direction, a network of creeks forms one of the world’s great salmon nurseries.

This bar, the Rod-N-Gun Whitewater Saloon, opened its doors in 1931. It’s situated on the west end of the few blocks that comprise downtown Stanley, population 115. The original owner lost the place in a card game, and since 1971 the saloon has been owned by one family. Casanova Jack Kirch poured drinks and entertained patrons with his band, The Stardusters.

Since Jack’s death, his brother Johnny Ray has run it. It’s a long history in an unlikely place for a bar to survive, much less feature live music regularly. But this alpine valley has long bred a kind of graceful endurance that emulates the

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millions of salmon that swam to and from its madrigal of mountain waters.

I want to tell you about the bartop that graces this rustic establishment. It is a 15-foot-long, flat-cut, blond-hued, thick timber slab; and it features an intricately inlaid map of the Middle Fork Salmon River and its tributaries, a shrine to the river and some of its storied places: Velvet Falls, Impassable Canyon, Redside Rapids.

But the Middle Fork’s beauty is haunted. Its namesake fish, the Chinook salmon, is circling the extinction drain.

And I want to tell you it doesn’t have to be this way.

Some 10,000 folks each year float the 104 miles of the Middle Fork down to its confluence with the Main Salmon.

From there it’s still another 100 miles downriver to the nearest town, Riggins, Idaho. From Riggins, the Main Salmon curves north for 86 miles, meeting the Snake River in Hell’s Canyon. Then, for roughly 170 miles, the Snake flows

north and west, meeting the Columbia River near Pasco, Washington. Three hundred five miles from Pasco, the Columbia meets the Pacific Ocean near Astoria, Oregon. Chinook salmon from the Middle Fork Salmon River swim this entire distance— all 900 miles—at least two times in their lives, migrating to sea as finger-length juveniles, and returning as yardstick-long adults.

Twenty miles northwest of Stanley on State Highway 21, there’s a wide, unmarked turnout. For 10 months of the year, you’re unlikely to see a car parked there. But in May and June, it’s a busy place.

Here, for a few weeks in late spring, you can put on at Marsh Creek as it flows out of its headwaters in the Sawtooth Mountains and float to where it joins Bear Valley Creek some 7 miles downstream, whereupon commences the Middle Fork Salmon.

For years in early June, an impromptu downriver race has taken place, with the starting line at dawn at Marsh Creek, and the finish line however far a team of paddlers can make it before sunup the next day.

On June 3, 2017, four kayakers—Tyler Bradt, Aniol Serrasolses, Todd Wells and Brendan Wells—taking advantage of the highest flows in a decade, launched from that Highway 21 turnout at first light. By dawn on June 4, their GPS tracker reported they’d averaged 11.5 miles an hour and moved 287.5 miles in 24 hours, a world record. They’d covered all 104 miles of the Middle Fork before lunch.

The namesake fish of the Salmon River pioneered this route between Stanley and sea level. After their 900-mile swim, adult salmon spawn and then die in the high mountain meadows of Marsh Creek and neighboring waterways. The resulting fertilized eggs, the color of a sunrise and the size of a coffee bean, hatch in-river as the days lengthen and the snow begins to melt. When the time is right, these juveniles start to ride the prodigious river current toward the ocean. They go backwards—facing upstream like surfers on a wave, letting the pulse and flow of their home water carry them seaward.

Here’s the problem: not far from Marsh Creek, the river quits being a river and instead morphs into a 500-mile-long series of dams and reservoirs.

Biologists have determined that a Marsh Creek salmon’s journey to the ocean once took two weeks.

It now takes two months. The delay starts where the flowing river stops.

Passage through eight dams along the way can be lethal. Salmon either make it over the spillway of the dam or through the powerhouse, where, if they’re lucky enough to dodge the hazards of swimming in an industrial pipeline, they undergo a hasty scientific examination. Anesthetized, weighed, measured and stapled with a rice grain-sized transponder that allows them to be tracked like grocery store

A wooden hand-engraved plaque by Stone Fly Studio depicting a map of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. PHOTO BY ELI KRETZMANN

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inventory, they are piped back into the river, only to undergo the same examination process at the next dam downstream.

A third passage route is by boat. In this scenario, fish are collected in the powerhouse exam room, piped onto a barge, hauled to tidewater below Bonneville Dam near Portland, then flushed back into the river. Rescuing fish from water ought to be as absurd a proposition as saving birds from the perils of the sky. We don’t FedEx sandhill cranes to get them to the tundra.

These slackwater salmon also must commit an unnatural act: turn around and swim of their own volition instead of riding the current. This extra expenditure of metabolic energy increases the odds they become bird food rather than adult salmon. In drought years, mortality rates for out-migrating salmon can exceed 90 percent.

I’m sure you’ve read lots of emails arguing dams haven’t caused the lion’s share of salmon decline. Good science does not support this claim. A long, slow decline in salmon numbers began in the late 1800s, but the Middle Fork and its sister Idaho wilderness rivers remained something of a stronghold. Fish habitat remained—and remains—as good as it was at the end of the last ice age.

Through the 1950s, the Middle Fork yielded an estimated 48,000 Chinook annually. In 1959, the Chinook fishing season on the Middle Fork was 11 weeks long, with a twofish-per-day limit. On its sister river, the Selway, so many salmon returned during this same era that western Montana residents would set up camp at Selway Falls for a few weeks every summer, where they’d catch their share of Chinook and haul it home to their freezers.

Then, around the time Cassanova Jack began slinging cocktails and singing country music covers at the Rod-N-Gun in Stanley, Middle Fork salmon numbers collapsed. The last full-length salmon fishing season in Idaho was in 1974. The

last of four dams on the Snake was completed in 1975. The problem isn’t with the Middle Fork. It’s downstream.

The culprit in Idaho’s missing salmon is those four dams on the lower Snake River in eastern Washington. They choke off access to the Middle Fork and its neighboring wild rivers.

Within a decade of these dams’ completion, runs of Chinook on the Middle Fork were reduced from almost 50,000 to less than 1,500 a year. In 2019, there were 322.

In 1994, a federal court commissioned a science panel to determine what portion of the salmon demise could be attributed to the federal hydrosystem on the Columbia.

The panel’s conclusion: 80 percent. A separate multiagency study a few years later concluded the most likely path toward recovering salmon in the Columbia Basin was to remove those four dams on the lower Snake. Eventually, the federal government agreed. An $80 million, five-year study released last year determined removing dams is the best way to restore salmon. However, it balked at endorsing this option, citing the economic cost—a curious conclusion.

On the contrary, it isn’t clear at all that the financial liability of letting salmon go extinct was part of the calculus of this study. Another federal study from 2001 lists the minimum annual economic value of restoring some fraction of salmon to Idaho at $182 million. Their value only increases when you consider ecological, cultural and religious worth. They are the keystone critters of the ecology of the Pacific Northwest. They fortified—spiritually, economically, culturally, and calorically— the First Nations peoples of western North America. They fed, at one stage or another of their lives, 137 different animals, from tiny shrews to 10-ton killer whales. They turbo-charged the fecundity of old-growth forests by fertilizing them with marine-derived nutrients. They created a fortune for a fleet of ocean-going commercial fishers.

Steven Hawley wrote this letter from the bartop at the Rod-N-Gun Whitewater Saloon in Stanley, Idaho, which opened its doors in 1931. The Salmon River is ornately carved into the bartop wood. PHOTO BY ELI KRETZMANN

Overlooking Little Creek Pack Bridge crossing the Middle Fork of the Salmon during a smoky August day. PHOTO BY JOSEPH T. O’CONNOR

MORE THAN 40 YEARS AND $17 BILLION HAVE BEEN SPENT ON A FAILED SALMON RECOVERY PROGRAM, WITH LITTLE IN THE WAY OF SERIOUS EXAMINATION ABOUT WHY IT HAS FAILED. Their continued existence is guaranteed by the United States government in the form of treaties that were ratified by Congress as the “supreme law of the land.” Salmon recovery is also directly mandated by at least two federal laws, the Endangered Species Act, and the Northwest Power Act, and indirectly by the Clean Water Act. First Nations have been patient as the federal government tries to transform dams that cause a clear violation of treaty fishing rights into ones that don’t.

When Columbia River salmon recovery was mandated in 1980 with the passage of the Northwest Power Act, Columbia River salmon runs had declined from between 10 million and 16 million annually in the late 19th century to 2.5 million. The goal in the early 1980s was to double annual salmon returns to 5 million. Instead, the effort to recover salmon has cut that number in half again, to a little over 1 million fish each year.

Russ Thurow, a fisheries research scientist for the U.S. Forest Service, rows down the Middle Fork of the Salmon. PHOTO BY JIM YOUNK

More than 40 years and $17 billion have been spent on a failed salmon recovery program, with little in the way of serious examination about why it has failed. Yet, based on the rejection of evidence gathered in their own most recent study, the federal government assumes that salmon recovery must take place without altering the perceived benefits that dams provide. Federal salmon recovery laws contain no language that even vaguely outlines this implicit assumption.

There is no economic activity that involves a dammed river that can’t be accomplished another way. Wild Chinook salmon in the Middle Fork, by contrast, have only one way.

You should know that there are knowledgeable, dedicated scientists working at some of the federal agencies with which CEQ is coordinating. One of them is Russ Thurow, who’s been studying salmon in the Middle Fork, first for the state of Idaho, then for the U.S. Forest Service, since 1979. I met Thurow in Salmon, Idaho, to take a walk and talk about fish.

“The Middle Fork is an extremely dynamic landscape,” he tells me. “Fires; an intense rain event in July or August. Pretty soon it blows out a tributary. It looks bad to humans. But in places like the Middle Fork these processes are unaltered.

That’s what creates the habitat [and] fish have adapted to those kinds of events.”

Each Salmon River tributary has hosted the evolution of a salmon whose genes are unique to that body of water. A Loon Creek Chinook is genetically distinct from her Big Creek cousin, just downstream. Thurow recalls a logjam in upper Big Creek that was a quarter mile long and 30 feet high, with logs jackstrawed so thick it didn’t look like anything could move up or downstream. But Big Creek salmon made it through MTOU TLAW.COM / MOUNTAIN

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Sunshine illuminates the riverbank along the rapids of the Salmon River. PHOTO BY HANJO/ADOBE STOCK

the maze. Thurow tells me Chinook salmon have been in the Middle Fork for 2 million years. They’re exquisitely adapted to this place.

Because logjams, landslides, floods, fires and droughts remain unaltered, and because salmon have this uncanny ability to adapt to a highly specific set of environmental conditions, Thurow says the Middle Fork, its tributaries and neighboring rivers, are a kind of Noah’s Ark for the genetics of Pacific salmon. There’s a diversity of wild genes that Thurow says will be needed if salmon are to survive the coming centuries of climate chaos.

But genetic diversity is only half of salmon’s unique survival strategy. Abundance is the other half. Thurow says the risk right now comes with historically low returns.

“If you have those numbers, you have this diversity across the landscape,” he points out. “Right now, with such low abundances, there are just huge areas of the Middle Fork with no spawning. Nothing. Zero. We are just bouncing around above extinction. We lose these populations in these tributaries over multiple years, and they’re gone. We are not going to replace them. They are irreplaceable.”

Thurow loves the river. “The Middle Fork is an incredibly unique place,” he tells me. “And without sounding too melodramatic, it’s touched my soul—I return to the Middle Fork on personal trips. Because it rejuvenates me just to be in that country. I do a lot of off-trail hiking; the feeling I get when I’m in some of those places, watching bighorn sheep and watching wild salmon, is that there’s not a lot of modern humans who’ve been there.”

At his urging, I took two days off to hike into one of those special places. If salmon are blinking out in the Middle Fork, I wanted one last look, which I got, and now am suffering from 72

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a mix of emotions that feels like unrequited love.

I’m back at the Rod-N-Gun, finishing this email to you, admiring the map carved into the bartop, trying to deny my haunted heart, fingers tracing my hiking route in the wood. Johnny Ray tells me he’s selling the place. Some party from L.A. is interested. We don’t talk about the reasons for him selling, just about the changes to the valley: the gaudy mansion being built on a prominent bluff overlooking town; the intensifying regime of fire and drought; the tourist pressure that grows as the West’s cities do.

I ask him who made the beautiful map, and he tells me the whole story. If you want to hear it, you’d better hurry and get to Stanley and ask him yourself. Like seeing a big fish around the valley anymore, you never know when the good places could be gone. When next year might be too late.

Sincerely, Steven Hawley

CALL TO ACTION

Send a comment to the White House Council on Environmental Quality explaining how you want to protect the wild salmon in the Columbia River Basin. Email salmon@ceq.eop.gov to submit your comment.

Steven Hawley is a writer from Hood River, Oregon. Most recently, he coproduced and wrote Dammed to Extinction, a documentary film about killer whales whose main source of food is Chinook salmon. His next book on river conservation is forthcoming from Patagonia Books in 2023.

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Up Tom Miner Basin, neighbors are grappling to prevent a wildlife miracle from being loved to death

BY TODD WILKINSON

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Photographs by Louise Johns

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Grizzly bears pass through a ranch in Tom Miner Basin, Montana. The exact number of bears that inhabit Tom Miner is unknown, but biologists say multiple generations of bears seasonally pass through the basin, where they find abundant food in the summer and fall.

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Holly and Charley May sit with their three children and dog, Maverick, on the side of the Tom Miner Basin county road watching grizzly bears in the distance in September, 2022. The Mays are from Livingston, Montana, and for six years they’ve kept an annual tradition to see the bears each fall.

It’s a few hours before dusk. The sun holds like a ball balanced on the sharp crest of the Gallatin Range and then starts to sink behind the mountains.

Tonight, there’s a rumble of thunder while a breeze rustles the leaves of quaking aspen. For a while now, a steady flow of vehicles has been rumbling up a dead-end dirt road from the floor of Paradise Valley far below. Reaching a meadow, drivers back into a makeshift parking area so that windshields face west. The atmosphere, for those old enough to remember, is akin to the days of yore when cars arrived en masse to outdoor drive-in movie theaters and waited for the show to begin.

Some spectators open their doors and climb onto elevated flatbeds of pickup trucks, carrying tripods, spotting scopes and cracking open cans of beer. Others hold cameras with long lenses. The rest stay inside their vehicles, sitting in anticipation for the unchoreographed drama to unfold. After one person shouts to a friend, he is met with glares and a few holding index fingers to their mouths with a collective “Shush.”

Eventually, with no fanfare, a grizzly bear nonchalantly emerges from the timber several hundred yards away on the other side of a ranch fence and enters a pasture. Then a second appears, this one a mother with cubs at her side. Then another—and another. The bruins stride beside a group of grazing cattle but neither species gives the other any heed. This isn’t a drive-in theater featuring a Walt Disney movie; it’s a 84

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picture of delicate, hard-earned coexistence, between humans and nature, predators and prey. And its future hangs in the balance.

Uninterested in eating meat, the wild bears converge to dine on the roots of a perennial plant, caraway, that carpets the pastures of the B-Bar Guest Ranch in Tom Miner Basin. While caraway is an exotic species that found its way here years ago and spread the same way dandelions do, even more enigmatic is the scene of bear watchers. What began as a low-key event involving mostly locals observing grizzlies filling their bellies on caraway before hibernation, has turned into a scene.

On the one hand, the opportunity to spy grizzlies at Tom Miner is a miracle; an extension of one of the greatest wildlife conservation success stories in history: the biological recovery of once imperiled grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

The core of the GYE holds an estimated 750 grizzlies and perhaps 40 of them live in or around Tom Miner Basin, just north of Yellowstone National Park. It’s a testament to remarkable efforts made by local ranchers in Tom Miner to prove that livestock and these formidable omnivores can share an intersection of public and private land.

What once was a bear-watching opportunity only known via word of mouth has been transformed by technology. The proliferation of cell phones and viral sharing of information on social media, tourism officials touting bear watching as an

TOM MINER ROAD HISTORICALLY SAW AT MOST 1,000 CAR TRIPS ANNUALLY; IN RECENT YEARS, THAT HAS SWELLED TO 9,000, MOST OF IT CONCENTRATED IN THE EIGHT-WEEK SPAN WHEN BEARS ARE VISUALLY PRESENT. attraction, and guides taking clients to this out-of-the-way place means the secret is no more.

As a result, Tom Miner residents, whose land stewardship practices have created a welcoming environment for grizzlies, now find themselves thrust into an unwanted New West dilemma. It hinges on a blunt question that has implications for many corners of the Rockies: are we humans in the 21st century capable of safeguarding exceedingly rare and priceless natural wonders or is our species fated to love them to death? °°°° Malou Anderson-Ramirez was raised in Tom Miner.

As cofounder of the Tom Miner Basin Association, she has devoted countless hours trying to untangle this Gordian knot.

She’s the face of a new generation of Western ranchers. Joining

her and other longtime residents is Maryanne Mott, owner of the B-Bar Ranch, which has vaunted status in the lore of conservation.

For years, Mott’s guest ranch has been a spot where members of the Greater Yellowstone conservation community have come on retreats. It’s fair to say that, as a venue, and with Mott’s encouragement, the B-Bar has helped incubate ideas now at the forefront of advancing transboundary thinking as it applies to protecting the richest bioregion for large mammals left in the Lower 48.

Part of the present conundrum with bear watching is owed to geography. The other to human nature. Tom Miner Road dead ends at a Forest Service trailhead leading into the Gallatin Range. The B-Bar, where grizzlies munch on caraway, is located near the end of the road. As Anderson-Ramirez notes, to give perspective, Tom Miner Road historically saw at most 1,000 car trips annually; in recent years, that has swelled to 9,000, most of it concentrated in the eight-week span when bears are visually present. Just down U.S. Highway 89, Yellowstone National Park has been shattering visitation records, with nearly 5 million visits notched in 2021. Compared to the wildlife traffic jams related to bears, wolves, bison and elk in the park, Tom Miner pales. But this solaceful and remote area is not made to handle industrial tourism.

Despite the enthusiasm of bear watchers, numerous problems have ensued, not owed to aggressive behavior on the part of grizzlies, but of people. Some visitors have climbed over fences and trespassed onto the B-Bar in order to move closer to the animals, heightening the risk of a negative encounter.

Others have treated it like a college football tailgate party, letting their barking dogs run off leash, even firing up barbecues to grill hamburgers and steaks. (The aroma of cooking meat and any juices that splatter on the ground can cause bears to become habituated to eating human food.)

Barbecues and hot mufflers from vehicles also heighten the risk of wildfires starting in tinder-dry grass. Motorists often drive too fast. Rising traffic levels pound a county road engineered to handle only a fraction of the volume.

Stan Lumsden, owner of nearby Sawtooth Mountain Ranch, brought in truckloads of gravel to create a parking area to prevent fire danger. And, while a chemical treatment has been applied to the road to abate dust levels kicked up by cars and coating the homes of local residents, it has also leached into the ground and killed trees along the road. Anderson-Ramirez says trying to do right by nature shouldn’t result in its fiercest advocates having to batten down the hatches.

Malou Anderson-Ramirez drives to get the herd of horses on an August morning with ranch dog, Sage, on her family's ranch in Tom Miner Basin, Montana.

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danderson.mt “LOUISE AND I FOUND ALL OF THESE CANS ON OUR TYPICAL RUN UP THE COUNTY ROAD THIS MORNING.”

“EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT FROM HERE, YOU’RE A PART OF THE COMMUNITY. WE ALL HAVE A RELATIONSHIP TO THIS PLACE. WHAT ARE WE DOING TO TAKE CARE OF IT?”

All of the above breach tenets of responsible bear watching, including respecting bears’ space as well as private property. “There has been a sense of violation,” AndersonRamirez says. “It’s not something we would have invited.”

Because Tom Miner isn’t in Yellowstone, no park rangers are on duty to enforce formal regulations, nor staff from the Montana Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks, nor a regular presence of deputies from the county sheriff.

Unmanaged, the scene at times has been a free for all.

On top of it, owners of wildlife safari companies that normally operate in Yellowstone have been taking paying clients to Tom Miner in increasing numbers, earning profits from bear watching but contributing nothing to the neighborhood which has been stuck with the headaches. Even rangers at the information desk in Yellowstone have referred tourists to Tom Miner. No one knows exactly what the human carrying capacity is— where numbers of people disrupt the neighborhood peace and sanctity of the bears and other wildlife—but many up Tom Miner believe it has already been surpassed.

Were it possible to limit public access up Tom Miner Road like, say, a private residential subdivision can, a solution that benefits bears, the neighborhood and the quality of the experience for wildlife watchers could certainly be achieved. But as a county road, which also accesses federal public land and a Forest Service campground, it is a public road. Public roads cannot be restricted or closed to public use without a compelling legal reason, although common sense might indicate that if justification were needed, this would be it.

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Park County Commissioner Bill Berg, who lives on the outskirts of nearby Gardiner and who first came to the region to work as a concession employee in Yellowstone 50 years ago, is sympathetic. He and county road and fire experts as well as officials with the U.S. Forest Service, state and federal wildlife have visited the site. Berg has watched bears there himself. The commission is well aware of the complaints and fears of Tom Miner residents and conservation-minded citizens, but, for now, since it is a public county road, elected officials and county planners have few options—other than educating the public.

Neither the B-Bar nor the Anderson Ranch has ever courted public attention, yet their devotion to protecting the wild character of Tom Miner has earned widespread praise. In addition to the basin being repopulated by a growing population of grizzlies, wolf packs and mountain lions have taken up residence too.

Ranchers use electric fences to protect young cows and horses, voluntarily adopted tough trash storage techniques, and the B-Bar imparts a message to its guests that they are entering into the homeland of wildlife and need to comport themselves with respect. Carrying bear spray goes with the terrain. Most of all, they encourage employees and visitors to turn up their level of awareness.

Maryanne Mott came to Tom Miner in February 1978 and caught two glimpses of it—by snowmobile and airplane. She bought the B-Bar not long after. The ranch sells certified organic beef and does everything it can to prevent conflicts. If an aggressive bear does threaten the herd, Mott has asked her ranch hands to first try moving

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TOM MINER IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT RE-WILDING CAN LOOK LIKE IF HUMANS ARE SMART AND WILLING TO AFFORD ANIMALS SPACE, ENGAGE IN TRIAL AND ERROR, LISTEN AND LEARN.

Two grizzly bear cubs dig for caraway root on a private ranch in Tom Miner Basin in September 2016. Tom Miner is home to an abundant supply of the non-native caraway plant, a calorie-rich root that grizzlies like to dig up and eat.

the herd to another pasture before calling in people to move the bear. They’ve also switched from running calves to 2-year-olds and it’s resulted in fewer losses. “When I came to the basin, those animals had lived there a long time before many of the humans,” Mott says. “Knowing how their habitat has been dramatically reduced over time, it seems the least we can do is respect their rights and by modifying our ways to fit their needs, we’ve maintained a better balance.”

As Anderson-Ramirez says, no rancher wants to lose livestock but neither is there an Old West intolerance for predators. “We know it is privilege to live in a place like this and we want to be good neighbors not only to our human neighbors in the community but to the wildlife that call Tom Miner home,” she explains.

The Andersons have lost beloved pet dogs to wolves and over several years they and neighbors have had dozens of cows killed by predators. While the toll hasn’t been ruinous when extrapolated across decades, if several animals die in a given year it can be very costly. The Andersons and other human residents, who wave to each other in passing on the dirt road, live in one of the wildest neighborhoods in America. They’ve never been attacked by a griz, however range riders and hunters on the nearby national forest have.

Dealing with rare predation on livestock has sometimes required lethal removal to prevent adult bears and wolves from teaching that behavior to offspring. Hannibal and Julie Anderson, Malou’s parents, say that over time a kind of rhythm has been established among the human and nonhuman denizens. Typically, if a predation incident happens, it involves male bruins. “I can’t really explain it other than to say we feel it, we sense it. If a bear starts preying on cattle and it requires the bear being removed, there’s a disruption and it takes a while for things to settle down again,” Hannibal says.

More than anything, Tom Miner is an example of what rewilding can look like if humans are smart and willing to afford animals space, engage in trial and error, listen and learn.

Hannibal says his mother and father bought land up Tom Miner in the mid-1950s to escape and help him heal after the Second World War. But he recognized, and it’s a way of thinking passed down across three more generations, that while the family name is on the deed, they are mere fortunate guardians of a place that emanates a spirit far greater than themselves. This isn’t some New Age idyll: it is evident in how they talk about it and the quiet, reverential way they interact with landscape.

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A BEAR WATCHING CODE OF CONDUCT FOR TOM MINER 1. Before you go, prepare yourself and communicate with your group what will be expected.

2. When you head up Tom Miner, you are a guest entering a wild neighborhood inhabited by wildlife and people. Be gracious and respectful. Do not cross fences or trespass on private property.

3. Drive slow (no more than 15 mph).

4. Don’t bring your dog, keep food in your car, and use the restroom before you go.

5. When you arrive, turn off your car engine and stereo, keep your voice down, don’t slam your car door, turn off the ringtone on your phone, stay along the road, and be courteous to others.

6. Do not start a fire, cook food, or smoke cigarettes. Do not park your car in high grass.

7. Never approach a bear. If a bear approaches the road, get in your car and roll up the windows.

8. Carry bear spray and know how to use it.

9. Don’t leave trash behind.

10. If someone is causing a dangerous situation for people or bears, call the Park County Sheriff Dispatch: (406) 222-2050.

11. As a way of giving back for the experience you’ve just had, send a contribution to the Tom Miner Basin Association by going to tomminerbasinassociation.org.

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A camera trap captures a grizzly bear walking along a path in the timbered forest on a ranch in Tom Miner Basin.

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Their son Andrew Anderson and his wife Hilary, here and on another ranch in the Centennial Valley, have developed better ways of raising livestock in places where bears, wolves and lions are also present. That includes using nonlethal deterrents such as guard dogs, fladry, electric fences and a “range rider” program Hilary started by which people on horseback move with cattle through the forests and grasslands to prevent conflicts with bears and wolves. Still another aspect is low-stress livestock handling wherein cattle mimicking the grazing habits of bison and elk results in better grassland health.

Another son, Daniel, has launched a nonprofit called The Common Ground Project that allows outsiders to spend time at the ranch and become immersed in nature to better understand how their relationship with the nonhuman-dominated world can be a reciprocal one. Daniel also is involved in wildlife transportation issues in the Upper Yellowstone River Basin and helps lead the push to establish a wildlife crossing along busy U.S. Highway 89 to facilitate safer passage and reduce animal roadkill to keep people and animals alive. His partner, Louise Johns, a world-class photographer who has had her pictures published in National Geographic (and provided images for this story), has been chronicling it all.

More than 50 cars line the side of the Tom Miner Basin county road above the B Bar Ranch, where grizzlies feed on caraway in the fields. Visitors come from as close as Livingston and Gardiner but also internationally to watch the bears in Tom Miner. Without a designated parking area, the shoulder of the road has been turned into a makeshift parking lot on private land.

Last but not least is their daughter Malou who, in addition to being a leader in the Tom Miner Basin Association, a certified practitioner of equine therapy, and a maven in discussions about sustainability and regenerative agriculture, is a proud mother of two daughters and partner to her husband Andres. Not long ago, Malou founded Teal Enterprises to advise ranchers on how conservation techniques can benefit their bottom line. The site features a quote from forerunning American ecologist Aldo Leopold: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”

While identifying as a “keeper of the New West” and shifting away from attitudes that presented ranching as being in a constant battle with Mother Nature, Anderson-Ramirez sometimes feels that dealing with grizzlies is far easier than dealing with waves of defiant humans. The invasion of bear watchers has brought an “unsettling” feeling to Tom Miner, an interruption to its placid tranquility, she says.

The inability to impose limits on human numbers means that in a state like Montana where freedom, liberty and individuals taking personal responsibility for their actions are touted as virtues, now more than ever people need to practice them. Navigating this ground and trying to uphold a spirit of neighborliness that has defined the way Tom Miner residents get along can be tricky. Greeting people who ascend the road now is a simple sign that reads: “Tom Miner Basin: A Wild & Working Landscape—Bears and wildlife live here. People and livestock do too.”

On some evenings, B-Bar manager Trina Smith will walk up the road and converse one-on-one with bear watchers who hail from the U.S. and other countries.

Most are grateful and many say they had no idea that to have a healthy population of bears involves trying to make 100 right decisions. Sometimes, Mott says, that upon reaching the parking area and seeing 70 cars night after night, the special feeling of intimacy gone; it can be disheartening.

The Tom Miner Basin Association has attracted financial assistance from a number of conservation organizations, but the costs of de-facto management of bear watching continue to add up. One way bear watchers can support conservation efforts up Tom Miner is by buying grass-fed beef raised in the basin, as profits are poured back into land stewardship.

Anderson-Ramirez is pleased that thousands of people have had an experience they’ll never forget watching grizzlies in her backyard, but they need to know it’s the result of local goodwill.

“They get the thrill of their lives and then they leave,” she said.

“We’re here day after day working to make it possible. If we want it to last, let’s not screw it up.”

CALL TO ACTION:

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ZY BROWN RANCH Big Sandy

Located southeast of Big Sandy, MT only five miles off pavement offering privacy, production and recreation. With over 26,000± total acres including 18,134± deeded acres and 8,000± acres of BLM and State lease, the ranch supports 650 cow calf pair and has 5,300± acres of tillable land.

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YELLOWSTONE CAMP Park City

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$17,450,000 | #368590

Complete interior rebuild, new high end appliances, being sold partially furnished! Top floor condo located in Big Sky’s Mountain Village.

Southern exposure, great views, close to skier services, central location with great parking.

©2022 BHH Affiliates, LLC. An independently owned and operated franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of Columbia Insurance Company, a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate. Equal Housing Opportunity.

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Let your imagination shine bright.

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Explore our other amazing community projects at NorthWesternEnergy.com/BrightFuture.

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TURN “I’D LOVE TO LIVE HERE” INTO “I LOVE THAT I LIVE HERE.”

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POWERFUL May 28 – December 31, 2022 The Apsáalooke people of the Northern Plains are known for their bravery, artistry, and extravagance.

Celebrate the prominence of women, daring feats in battle, unparalleled horsemanship, and innovative beadwork. Alongside historical war shields and regalia, contemporary Native American art highlights how this bravery and artistry is alive today.

Ben Pease - Sacred Under the Cliff of Yellowstone

Museum of the Rockies is honored to be the first museum in the world to host Apsáalooke Women and Warriors outside of the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.

Apsáalooke Women and Warriors was jointly organized by the Field Museum and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago.

Photo by John Weinstein, Field Museum

Wraps His Tail - War shield Photo by John Weinstein

Karis Jackson - Blessing of a Leader

Presenting Sponsor:

Stephanie Dickson & Chris McCloud

Ben Pease - Wherein Lies the Beauty of Life

Leading Sponsor:

Sheehy Family Foundation Contributing Sponsors:

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museumoftherockies.org | 406.994.2251 | 600 W. Kagy Blvd.

Photo by John Weinstein, Field Museum

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Find your Forever Agent® at bhhsmt.com ©2022 BHH Affiliates, LLC. An independently owned and operated franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of Columbia Insurance Company, a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate. Equal Housing Opportunity.

WATERFALL CREEK on Flathead Lake Bigfork, MT

Your family will fall in love with Montana lake lifestyle with this gorgeous log home on the pristine waters of Flathead Lake. Customcrafted from massive Canadian timbers, the immaculate home is situated on 6.13 acres and 330 feet of pebble beach lakefront, which includes a separate vacant lakefront parcel. The meticulous landscaping includes walking trails with bridges crossing a small year-round creek and a firepit area for entertaining family and guests.

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ClearwaterProperties.com Montana | Idaho | Washington | Wyoming

BY BRIGID MANDER

The Gateway Elk gather to cross a road at sunrise during the winter solstice. PHOTO BY HOLLY PIPPEL

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hirty mule deer huddle near the side of the two-lane highway as a pickup truck roars down the road. From a parked car 100 feet away, we watch the startled deer hop back over the livestock fence they had just crossed. They reconvene for a few minutes until the lead doe hops the fence again toward the pavement. After some careful glances and attentive flicking of her massive ears, she traverses the two sun-faded blacktop lanes.

The does and fawns follow her over the fence. They cross the road, hop the fence on the other side and swiftly move to a forested slope.

Had we not known this spot near the Upper Green River Basin in Wyoming was part of a migration route for mule deer and pronghorn, it might simply have been a wonderful glimpse of wildlife on the landscape. And had we been there at the height of muley and pronghorn movement, we would have witnessed thousands of streaming animals coursing through.

But it was early fall and these deer were on a mission, moving through this area from summer grounds near Jackson, Wyoming, to the Red Desert, about 150 miles southeast of their summer home.

Some deer with tracking collars have traveled hundreds of miles round trip to distant Island Park, Idaho, and back again. Like so many animals across the Western states, they undertake this trip twice a year, teaching their fawns the path, passing down the same route, year after year. It’s awe-inspiring. More sobering, however, is that we watched these deer hop three fences—one twice to escape the passing truck.

This scene only covered about 100 feet of their 150mile journey. And it was one artery of many in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

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The more scientists and biologists learn about wildlife migrations in this region the clearer it is how critical the freedom to move across the landscape is to the survival of the American West’s most cherished animal populations.

Conservation biologist Dr. Matthew Kaufmann, who works for the U.S. Geological Survey and heads up the vaunted Wyoming Migration Initiative at the University of Wyoming, says the understanding of large mammal movements is only a rarely new phenomenon but is changing the way people think about the importance of landscape connectivity. His outfit has brought it to public awareness by tracking animals and putting them on maps. In Wyoming, it has led to growing public support for protecting migration routes.

Western landscape that had been the same for thousands of years has changed drastically in the last 100. In the middle of ancient migration pathways, towns such Jackson, Wyoming, or Gardiner and Bozeman, Montana, or Denver, Colorado, have ballooned, along with surrounding sprawl, fences, gas and oil development, and ever-increasing vehicle traffic.

Current regulations to protect critical habitat and movement corridors are few and far between in relation to the total landscape, although federal programs, state game and fish agencies, nonprofits and some landowners (think conservation easements on Ted Turner’s Flying D Ranch in Gallatin Gateway, which many smaller landowners also implement) are working together to make sure animals can still move as needed. “It can seem and feel like this place is so wild, but the human footprint is already everywhere. We think these distances are so vast, but it’s not much to these animals,” said Kyle Kissock, communications director of the

A truck emerges from the Trappers Point wildlife overpass on US 191 near Pinedale, Wyoming. PHOTO BY LEON SCHATZ AND GREGORY NICKERSON/WYOMING MIGRATION INITIATIVE

Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation, which works in western Wyoming to reduce the impacts of human activity on natural processes.

Around Yellowstone National Park, a globally renowned magnet for wildlife watching, an important piece of information that land managers and biologists still struggle to convey to visitors—and even many area residents—is that wildlife do not and cannot live exclusively within national parks. To survive and thrive requires a much more significant land area, over public and private land, with three components: summer range, winter range and an intact, navigable migration corridor that each herd has historically used.

Consider this: Yellowstone is about 2 million acres; the bulk of the landscape its animals actually use throughout the year in Greater Yellowstone covers at least 23 million acres.

With the core of the habitat—Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks—under federal protection and until recently most of the rest of it relatively undisturbed, the area boasts some of the most famous and healthy wildlife populations—and a booming wildlife-watching tourism industry—that still exist in the modern world.

“As the concept of wildlife movement and migration [is] more widely recognized, many states realize the need to identify and conserve important habitat and movement areas,” said Elizabeth Fairbank, a road ecologist with the Bozeman-based Center for Large Landscape Conservation, known as CLLC. “Protected areas provide good core habitat for wildlife, but during these big seasonal movements

to migrate or dispersal to establish their territory, they come across a multitude of barriers like human development, and linear features like roads, railroads and fences. These can be extremely difficult to overcome and can be a big source of mortality,” Fairbank added. “It is really important to understand where we need to maintain or restore habitat connectivity across linear features.”

Biologists in the Intermountain West, along with teams from state game and fish agencies and university researchers, have used radio and GPS collars to prove that animals use the same exact routes over and over. Often, seasonal migrations are well over 100 miles each way, and biologists believe that many of today’s known routes were likely longer in the past but have been altered due to human impacts. Publicity efforts, such as those from WMI and CLLC, have significantly increased public interest in mitigation efforts like wildlife overpasses and underpasses on roads. Their work also highlights needs for habitat protection from development, including increasing housing sprawl and resource extraction, both of which negatively impact migrations and, ultimately, population numbers.

Overpasses and underpasses can lower animal road fatalities by around 90 percent, a huge benefit but only one piece of a complex puzzle.

“Corridors, [the] larger mapped areas which surround known GPS routes, are of critical importance to conserving migrations across the West,” said Josh Metten, Wyoming community coordinator for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. Metten, also a skilled wildlife photographer, knows the conservation science and the popularity of migrations. “Mitigating human disturbance to migration corridors is critical. We know from GPS collar data that mule deer and other migratory wildlife have a high fidelity to existing migration routes, and when enough disturbance occurs, they stop migrating.”

A famed bighorn sheep herd in the Tetons is a good example of what can happen when humans impact a landscape. Development severed the herd’s migration and now an unnaturally small population remnant is trying to survive in the high peaks year round. In order to help recover their numbers and because the sheep’s situation has become so dire, Grand Teton National Park is considering closing

more of the terrain the sheep still live on to human recreation.

“Jackson is what happens when we build in a valley that was a migration corridor bottleneck in the past,” said JHWF’s Kissock. “Now, animals have to try to get around the development or they lose the routes that help them survive.

It’s the end game.” Similarly, development in Big Sky has encroached on important wildlife corridors and habitat from the Madison Range, and Gallatin Gateway development is on the cusp of blocking travel for elk, mule deer and other animals.

In 2018, the U.S. Department of the Interior released Secretarial Order 3362, which called for states to prioritize documenting and conserving migration routes for elk, mule deer and pronghorn, and would build on biologists’ work to document migrations into the future. “Habitat loss from residential, commercial and energy development, increased wildlife vehicle collisions, fencing barriers, and increasing human recreation are all important factors which can threaten migrations when not addressed properly,” Metten said.

This map shows the migration patterns of thousands of elk in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. MAP COURTESY OF THE WYOMING MIGRATION INITIATIVE

– Josh Metten, Wyoming Community Coordinator, TRCP The daily challenges of the Gallatin Gateway elk.

PHOTO BY HOLLY PIPPEL

Since that directive, the USGS—in conjunction with state researchers—has released two sets of maps, one outlining 42 migration routes in five states, and a more recent one with 65 new migration routes covering nine states and various tribal lands. While this is far from a complete picture, it’s a key step. This important data will impact conservation planning conducted by a wide array of state and federal stakeholders to reduce barriers to migration caused by fences, roads and other human development actions.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks staff recently made an effort to engage and work with county land-use planning, sometimes at the request of county governments leading these efforts. But there is a lot of work to be done given that much of the land is in private hands, with ownership not obligated to consider wildlife. Gallatin County, for example, does not have countywide zoning, a critical regulatory tool to help wildlife benefit and survive. Nonetheless, as the county works toward developing a growth plan, Montana FWP is assisting conservation nonprofits in providing information on wildlife movement and migration.

Gallatin County provides a sobering example of human activity threatening the wild processes of the land, right under the noses of Bozeman’s human population, many of whom live there because of the wildlife and open spaces. Yet the increasingly busy landscape between Big Sky, Gallatin Gateway and Four Corners is proving a disaster for elk and mule deer. Here, as former agricultural land is quickly subdivided into homes and thousands of people drive through the area each day, elk and mule deer are losing a critical movement corridor—in real time. And moving through the space becomes increasingly dangerous or fatal.

“We feel the squeeze here, and we feel it daily. But newcomers from much more developed places still just see wide-open spaces, and don’t understand how we’re losing critical habitat,” said Holly Pippel, a realtor, conservation supporter and archery hunter in the Gallatin Gateway area. There isn’t much most individuals can do in the face of an agricultural industry making it hard for producers to make a living, leading to them selling off their lands—that will be a federal task— but there is still hope for community action. In addition to depending on new regulations from local and federal agencies, Pippel says that by educating real estate industry professionals on the dos and don’ts of living alongside wildlife, they can in turn educate new residents, owners and renters on the importance of sharing the landscape, and

The interstate highway bisects mule deer winter range in the "Sisters" portion of Interstate-80 along the Overthrust Belt in Uinta County, Wyoming. PHOTO BY GREGORY NICKERSON/WYOMING MIGRATION INITIATIVE

CALL TO ACTION

Kyle Kissock is the communications director of the Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation. PHOTO COURTESY OF JHWF

Josh Metten is the Wyoming community coordinator for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. PHOTO BY ZACH MONTES

how it can be optimized on each piece of land.

On the bright side, despite the increasing obstacles facing wildlife, there are some new collaborative efforts between nonprofits, state game agencies and academic researchers working to develop awareness and solutions for smarter future development and mitigate human impacts. Public interest in and support for wildlife migration crossings and landscape protection has increased dramatically through their communication and education campaigns. The CLLC and the Western Transportation Institute are working on an important assessment of Highway 191 between Four Corners and West Yellowstone. “This assessment will pull together datasets on wildlife-vehicle conflict, habitat, wildlife movement and identify priority areas to maintain or restore connectivity across a highway that bisects important wildlife habitat between YNP, Custer-Gallatin National Forest, and other areas,” said CLLC’s Fairbank. “Wildlife do not understand these boundaries.”

Those who are actively working on these efforts say progress is being made on preservation and are optimistic that momentum and support will grow as more citizens understand what is at stake.

“Time is of the essence to preserve the land,” Pippel said. “All the groups that should, and need, to talk about it aren’t meeting yet. It is so multifaceted and seems overwhelming. But I still think it can be done.”

According to a 2020 MDT study, traffic volume on Highway 191 increased by 38 percent between 2010 and 2018.

Of reported crashes, 24 percent involve wildlife, but many animal collisions go unreported. Road mortality is a major threat for all wildlife species.

Locally, the Center for Large Landscape Conservation is working on a number of projects including one that covers Highway 191 from West Yellowstone to Four Corners and needs input via either of two methods: a smartphone app called ROaDs (Roadkill Observation and Data System) or an interactive web page.

“People can help out by becoming a citizen scientist to record observations of where they see wildlife (alive or dead) along these two important road corridors in the GYE,” says Elizabeth Fairbank with CLLC. The information the group gathers will be used to determine the highest priority areas where animals cross the road and contribute to planning mitigation including overpasses and underpasses.

Visit largelandscapes.org/191 to learn more about the U.S. 191 Corridor Study and how you can become a citizen scientist.

Brigid Mander is a skier and a writer based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Her work regularly appears in publications ranging from The Ski Journal to The Wall Street Journal.

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STRENGTH OF A LYON

How one man’s brush with death led him out of the flames and back to life

BY MATT CROSSMAN

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF DANIEL LYON Daniel Lyon stands in front of a “Don’t give up” mural in Longview, Washington. “It’s a statement that I hold near and dear to my heart,” Lyon says.

Lyon with a Smokey the Bear sign at the USFS Ranger Station in Cle Elum, Washington.

Cap

The Twisp River Fire raged through a forest northeast of Seattle. Whipping winds doubled its size in 15 minutes, and the fire ultimately burned more than 11,000 acres during 2015’s bone-dry summer. Flames licked the sky 60 feet above the firefighters’ heads as they worked to protect a home in the rural northeastern part of Washington.

Heat lashing their faces, it became clear they couldn’t save the house. Instead, they had to save themselves.

Daniel Lyon, then a wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service working out of Okanogan/Wenatchee National Forest, rushed to Engine 642, climbed into the seat behind the driver and held on as they took off. Smoke as “black as night,” according to an investigative report, obscured their view. The road turned, but the engine didn’t. The truck careened down an embankment and slammed to the ground some 40 feet below the road.

“I knew right then the only chance of survival was getting out of that fire engine and running,” Lyon said. He climbed out, and fire ripped through everything—trees, grass, the truck, even Lyon himself. His clothes melted to his skin as he clambered up the steep ravine, hand over hand, fingertips digging into the scorching dirt.

After reaching the road, he sprinted toward a wall of flame, burst through and left the fire behind. Grief swallowed him as he realized the other three firefighters in the truck—Thomas Zbyszewski, Andrew Zajac and Richard Wheeler—had not made it out. All three died in the fire.

Firefighters rushed to Lyon’s aid, peeling off his smoldering clothes and driving him to meet an ambulance that was on its way. He begged the EMTs to pray for him, to give him painkillers.

Then the world went black.

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“A collage I created to always remember them.” From top to bottom: Richard Wheeler, Thomas Zbyszewski and Andrew Zajac died in the 2015 Twisp River Fire, the same fire that Lyon lived through.

Lyon and girlfriend Megan Lanfear pose during a road trip with the Badlands of South Dakota in the background.

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I met Lyon 18 months ago. Now a policeman near Seattle, he’s trim and athletic looking, the result of countless hikes across the Pacific Northwest with his girlfriend, Megan Lanfear. He has dark hair and seems to always wear the hint of a smile.

Two things struck me when I first saw him: his scars— “What the hell happened to him?” I wondered—and his eyes.

They invited me to ask, “What the hell happened to you?” His eyes and his scars formed a “before” and “after” picture in one body. Whatever the hell happened to him, his eyes show that those scars taught him something about life, I thought, and I wanted to know what that is.

In a series of conversations this spring, Lyon tells me he spent recent months plotting his future with Lanfear, who had been accepted into two dental hygienist schools. The time came to decide which one to attend: The one in Idaho or the one in Wyoming?

If Lyon’s life had turned out differently, the couple might have stressed over which school to choose, which neighborhood to live in, which house to buy. But instead of worrying about such decisions, they’re excited to make them.

These options represent independence to Lyon, 31, a goal he has been pursuing since he nearly burned to death inside that Twisp River Fire seven years ago. “We didn’t know if he was going to be able to feed himself,” Lanfear said.

By spending years rebuilding his body, mind and life, Lyon has progressed from being unable to brush his teeth to this, the precipice of homeownership, and the last step toward living the life he envisioned for himself before the fire. “My dream has always been to live independently and be able to have my own house, a little piece of land that I can take care of,” he said. To understand how powerfully fulfilling this dream is for Lyon, you have to understand the nightmare he went through to get here.

--Three days before Lyon was burned in the fire, his mother, Barbara, dreamed he had died in one. “Every day I would ask him, ‘Are you going to be OK?’” she said. Lyon called his parents in Stevensville, Montana, at noon the day of the fire, so they tried not to worry even as stories about it filled the TV news. At 7 p.m., Barbara’s phone rang. “Get here immediately,” a nurse told her.

Barbara and Daniel’s father Dan drove overnight, arrived in the hospital and rushed to Daniel’s room. He was covered in bandages, IV tubes running into his body from all over.

“Am I going to live?” he asked them. Daniel has no memory of that, or anything else for the first month he was in the hospital, much of which he spent in a coma. Dan and Barbara stayed in Seattle for three months, visiting Daniel daily. Their son had been there for Barbara when she fought breast cancer the previous year, and she vowed to be there for him. Some nights she slept on a chair in his room.

“He was having nightmares,” Barbara said. “His blood pressure would shoot way high. His feet would be going 100 miles per hour. There was nothing you could do to control him. When he started to go into that zone, I would start talking to him about family, and his dog, Ozark. My voice would seem to calm him down. The doctors wanted me to stay because that would help him.”

Slowly, the answer to, “Am I going to live?” became “Yes.” But what kind of life would he have? What would he look like? What would he be like? Would he be the goalsetting, go-getting outdoorsman he had been before? That appeared unlikely. The thought that he might someday buy a house and live on his own seemed impossible.

Third-degree burns covered 65 percent of his body.

Nine of his fingertips had been amputated. Waffle scars laced his arms. Sunglasses had protected his eyes, boots had shielded his feet and ankles, and he has a clean patch of skin on his right wrist that was covered by his watch. He lost count of how many surgeries and procedures he’s had.

It’s more than 100.

As bad as his external injuries were, he suffered no serious internal damage. Lyon and his doctors brainstormed two explanations for why the heat didn’t scorch his lungs. One, it’s a miracle. The other, Daniel was screaming in agony, thus exhaling the entire time. The heat never got inside him.

-After three months in the hospital, Lyon moved into his parents’ home in Stevensville to begin three years of physical and occupational therapy. His occupational therapist, Becca Robertson, says burn victims’ skin becomes dry, hard and inflexible. Underneath the skin, Lyon’s muscles and tendons lost flexibility and strength from lack of use.

After the burn: Lyon in the ICU at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle during his first month of recovery.

“It’s such a common phrase to say, ‘Oh, you can do anything you set your mind to.’ But I truly believe in that statement.”

-Daniel LYON

When he started treatment, Lyon could barely move his fingers. He could not hold anything; he couldn’t button a shirt.

His treatment with Robertson loosened his skin first, which eventually led to increased mobility and strength in his hands and arms, the area where Robertson had focused their work.

The two bonded as they spent hundreds of hours together.

They talked hunting and fishing and politics. Under Robertson’s care, Lyon worked toward rebuilding strength and dexterity for normal living—getting dressed, eating, driving—and normal for him: fishing, hiking, riding a bike.

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Robertson has worked as an occupational therapist for more than 30 years and says Lyon is the most inspiring patient she’s ever worked with. “He always worked through the pain, always pushed himself to do better and better,” she said.

But to what end was he getting better? His physical therapist asked him why he was going through such pain.

Lyon’s answer—“Because that’s what doctors told me to do”—wasn’t good enough. He needed a bigger, bolder, more meaningful reason to justify pushing himself beyond normal pain thresholds.

Lyon wanted to be active outside again and set a target to work toward. Summiting Mount Rainier seemed like a way to redeem the pain. Climbing Rainier—a view of which dominated his childhood home near Seattle—would prove he was back to normal, physically, at least.

“You’re going to do what?” his dad asked.

After rigorous cardio training to prepare, Lyon hiked to base camp on the four-year anniversary of the fire. It was a beautiful day. He slept in a hut and woke up to a frigid, rainy morning. Cold makes him numb, which hinders his dexterity, something that’s already limited because he doesn’t have fingertips. He could barely hold the ice axe.

Lyon kept going. He wasn’t summiting Rainier just for himself; he was summiting it for Zbyszewski, Zajac and Wheeler, too. Finally, Daniel and his guided group of 12 arrived near the top with a small window of time to reach the summit, take pictures, and get back down.

Lyon all smiles with Wildland Firefighter Foundation Director Burk Minor in Enumclaw, Washington. He presented the flag from Mount Rainier to Minor as a symbol of his gratitude for the foundation’s support.

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The view was … well, there was no view. Rain engulfed them. Visibility was 50 yards. That hardly mattered. Lyon is a Christian, and he believes in heaven, and as he stood atop that mountain he thought, “This is as close as I’ll ever get to being with them on earth.”

The expedition left a mark on his soul and seared into his heart the memories of his fallen comrades. “It was truly the coolest feeling and experience I have got to have, really in my entire life,” he says now. “Just the feeling of accomplishment and the feeling of being close in spirit with my buddies. It was incredible.”

-Sitting across a table from Lyon, I wondered if I was seeing things: Were his scars and his eyes working together, telling a story about what he learned from the experience? About what type of life—about what type of person—a fire can leave in its wake? I described this to people who know him.

Robertson said: “He has this aura about him that makes him seem really open.”

Lanfear: “He’s always been OK telling the story, because at the same time he is telling his story, he is keeping the legacy of his guys alive. It helps him to heal when he talks about it.”

His mom: “He has accepted it.”

The road to acceptance was as arduous as the ascent of Rainier. And far longer. It started when Lyon was in a coma.

Stacks of mail—letters of encouragement, drawings from schoolchildren, badges from firefighters—arrived every day.

His parents read all of them to him—50 a day, they say.

“That’s one of the most powerful things about this whole story,” Lyon said. “My endurance didn’t just come from myself. It came from the people I surrounded myself with. Society helped me get to where I am.”

Still, when he moved from the hospital to his parents’ home he was sullen, withdrawn, simmering with anger, clear indications he had post-traumatic stress disorder.

He spent hours in counseling. “The biggest thing was when I started doing motivational speaking and telling my story,” he said. “Once I broke through that barrier, things started having a snowball effect.”

That snowball got bigger when he became comfortable going out in public with friends, and grew again as he went on vacations. He saw re-establishing his As a target during recovery, Lyon set his sights on Mount Rainier. Here, during hobbies—fishing, hunting, hiking—as major milestones. a late summer snowstorm the day after the four-year anniversary of the He returned to work as a day-trader and part-time cop, wildfire, Lyon and climbing guide Ben Leudtke stand on the summit of Rainier. the semblance of a normal life.

A budding romance with Lanfear helped, too. Friends before the fire, they became a couple as he healed. Lyon redeemed his physical pain, helping others by sharing his story and his parents credit her for inspiring his recovery. Love redeems his emotional pain. was a powerful motivator. But it all came laced with pain.

When he gives speeches, his call to action is always the Zbyszewski, Zajac and Wheeler can’t go out with friends, can’t same. “It’s such a common phrase to say, ‘Oh, you can do work, can’t fall in love with a woman who won’t leave their anything you set your mind to.’ But I truly believe in that side. Why should he get to? A better question: What if he statement.” could do those things but didn’t?

Lyon’s life—in whatever house he buys in either Idaho “I came to a point where it would be worse if I didn’t or Wyoming—is proof. “I’m definitely not the strongest guy. enjoy life after being granted a second chance at it,” he said.

I’m not the fastest runner. I’ve never been the top of my class “I couldn’t let it go to waste. That meant simply enjoying when I went to college or high school. But I think the biggest life again. I was able to heal some of that survivor’s guilt by thing that’s got me through the hardship was my mindset, and looking at it that way.” just that simple will to live.”

The road back remains an ongoing process. “I don’t know People often comment to him that they could never do if I’ll ever fully recover from it mentally,” he said. “But in my what he did. “Of course you think that,” he tells them. “If you heart, I’m in a happy place.” would have asked me prior to the accident, ‘Could you survive -something like that?’ I would have said, ‘no way in hell.’”

When I told Lyon what I read in his eyes and scars, he But he did. took it as the compliment I meant it to be. He wants people to “I’m still burned,” he said, “but I’m not broken.” ask about his scars because it beats staring, and because those scars taught him about resilience. Just as climbing Rainier

CALL TO ACTION: Wildland Firefighter Foundation’s focus is to help families of firefighters killed in line of duty and to assist injured firefighters and families. Volunteer with the WFF’s 52 Club and participate in its fundraising events held across the country, including a Vertical Drop ski challenge in Kirkwood, California; a RIP-N-LIPS Lips bass fishing tournament in Prineville, Oregon; and golf, softball and half-marathons around the U.S. Organized by the boots-on-the-ground wildland firefighters themselves, these events take place mainly in spring and fall. In summer, the crews are all fighting fires.

Visit wffoundation.org to learn about these events as well as volunteer and donation opportunities.

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Wilderness Adventures Building life skills in the outdoors As a kid from Central Illinois, a 16-yearold Tom Holland was amazed the first time he found himself in the ocean of mountain peaks making up the Teton Range. The seemingly endless granite and wild, open spaces awoke in him a sense of adventure and he left that summer trip with Wilderness Adventures, a Jackson Hole, Wyomingbased outdoor education organization, armed with a new set of technical skills along with life skills he would carry with him into adulthood.

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Holland went on to study business and early childhood education, and become the CEO of the American Camp Association, a nonprofit center for camp professionals out of Indiana. But he kept in touch with Mike and Helen Cottingham, who had originally founded Wilderness Adventures in 1973. In 2016, when the Cottinghams were looking to pass the business along to its next owner, Tom and his wife Catherine rose to the challenge.

“To do what we do is a dream come true,” says Holland, now 42. “I get to go to campfires in the middle of the summer and see the impact of this thing; that’s incredibly magical. The outdoors is a place of solace and connection for kids and that isn’t going away.

We feel so lucky and honored to carry this torch.”

Now in its 50th year, through day camps, overnight trips, gap semester programs and custom trips that reach across the U.S. and globe, Wilderness Adventures has inspired and changed the lives of over 40,000 alumni, providing youth with technical and life skills in what the Hollands believe is the most powerful classroom of all—the outdoors.

In a curriculum they call the Trail Map, kids of all ages learn the hard skills of the outdoors—how to pitch a tent, cook outdoors, pack proper supplies and hike to remote locations— and along the way build invaluable soft skills such as teamwork, communication, creative and critical thinking and empathy.

Now, with a pandemic-affected generation navigating their school years, and often over-stimulated by today’s technology and screens, Holland believes the experience of summer camp and outdoor education is more important than ever. It not only provides a reprieve from society but reaching kids early in life has a ripple effect—they grow into more thoughtful stewards for their communities.

“I just think kids need this experience now more than ever,” says Holland. “To be carefree, with role models guiding your experience, to be able to grow and get dirty. We want them to then take the energy and experience that they get and translate it to the rest of their lives.”

Holland runs his business on a philosophy: “There’s room at the campfire for everyone,” meaning socioeconomic or ethnic differences should never deem the outdoors inaccessible. Through their Wilderness Adventures Foundation, the organization aims to reach kids who otherwise may not have been able to experience reaching the peak of the Grand Teton, camping in the wilderness or sharing a campfire with newfound friends.

“Wilderness Adventures’ foundational goal is to ensure finances are never an issue and includes people of different racial and economic backgrounds,” says Holland. “We are trying to make sure our campfire is open to everybody. If you can start with kids, with that influence and commitment to the tenants of this community, I think we can be well equipped.”

Already firmly established in Jackson Hole, Wilderness Adventures looks next to grow their five-day, K-8 Base Camp program into the Bozeman area by 2023, as they hope to reach and educate more youth in beautiful spaces.

“We think the community of Bozeman aligns with outdoor enthusiasm and the opportunity for kids seems just about right,” says Holland. “The program that’s worked for Jackson is something we’re excited to bring to Bozeman.”

Holland recalls the day the Wilderness Adventures brochure arrived in the mail when he was a kid back in the Midwest and how he mowed lawns all summer until he raised the tuition to attend, unaware how much it would change the course of his life.

“I didn’t know about the Tetons or mountains or anything like that,” says Holland. “What that trip did for me as a young adult was instill in me a confidence that I never felt before and that I never imagined. I had a story to tell.”

Today, thanks to Wilderness Adventures, 40,000 other youth in communities across the country have their stories as well.

Wilderness Adventures is a Jackson Hole, Wyoming-based outdoor education organization that provides students of all ages with unique life skills while exploring the outdoors. They will grow to serve the Bozeman area with their K-8 Base Camp programs by 2023. PHOTOS COURTESY OF WILDERNESS ADVENTURES

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Troy Fieseler, a Wyoming Game and Fish Pinedale Habitat biologist, helps wind up old barbed-wire fence that was being replaced with wildlife-friendly fencing on big game winter range south of Pinedale, Wyoming. PHOTO BY MARK GOCKE, WGFD

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Editor’s note: This essay was written in 1991 during the filming of A River Runs Through It in Livingston, Montana. It appeared in Toby Thompson’s 2012 book, Riding the Rough String: Reflections on the American West. He has updated it for Mountain Outlaw magazine.

Watching River Flow, Part 1: Looking upstream

BY TOBY THOMPSON

A River Runs Through It debuted in Bozeman’s Ellen Theatre in 1992 and this summer marks its 30th anniversary.

In this iconic scene, Brad Pitt’s character, Paul Maclean, demonstrates the art of “shadow casting.” The scene was filmed on the Gallatin River. A River Runs Through It © 1992 Allied Filmmakers, N.V. All Rights Reserved.

1920s motorcycle on high, thin wheels swims through gravel on Callender Street as a grizzled man in coveralls rides it past horse-drawn buggies, Model Ts, and a fat team of Percherons hauling a buckboard. The Panaflex swings as costumed extras cross an avenue dressed in fake balconies, gas lampposts and wooden sidewalks. This is the opening scene to A River Runs through It. Every trace of modern Livingston has been camouflaged. Director Robert Redford’s cinematographer, Phillipe Rousselot, gauges the exquisite afternoon light before panning sky and mountains, then gliding to the Maclean boys scouting town.

They’re supporting actors. Craig Sheffer and Brad Pitt play Norman MacLean, author of the novella upon which the film is based, and his brother Paul, respectively, with Tom Skerritt as their father and Emily Lloyd as Norman’s wife.

River is strikingly cast, but for the moment it’s Redford’s set that intrigues. Livingston’s falsefront buildings, wide 19th-century streets, and surrounding Absaroka Mountains have not required much doctoring. Livingstonians are happy to see the film here; some speak of leaving its scenery in place, to lure tourists. As much as $10 million will be pumped into a depressed economy

by River’s crew. The civic center, rented for $2,000 per month, is now a sound stage. Merchants are being compensated for this shot’s disruption.

Locals have been hired as extras, grips, tailors, seamstresses and carpenters. As Redford hopes to bring River in for $12 million, most are earning a bottom-drawer wage.

Redford slouches in a canvas chair on Callender’s sidewalk, his head tilted toward the sun. He’s conferring with staff when this reporter’s spotted. We shake hands then face off in the street like gunfighters. Redford initiates a diatribe against magazine, television and newspaper reporting, even the Washington Post’s (whose Watergate coverage his portrayal of Bob Woodward, in All the President’s Men, eternalized) before conversation eases toward Montana and author Tom McGuane, a friend who introduced Redford to Norman Maclean’s book in 1980. Redford’s face brightens.

He’s lunched at McGuane’s, promising that River will be dedicated to American Rivers, a foundation McGuane represents.

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(L): Paul Maclean, newsman, prolific fly fisherman and younger brother of A River Runs Through It author Norman Maclean, holds up his catch, circa 1922. PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN N. MACLEAN (R): Pitt, who plays Paul in the film, holds up a catch of his own. Paul Maclean was Pitt’s first major leading role. PHOTO COURTESY ALAMY

om’s got a great life,” Redford says of that rugged sportsman. I mention McGuane’s passion for cutting horses and the Zen of showing them, and Redford says, “There’s a lot of Zen in directing.” He pushes back the sleeves of his black T-shirt. “There’s competition in this film, like Paul throwing rocks to spook Norman’s fish. But directing’s not about that.”

He might have suggested “grace.” His look is beatific. He’s won this slugfest for River, directing it for his own company on a shoestring budget in a historical West he adores. The past is Redford’s territory. History is, colleagues suggest, one reason for his avid preservationism: he can’t bear to see the past erased.

His boyhood was linked to Hollywood, if only its studio gates. He remembers the “painted sky” of backlots “standing out against the real sky,” and actors he considered unmanly, even “girlish.” He had talent for sketching, which his father, Charles Redford, decried as futureless (“I was more of a dreamer than he’d hoped.”), and talent for mimicry. Redford’s stepbrother, William Coomber, told Newsweek in 1974: “He used to have a game called ‘Guess who I’m walking like?’ Bob could walk like anybody you knew, and you could recognize the person instantly.”

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The previous night he’d seemed to be imitating a teenager on a first date. He’d stepped through the door of Livingston’s Sport saloon in Levi’s and a pearl-buttoned work shirt. Then froze, scouting a table. His companion wore a silk blouse and linen skirt—upscale for Montana—and fingered her hair anxiously. She was not so tall as Redford, who scanned the room, his gaze never rising to eye level. He spotted a vacant corner and the couple settled. He’s been in Livingston since mid-June, 1991, when he began directing River.

Redford’s hair is a straw heap of reddish-blond, frosted with white; at the moment he had little to say. His date fidgeted. They sat close, like kids at a malt shop, sipping drinks and hardly speaking. She glanced at his face. It is craggy, lined and pitted with scars. The smile, when it flashes, is still brilliant. His chest and arms are powerful, but he’s sprouted a belly. He’s 54 years old, freshly divorced, a grandfather.

Few of the locals that night heeded Redford; Livingston is accustomed to celebrities. At least four previous movies have been shot here, including McGuane’s Rancho Deluxe, his Cold Feet (written with Jim Harrison) and his The Missouri Breaks, which brought Brando and Nicholson to town. A fifth McGuane film, Keep the Change, finished production in September of 1991.

Irish actor who communicates best through physicality. He’s told River’s publicist, Beverly Walker, “Scots have enormous difficulty in expressing feelings and emotions, and are capable of intense judgementalness, of punishing others by silence.”

One patron who’s noticed Redford’s silence was William Hjortsberg, the Montanan whose quirky novel, Falling Angel, was optioned by Redford before it became Alan Parker’s film Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke. Hjortsberg worked with Maclean as a screenwriter for Paramount on the first adaptation of River.

The novella, A River Runs Through It, concerns family, “Norman was a salty old guy,” Hjortsberg remembered, specifically familial communication. It was nominated for “whom I liked enormously. When I met him in 1978, his wife a Pulitzer in 1977, sold 275,000 copies, and was called “an had died a few years before. That’s why he started writing. He American classic” by Alfred Kazin, with passages “of physical was about 75 when I met him. We fished the Blackfoot River rapture in the presence of unsullied primitive America that and afterward he offered me a snort of whiskey from a Mason are as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Emerson.” But River highlights two brothers, one gently meditative, the other jar. He’d transferred whiskey from the bottle to this jar; I guess it reminded him of bootleg liquor during Prohibition, the era violently self-destructive, who share a passion for angling. “In our family,” Maclean wrote in the autobiographical novella, of his book.” “there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” And Maclean’s brother, Paul, was a newspaper reporter and gambler who was beaten to death in a Chicago alley, to Maclean’s father, a Presbyterian minister who alternated presumably over debts. The bones in his right hand—the lessons in scripture with those in casting, “all good things— casting hand—were smashed. Paul is the brother in River trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace that Maclean cannot save. “The book is really about loving comes by art and art does not come easy.” somebody,” Hjortsberg said, “being unable to help them, and The Maclean brothers were first-generation Scottish seeing them slide toward destruction.”

Americans who communed in sport. Redford is a ScotchWhen Paramount’s option lapsed, actors William Hurt and Sam Shepard tried to gain the author’s favor, but Missoula writers William Kittredge and Annick Smith (creators of Heartland) won River’s screen rights, forming a partnership with Maclean. They took a script to Redford’s Sundance Institute, and Redford, according to Kittredge, said, “‘But I was going to do this.’ And,” Kittredge added, “when the steamroller starts moving, you get out of the road.” Redford, in a Premiere article about Sundance unrest, denied impropriety. “I wasn’t aware of moving anybody out,” he said. But, he admitted, “I don’t have a lot of success working with a lot of people.” He was at the tail-end of a courtship of Maclean’s family that required three visits to Chicago, an authorial visit to Sundance, and Maclean’s approval of the final screenplay.

The author died in 1990 at 87, cantankerous to the end. “Norman obviously didn’t much want to have a movie made,” Hjortsberg said. “When he read my script, his reaction was, ‘These are my family and you can’t treat them like this.’ I tried scrupulously to be faithful to the book, more faithful than the script Redford’s shooting.”

Maclean’s sensitivity was not lost on Redford, whose own father was distant and uncommunicative, and who died in April of 1991 at age 76. He was a Chevron accountant who’d been a milkman in Santa Monica while Redford was growing up. “Bob had to go down last month and clean out his father’s things,” Beverly Walker told me. “When he said that, tears filled his eyes.”

At the Sport, Redford finished supper and guided his date toward the door. He looked distracted. The couple was outside when a waitress, waving her unpaid check, followed.

At the age of 74, Norman, a former English professor at the University of Redford reappeared sheepishly, laying plastic on the bar. His Chicago and the film’s protagonist, wrote the famed 1976 novella, A River Runs date squinted from the entryway. Time to settle up.

Through It. His only book published during his lifetime, River was nominated for The kidding of Redford has been primarily by business wags: “Welcome Wobert Wedford,” reads Main Street Car Wash’s sign, and “A River Runs through What?” demands Trower Drug.

a Pulitzer Prize in 1977. PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN N. MACLEAN

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rad Pitt has not been seen at The Sport. He dines each night at Mark’s In and Out, a ’50s vintage drive-in at the south end of town. “He orders two chicken sandwiches and a Coke,” servers tell me. Tom Skerritt brunches, on Sundays, at Martin’s railroad café, now the Northern Pacific Beanery. Pitt has dated locals, one of whom says he sleeps in a tent pitched in the apartment’s living room—for verisimilitude. Redford appears to be doing little but work.

Nevertheless, rumors hatch about the set like caddisflies: Redford’s drinking and philandering—“I hear he’s worked his way through Bozeman”—producers are punching extras; male crew are fist-fighting cowboys and bedding cowgirls; Redford’s quarreling with Forest Service rangers and not paying carpenters overtime; his complexion’s poor and he’s shorter than expected.

Off Callender Street, Redford’s moved to a shadowy alley, just below painter Russell Chatham’s studio. There he’s coaching actresses in a whorehouse sequence. Chatham is a world-renowned landscape artist and record-holding angler. He’s so protective of Maclean’s novella that he warned Craig Sheffer at a gallery opening, “I’ll get you guys if you fuck up the fly-fishing scenes.” Redford owns several Chatham canvasses, and the grace with which Russell captures Montana’s light in oil is, one presumes, how Redford dreams of rendering it in celluloid.

The director stalks alley cobblestones, moving from camera to brick wall to pose a prostitute. For a second he becomes the girl, placing one arm against a roughened balcony, the opposite hand on his hip.

He’s posturing there when Chatham appears amid the garbage cans.

Redford’s startled. But smiling, he throws his arms around the burly painter and squeezes hard.

--The legend behind Redeemer Lutheran’s pulpit reads “GOD IS LOVE.” Redford sits in the front pew, a grayish skivvy tugged from his jeans, boots splayed out and his face corrugated with fatigue. It’s 10 p.m. He’s been directing since 9 a.m. The church is darkened, ghostly. A comely masseuse kneads Redford’s neck and shoulders as Tom Skerritt stands before a walnut lectern delivering Reverend Maclean’s eulogy for his son: “ ... and so it is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. However, it is also true that you can love completely without complete understanding … ” This is River’s penultimate scene and Redford’s determined to make it right. “Action,” he calls, as the white-haired Skerritt removes spectacles, pulls at his vestment, and begins. Redford quietly says, “Cut.” He stares from his pew. He repeats this drill, suggesting minor variations and rising to check results on videotape. “Action … ” After a moment the director leaves his pew and stalks the church’s nave like a puma. He yanks at his shirt and chews gum madly. He stops, frames the shot, then disappears outside, seeking isolation. Or is it trees, flowers, nature?

Walker sighs. “I’m convinced one reason Bob speaks so much about the environment is to avoid speaking about himself and his family. You know, the principals in A River Runs through It physically resemble Bob: Brad Pitt, the young rebellious Bob, Tom Skerritt, the older Bob. I think middle-age is a tremendous relief to him. He’s no longer handsome. We suggested airbrushing his publicity stills and he said, “Forget it.’”

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TOP: Craig Sheffer, as Norman, ties a fly while standing in the Gallatin River where many of the fly-fishing scenes were filmed. A River Runs Through It © 1992 Allied Filmmakers, N.V. All Rights Reserved.

MIDDLE: Redford directs Sheffer and Pitt during the shooting of one of the film’s classic scenes where the Maclean brothers “shoot the chutes” in a “borrowed” drift boat. PHOTO COURTESY ALAMY BOTTOM: 10 and 2: (L-R): Pitt, Sheffer and Tom Skerritt as the Reverend John Maclean cast into the Gallatin River during filming. “If our father had had his say, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him,” Norman wrote. PHOTO COURTESY ALAMY

Redford on scene.

River won the 1993 Academy Award for Best Cinematography and was nominated for Best Music, Original Score and Best Adapted Screenplay. A River Runs Through It © 1992 Allied Filmmakers, N.V. All Rights Reserved.

Bob Woodward, a friend of Redford’s since the 1970s, has said, “What interests him is that there’s a surface and there’s a reality. What you see on the surface doesn’t always reflect the reality. He’s really interested in secrets ... what’s hidden in an individual, a family, an institution, a culture ... and what’s hidden within himself.”

“Sadness is inherent,” Redford has admitted. “If you look a certain way, you’re not supposed to be sad. You’re not supposed to have nightmares.”

The director has returned and Tom Skerritt’s eulogy as Reverend Maclean, at last, seems spun. In a dozen takes Redford has muttered little more than “cut,” his back bent and the masseuse kneading his shoulders. His fatigue is overwhelming. It’s as if he were filming his eulogy, or that of his dad. Skerritt makes some tiny adjustment in delivery and Redford stiffens. The girl’s hands fall away. Redford straightens in his pew, and with a voice barely audible, whispers, “Nice.”

It’s lunchtime in Sacajawea Park: white cavalry tents shield crew and company from the mountain sun, as Redford sits alone beside his aluminum teapot of a trailer, a classic Airstream. Like River’s props, it might as well be vintage. He’s so immersed himself in the Macleans’ era, hanging photos of their family, reading Paul’s newspaper columns, playing Norman’s taped lectures, and studying his letters, that he’s lived in their “world and life and time for several months now,” he’s said. “I’ve not read a paper or watched television, and I have only vague knowledge of what’s happening in the world.”

Redford may be ignoring it, but it hasn’t forgotten him.

Esquire, Vanity Fair, Outside and USA Today are present, and sheriffs have been called to roust tabloid reporters from the shrubbery near Redford’s rented house. His daughter

The past is Redford's territory. History is, colleagues suggest, one reason for his avid preservationism: he can’t bear to see the past erased.

and granddaughter have visited, as have Maclean’s children and grandchildren. The National Enquirer, according to Livingston Enterprise Publisher John Sullivan, has entreated local reporters to do legwork on the romantic front, hustling photographs and misrepresenting itself in hornswoggling gossip from locals.

Now Redford sits on a metal folding chair, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the Absarokas. Off to his right, Tom Skerritt—in black trousers and suspenders—practices fly casting in a small lagoon. River’s angling sequences have gone well, its actors coached by John Bailey, of Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop, or George Croonenberghs, the Macleans’ boyhood friend. Montana’s native trout have been spared by hatchery and mechanical substitutes. Here behind Redford, on the Civic Center’s steps, grips strum hillbilly tunes on battered guitars. Nearby, chefs distribute 120 desserts from a Winnebago as, due east, Brad Pitt squats on the riverbank petting his hound dog, Deacon, and smoking while he surveys the Yellowstone.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it,” Maclean wrote. “On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”

“It’s that last line in the book that just rips me up,” Pitt tells a reporter. “I identify with Paul in a lot of ways ... people who have so much, yet somehow just can’t get it together are very mysterious and compelling to me.”

The town genuinely likes this film crew, an affection cemented when Redford offered River’s vehicles to evacuate a Mill Creek ranch threatened by forest fire. On Wednesday, he pedaled his mountain bike to the post office, where a crowd waited to assist Mayor Bill Dennis in presenting him with the key to the city. “You’ve been a great host,” Redford called. “It was terrific.” He looks thoughtful. “But get ready. This film is going change everything.”

Toby Thompson has written for Vanity Fair, Esquire, and American Film Magazine. He is the author of six books of nonfiction and teaches nonfiction writing at Penn State.

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Watching River Flow, Part 2: Looking downstream

BY TODD WILKINSON

Craig Sheffer, playing Norman Maclean, looks back as his fly line flicks the air while filming A River Runs Through It in Montana in 1991. A River Runs Through It © 1992 Allied Filmmakers, N.V. All Rights Reserved.

s often is the case, the passage of time brings a warm diaphanous gloam to the way we remember the past. Some 30 years ago, in the months before the film A River Runs Through It began appearing on big screens, director Robert Redford told part-time Livingston, Montana, resident and writer Toby Thompson to “get ready. This film is going to change everything.”

In hindsight, it is impossible to overstate just how prescient Bob Redford’s prediction was. It’s a view shared today by the son of Norman Maclean himself, the latter being author of the novella set in Montana and widely considered one of the best fishing stories ever written in American history. A River Runs Through It rightfully ranks right up there with Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prizewinning tale, The Old Man and the Sea. The Hemingway mention is more than anecdotal.

Not only have generations of the writer’s fans made pilgrimages to the places where he fished, lived and visited—including Cooke City, Montana, and Ketchum, Idaho—but the mystique of Hemingway’s association with Key West, Florida, is blamed, in part, for both the popularization and development pressure placed upon the once quaint saltwater fishing mecca.

As for A River Runs Through It, John Maclean has waded often into the fleeting afterglow of his father’s words, the place they were drawn from, the moments they shared together fly fishing the Big Blackfoot River east of Missoula. In 2021, John’s own book, Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, was published to acclaim for it delves into “the story behind the story.” He reflects on his father’s intent and the dreamlike spell the book— and film—put on people who became smitten with an idealized sense of what Montana was—and is. He shared a little-known fact that while his father was still alive and having rejected a first script written by a giant of Montana literature, the late William Kittredge, it appeared the movie might never be made.

But in 1992, two years after Norman Maclean died, it did.

Now, 30 years later, what impact did the movie A River Runs Through It have on the state where it was made?

What if it hadn’t been made? And, can any parallels be drawn to the effects of another visual storytelling phenomenon—the fictional TV melodrama Yellowstone— set in the real Paradise Valley north of Yellowstone National Park?

Notably, in the allegorical fable of Yellowstone, a defiant ranch family led by actor Kevin Costner as its patriarch, battles to prevent ruthless out-of-state developers, backed by a capital equity firm based in the East, from ruining the pastoral character of Montana by building a massive Big Sky-like resort community just beyond Yellowstone Park’s northern border. Sometimes, in this third decade of the 21st century, it’s difficult to distinguish where make-believe begins and reality ends.

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Two fishermen wade through DuPuy’s Spring Creek in Paradise Valley, a tributary of the Yellowstone River. The Yellowstone is a prime fishery, and Paradise is one of many river valleys in Montana that’s seen significant growth in development and recreation. PHOTO BY LYNN DONALDSON

John Maclean still steps into streams. Dividing his time between suburban

Washington, D.C., where he served prestigiously as a bureau chief for The Chicago Tribune, and his family’s getaway at Seeley Lake, Montana, he occasionally drives over to the Blackfoot. Just as his father taught him, he floats his line in a four-count rhythm onto seams of water where trout lie. But, as he explains it, he isn’t so much trying to land a big fish. “I try to catch the essence of what once was,” he says.

What once was—as three generations of the Maclean family knew the river—is gone, forever carried away into the current of change. “People did not boat the Blackfoot, not in my Dad’s time and not when I was a kid,” John says. “Now you’ll encounter between 50 and 100 boats coming down.”

In the three decades that have passed since A River Runs Through It transformed the public perception of fly fishing, so, too, have the backdrops and communities where the film was set.

Bozeman, downstream in the Gallatin Valley near where much of River was filmed, has experienced an inundation that, from the perspective of an extended real estate boomtime, blew in like a hurricane and never left. Livingston and Paradise Valley, too. Impacts are evident in how the human footprint of development has expanded, how former cattle and farmlands have become recreation retreats and how the venerated rivers themselves are now swarmed with anglers, sometimes with a frenzy mirroring the flurry of a caddis hatch.

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Redford told me it was his hope and sincerest intent with the film to communicate the reverence for wild water that the Maclean clan embraced as an ethos—a sacred marriage of spirituality and immersion in the sublime unmarred elements.

May 1976 and while it remains a cult classic for American place-based literature, fly fishing in its aftermath still emanated only boutique appeal. The film, however, set off a mass adoption of fly fishing as a sign of lifestyle status.

Outings on trout streams in the Northern Rockies came to represent their own class of trophy, like pieces of a portfolio that include homes, land and memberships in prestigious country clubs.

Akin to Thompson, I, too, interviewed Redford on a couple of occasions. In August 1993, I flew down to Utah from Bozeman and spent a day tagging along with him at Sundance, home to the institute he founded to champion independent films and where Redford’s own commitment to environmental protection was galvanized. Redford told me it was his hope and sincerest intent with the film to communicate the reverence for wild water that the Maclean clan embraced as an ethos—a sacred marriage of spirituality and immersion in the sublime unmarred elements. On the page, it was stated clearly in the novella’s opening line: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.”

John N. Maclean, son of A River Runs Through It author Norman Maclean, is a writer like his father before him. In June 2021 John published his own memoir, Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, about his family’s now-famous love affair with the Blackfoot River. PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN N. MACLEAN

to protect public lands or narrating documentaries on topics ranging from wolves to restoring San Francisco Bay. He genuinely loves Montana. Unlike others who make movies, using natural beauty as a supporting actor, conservation to him is a conviction rather than a fashion statement.

Articulate on issues, he’s never held back out of fear his activism might affect his appeal at the box office or his bankability as an actor/director. Conversant both in the science and philosophy of biodiversity, he is an inveterate reader. In fact, it was noted that Montana writer Thomas McGuane handed him a copy of A River Runs Through It after Redford complained that good contemporary stories about the West were hard to find.

Somewhat daunting, the moment I strolled into his office at Sundance, he had a stack of clippings from stories I’d written in newspapers and magazines on his desk. He already had sized up whether our visit would last an hour or the day. Our conversation fortunately lasted all day and included a chat the following morning. When he told Thompson the film would have impact, he wanted it to inspire new generations of protectors, but conceded the inherent danger always is the unpredictability and unintended consequences of human nature.

In the years since the movie appeared, Montana became world-famous as a destination for fly fishing. Multimilliondollar mansions, once rare, now abound in the western mountain valleys. Guest lodges have become sites for hosting corporate retreats, where days on the water angling are used not as venues for transcendental experiences but “teambuilding exercises.” Owning expensive gear and driving a tricked-out SUV to the boat ramp is a display of prestige, and “good days” are frequently measured by number of fish caught.

John Maclean and Redford share the conviction that this is the very antithesis of the kind of modest unpretentiousness Maclean the elder was venerating. As John himself has become a committed advocate for protecting rivers as their own life force—a point emphasized in Home Waters—he is horrified by how fly fishing in Montana has become industrialized. What role did the film play? “I think the correct noun is accelerant,” he notes. “You can’t put the blame simply on the film. It had its own effect but there were a lot of contributing factors.”

Norman Maclean is the author of the 1976 novella A River Runs Through It. PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN N. MACLEAN

Robert Redford has never been a superficial, fair-weather advocate for nature. Formidable, he is outspoken as an environmentalist, fierce in lending his voice to protect the natural world, be it as a spokesman for organizations fighting

Paul “Rock” Ringling, born a Montana rancher’s son out on the state’s eastern prairie, says the movie was merely a flashpoint ignited by a number of converging components.

“There’s a bunch of things interwoven in here,” he says. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many ranches and farms in western Montana, including valleys like Paradise, the Boulder, Shields, Bitterroot and Gallatin, were beset by high interest rates and low cattle prices. “A lot of smaller ranch properties were rendered uneconomical. They had natural amenities on them and they were going to be for sale as a discount. This coincided with the explosion of wealth creation on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley and with Texans in the oil business.

And then, on the back of that trend, comes the movie.”

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Downtown Livingston, Montana has retained its charm and the stunning backdrop of the Paradise Valley, but much has changed since the film A River Runs Through It was filmed on the main streets of the south-central Montana town.

PHOTO BY LESLIE FEIGEL

Ringling’s father was a state legislator, and his

family roots include ties to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Concerned for the future of his home state, Rock went to work for the Montana Land Reliance more than half his adult life ago and his career in land conservation overlapped almost perfectly with the years between the movie’s release and now. He was with MLR for 29 years. When he started, the organization had worked with property owners in Montana to put 40,000 acres under conservation easement that permanently protect land in exchange for tax breaks.

Today, MLR’s portfolio of easements spans 1.2 million acres. Those protected private lands and waters have bettered the prospects for survival of public wildlife moving seasonally across public and private ground. Direct cause and effect between the movie and current growth challenges can be difficult to pin down, Ringling notes, but consider this: Prior to A River Runs Through It, Big Sky, Montana, was largely a middling ski resort community in the Northern Rockies. Five years after the movie’s debut, the Yellowstone Club was founded and the gated community of nearby Spanish Peaks was created, both of which metamorphosed the dale below Lone Peak into a four-season elite destination for the rich and famous.

Big Sky has ballooned. In the last few decades, its population has increased three times faster than Aspen or Sun Valley and five times faster than Jackson Hole. Billions upon billions of dollars’ worth of real estate has changed hands. And ready access to fly fishing on the Gallatin, the river where the movie was made, is touted as a major attraction. Rivers throughout the region have experienced development near their banks.

Bozeman, the fastest growing micropolitan city in America, had a population of less than 25,000 in 1992 when River debuted, and today is double that. At current growth rates, Bozeman and Gallatin County will double in less than 20 years to reach 220,000, the current population of Salt Lake City proper (not the entire metro); By the 2060s, if the inundation continues with people fleeing mega-metro areas and climate change-related impacts (soaring heat and water

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shortages in the desert, rising tidal surges along the coasts and outbreaks of catastrophic wildfires), the Bozeman area could double again to reach 440,000, about the current size of Minneapolis proper.

“Montana wasn’t ready to deal with the land rush that the movie helped ignite—but then again, I don’t know how it could have been,” Ringling says. The notion that handshake deals were how many transactions were handled for generations was no idyll. But outside developers, seizing upon lax regulations in counties and the belief that all growth was good, set up western valleys to be exploited without much thought given to what would soon disappear, he says.

During 1991, when the film crew and actors in A River Runs Through It were moving between shooting locations, a few memorable casting scenes were filmed along the Gallatin River north of Big Sky. On a rare day off, Redford received an invitation to get together with an old dear friend, an actress with whom he starred in a few films —among them Barefoot in the Park and The Electric Horseman. Turning off U.S. Highway 191, he drove up Spanish Creek Road, heading deeper into the Flying D Ranch for a rendezvous with Jane Fonda and her new husband, Ted Turner, who had acquired the sprawling property a couple of years earlier.

Redford learned more about Turner’s plans for building a larger bison herd at the former cattle ranch. Sharing Turner’s and Fonda’s convictions about conservation, he was intrigued.

Turner’s purchase of several large ranches in the West and populating them with bison, almost single handedly leading a modern appreciation for the species, is today the stuff of legend.

In southwest Montana, the symbolism of Turner buying the 113,000-acre Flying D and putting its days as a working cattle operation to rest, signaled its own dramatic seismic shift in land ownership that only accelerated, coincidentally or not, after River hit theaters. It fueled the trend of traditional livestock operations being converted to recreation and hunting properties that continues today, Ringling says.

While Montana’s “discovery” has brought numerous expressions of unwanted change, there have been two upsides, Ringling says. One was that new buyers protected ranchland via conservation easements. Secondly, the desire to have private fly-fishing water on their land inspired them to restore streams that had been harmed from overgrazing by livestock.

Restoration has come to many streams that have had their function as spawning habitat for wild native trout revitalized.

Eric O’Keefe in 2007 co-launched The Land Report, the vaunted source for identifying the top landowners annually, in terms of volume of acres, in the U.S.

A raft floats down the Blackfoot River. John reflects on the changes to the Blackfoot, like how in his father’s day nobody would float the river. Now, John says you might see anywhere from 50-100 boats on the river.

PHOTO BY BOB WICK/BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT

“The problem is, it ain’t Montana anymore when the valleys turn into giant suburbs and the rural people, pastures and wildlife get replaced by subdivisions.”

- Rock Ringling, former Managing Director, Montana Land Reliance I asked O’Keefe if A River Runs Through It had been a catalyst for the explosion in large properties becoming a coveted class of assets. “Definitely. You cannot underestimate the impact of those visuals, and by that I’m talking about Redford’s cinematography and screen magic coupled with the ascendent star of Brad Pitt [as Maclean’s younger brother, Paul],” O’Keefe explains.

He points out how Montana land broker Greg Fay launched Fay Fly Fishing Properties in 1992. “I see the impact of the film in countless ways with how people are driven to enjoy the Montana outdoor experience.” Where skeptics have

claimed that properties with conservation easements attached to them, such as many of Fay Ranch properties, are a liability to value since they limit development, O’Keefe says healthy landscapes command a premium. “Phenomenally, heightened demand has pushed prices well beyond any potential loss of value associated with the easement,” he explains. “In a flat market, a conservation easement will result in a lower price but in a hyper-intense market like we have today, preserving, enhancing, conserving land is not resulting in lower values.”

Ringling notes that for every magnanimous large land buyer there are others willing to carve up wildlife habitat and open space in order to profit. While Taylor Sheridan’s series Yellowstone is fiction, the portrayal of unscrupulous capital investors from Wall Street seeking to make a killing on real estate is not. Many, in fact, believe that Yellowstone is having a far more negative effect on southwest Montana than A River Runs Through It. Two of the fastest-growing job categories are real estate brokers and outfitters/guides. “They’re all out there telling people they can live their dream by owning part of the West,” Ringling says. “You can’t fault people for falling in love with Montana. Compared to where they’re coming from, they see all of this open space and ask, ‘What’s the problem?’ The problem is, it ain’t Montana anymore when the valleys turn into giant suburbs and the rural people, pastures and wildlife get replaced by subdivisions.”

Old ranches and farms have over the years been carved up into 20- or 40-acre ranchettes that create a kind of sprawl that destroys wildlife habitat and blights open spaces. On top of that, with conveyance laws, the inheritors to those properties can divide them in half.

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John’s son, John Fitzroy, fishes the Blackfoot.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it,” wrote John Fitroy’s grandfather in A River Runs Through It. “The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN N. MACLEAN

Three factors that did not exist before

separate the early 1990s and today: social media that has hastened the loss of places whose locations used to be obscure and little known; climate change as a grave concern for humanity; and the arrival of technology that allows people to live practically anywhere and work remotely. The latter has expressed itself mightily during the pandemic.

“I have a cowboy friend, Edgar, who says he likes to ride his horse to the top of a hill at night and look to the east where there’s not a light or nothing that would indicate Montana has changed,” Ringling says. “He does it just so he can spend a few more moments in denial. But he knows he has to turn around. When he peers across the western mountain valleys there’s one yard light after another.”

Not long ago, Ringling and his wife were out watching Western curlew birds with friends in a valley where the tentacles of Bozeman have not yet spread. “They told us to just listen. [To be] absolutely quiet. I think people come to Montana with a vision of seeing themselves standing in the middle of a trout stream, bathed in solitude and silence and trying to get reconnected with nature,” he explains.

“But that’s a far cry from today with a steady line of boats 50 yards apart going down the Madison or the Yellowstone.

That’s where the fantasy of the book and the movie ends.”

While land-protection victories have a hard time keeping pace with the expanding footprint of development, there have been some amazing achievements. Along the Blackfoot River, the Blackfoot Challenge has protected 80 percent of the land girding the river corridor as “working” ag and timber lands, in which maintaining ecological health is the commonly shared objective. It’s an initiative that John Maclean praises. Yet, while the currents flowing through the Blackfoot are cleaner than they used to be, thanks to

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cleanup of abandoned hardrock mines, recreational river traffic has created a bustling corridor his father would find at odds with the solemn solitude he immortalized.

In the final scene of the movie, an elder Norman Maclean is portrayed standing alone in the Blackfoot, haunted by the loss of things he adored most in life, set against the daunting mystery of time immemorial. Behind the modern slogan that humans in the 21st century are “loving places to death,” Maclean’s surviving son notes that the counter is that people, when given a chance, will also rise to defend from harm the places they love.

How a fishing tale for the ages might contribute to an outcome one way or another boils down to the instincts of human nature. And right now, we don’t know how that story ends. But there is the sobering reminder of Redford’s words, that the film was going to change everything. In 30 years, those changes have been epic. What will the Northern Rockies look like in another 15?

Call to Action

Filmed in part on the Gallatin River, A River Runs Through It has helped popularize the sport of fly fishing. The Gallatin is a special river. It needs attention and protection.

Gallatin River Task Force partners with the community to lead conservation and inspire stewardship of the Gallatin River Watershed. Want to help? Visit gallatinrivertaskforce. org to find out about volunteer opportunities.

In the Missoula area or want to support conservation of the Macleans’ famous Blackfoot River? Blackfoot Challenge is leading the effort. Visit blackfootchallenge.org to learn about volunteer and support options.

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MORE THAN MUSIC

WILDLANDS FESTIVAL BRINGS GRAMMY-WINNING LINEUP, SUPPORTS SURROUNDING LANDSCAPE

BY MIRA BRODY AND BLYTHE BEAUBIEN

In this corner of southwestern Montana, it’s hard not to look beyond the stage of the Big Sky Events Arena to the surrounding landscape, the imposing 11,166-foot Lone Mountain silhouetted by the sun setting behind the jutting Spanish Peaks and basking the sky in a palette of orange and pink. One can hear the riff of an electric guitar from the arena’s stage and cries of the audience below—the entire experience is elevated by where we are and the access we have to wild, beautiful spaces.

The unity of these shared passions is exactly what Wildlands Festival is all about.

Wildlands Festival will rock Big Sky with two nights of world-class music Friday, August 12, and Saturday, August 13. Friday’s show will feature music legend Lukas Nelson & POTR and Jason Isabel.

Saturday will welcome six-time Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, performer, producer and New York Times bestselling author Brandi Carlile as she passes through during her Beyond These Silent Days tour. She’ll be joined by Grammy-winning and 15 million record-selling duo Indigo Girls, known for classics such as “Closer to Fine.”

In addition to an exciting lineup of musical talent, Wildlands Festival has partnered with area nonprofits that share a love for conservation.

“Our goal is to not only curate an amazing night of music in an incredible venue, but to raise money for some very worthy charities that work hard to protect our beautiful landscape,” said Eric Ladd, chairman and co-founder of Outlaw Partners, producer of the event.

This year’s partners include Big Sky Community Organization, Gallatin River Task Force and Gallatin Valley Land Trust—organizations that support the wild spaces that make Big Sky, Bozeman and the surrounding landscapes of southwest Montana so special, and why many of us chose it as our home.

“In some way, we all came here because of the unique recreation opportunities and natural resources of this special place,” said Chet Work, executive director at GVLT. “Supporting conservation efforts and organizations like GVLT ensures that these most attractive qualities of Big Sky will last for future generations to enjoy and safeguards the natural habitat [of] iconic Montana species.”

A portion of all Wildlands Festival ticket sales will be directly donated to these three nonprofits that share the same ethos as the Wildlands Festival and its goal to bring attention and stewardship to the wild and open spaces that surround the community in Southwest Montana.

It’s a festival that goes beyond entertainment—Wildlands supports the trails, wildlife, rivers and land that are as iconic to Big Sky as the intimate 5,000-person venue nestled inside it all.

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Gambling with the Outdoors Lotteries and timed entries are becoming increasingly common to access public lands and experiences. But are public lands, and the public themselves, winning?

BY MARK WILCOX

My girls scurry ahead of me, grabbing chains anchored into sandstone and striding confidently along cliff edges with 1,000-foot falls the consequence of any major misstep.

Nya, 13, was born fearless. Ari, 10, is following her lead. Kael, 14, is the reason they provide chains. His fearful grip could be leaving grooves in the iron as much as the iron leaves channels in the red rock.

My kids are ascending the nearly 1,500-foot red-rock buttress of Angels Landing in Zion National Park for the first time. We’ve come on December 1, 2021, just after the Thanksgiving crowds dissipate. Mostly we’ve come now so we can do it at all.

A permitting lottery will soon go into effect that may make today the last time we hike Angels Landing as a family.

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Hikers cross a narrow ridge of sandstone on Angels Landing in Zion National Park flanked by precipitous drops. The hike now requires a paid lottery to “win” the chance to pay for a permit. PHOTO BY MARK WILCOX

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Prior to lottery and permitting, crowds often bottlenecked at key points along the trail, which some said led to scary situations. PHOTO BY ABI FARISH / NPS

"We are looking at a range of visitor management actions that focus on protecting resources, improving the visitor experience, and reducing congestion, noise and pollution.”

A divisive issue

For my kids, Angels Landing became a highlight I’m confident will encourage them to seek lifelong outdoor experiences. Kael, who was so uptight he started cramping early on, loosened up and called it one of his all-time favorite hikes. And he’s been on some doozies.

According to a spokesman for Zion National Park, about 300,000 people climbed Angels Landing in 2019—the most recent data available. That’s about 1 in 15 park visitors.

That was before the COVID outdoors boom.

Between 2019 and 2021, Zion visitation ballooned 12.3 percent to more than 5 million.

If demand for Angels Landing increased as much as park visitation—a reasonable assumption given its prominence and popularity—that means about 337,000 people climbed the daunting fortress of sandstone in 2021, an average of 920 people per day on a knife-edge cliff with one set of chains for safety.

Falls happen. Since 2000, 14 people have died on Angels Landing by causes not well understood, according to a park spokesman.

By the law of averages, it’s not many people.

Roughly 4.7 million people have stood atop Angels Landing since 2000. With those numbers, you’re about 37 times less likely to die climbing Angels Landing than driving to get there. Which all begs the question: Should access be left unrestricted, supporting a suboptimal, possibly dangerous experience for more people? Or should access be tied to lotteries and permitting? It’s a tough question of quantity or quality and requires difficult solutions.

More parks are opening timed-entry systems and lottery permitting for key attractions since the first lottery went into effect in 2009 for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota.

Since then, it’s slowly become a trend as visitation soars. Among America’s national parks, at least Acadia, Arches, Haleakalā, Glacier, Great Smoky Mountains, Rocky Mountain, Shenandoah, Yosemite and Zion have all flipped the switch on timed-entry passes or additional permitting for key attractions or hikes. On a more local and less restrictive basis, Yellowstone has sought to better accommodate the crowds.

Linda Veress, public information specialist at Yellowstone, said that the park now allows online pre-purchases of entry passes as well as fishing and backcountry permits to avoid entrance-booth and visitor-center crowding.

Visitors gather to watch Old Faithful erupt. Currently Yellowstone is pursuing more visitor-friendly tactics for key attractions, but the park and visitors have complained of overcrowding in recent years. PHOTO BY MARK WILCOX

And Yellowstone campgrounds can also now be reserved up to six months in advance on the all-things-outdoors federal website recreation.gov. According to Veress, these measures have already helped reduce congestion in key areas while increasing certainty for park visitors.

Taking online automation onto the street, the park also launched an automated shuttle pilot program to ferry people around the congested area of Canyon Village. “As visitation continues increasing in Yellowstone, we are looking at a range of visitor management actions that focus on protecting resources, improving the visitor experience, and reducing congestion, noise and pollution,” Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly said in a press release on January 20 of this year. “Shuttles will unquestionably play a key role in helping achieve these goals in many of the busiest areas of the park.”

These friendly measures seem designed to accommodate the crowds rather than inhibit them. Veress said these and other measures for the future will help deliver the park’s strategic priority of a “world-class visitor experience.”

But at some parks, the measures seem designed to cut the crowds, not accommodate them. There are currently 23 permit lotteries, five ticket lotteries and 13 timed entries at parks noted on recreation.gov. Some say the regulations are temporary to deal with crowding. Others don’t sound so sure.

Janelle Smith is a spokesperson for recreation.gov, the portal that also manages the new Angels Landing permitting experience. Though Zion National Park instituted the change, Smith backs it after having her own crowded-trail experience at Angels Landing. She attempted Angels Landing over Thanksgiving weekend—the same timeframe my family avoided because of crowds. And while the experience for my children was life changing in a good way, Smith said hers pushed her away.

“It was so crowded and dangerous we couldn’t complete it,” she said. At one point, a frightened woman lost her balance and fell into Smith. If conditions had been much different, death could have followed for her, for the woman who stumbled and for others nearby on the trail. Shaken, Smith turned around disappointed, vowing to never go back. Now others are being turned away for different reasons, for better or worse.

The gamble

Some say that adding a lottery system to an outdoor activity is a bet everyone loses. “I don’t see how the cost is not gambling in the state of Utah,” said Ashley Romero, an outdoorswoman who responded to my public call for comment on a southern Utah hiking Facebook page. “It’s absurd and it absolutely discriminates [against] low-income families.”

One man called it “another scammy lottery.” Others countered about a need for more funding, which kicked off a firestorm of heated commentary on my Facebook queries about whether people like the new system. Most seem to grudgingly accept the need for additional permitting in crowded places. But anti-lottery people think they should get a service or experience if they’re paying. Others think the National Park Service needs all the funding it can get. Still others think they should simply raise the fees for the permits themselves and make them reservation-only.

“I have entered the day-before lottery [for Angels Landing] three times and was not selected,” said Emma Plunkett on Facebook. “I was really hoping to go while I was camping in Zion!”

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Going vertical?

You’ll need a permit there, too The recent uptick in permits and regulation isn’t just limited to the lower landscape of the national parks we love—it’s having an impact on their walls as well.

To date, the focus has been on “big wall” style climbs, routes that typically require multiple days and bivouacs to complete. The biggest shakeup came in May 2021, when big-wall mecca Yosemite announced a two-year pilot program requiring climbers to have a wilderness permit for all overnight routes. The program is intended to collect data to better understand how climbers utilize the park.

While overnight permits for wall climbs have been the norm in Zion for years, this action marked a sea change for Yosemite’s climbing community, which has long enjoyed a granite playground essentially free of access issues aside from annual bird nesting closures on some formations.

Park officials and climber-advocacy groups have maintained a healthy dialogue, but many vertical enthusiasts can’t help but wonder what changes the pilot program could potentially usher in; and what restrictions those changes might entail. – Matt Desenberg Angels Landing crowds such as these tended to thin prior to the summit, but many reported a subpar experience prior to the lottery permitting. PHOTO LIZZ EBERHARDT / NPS

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“Honestly, we had no idea how hard the lottery was until we got there and saw how many people were being turned away and were not able to get spots.”

-Danielle Paquette, Angels Landing hiker

The new permitting at Angels Landing lets limitless people pay for the chance to get a permit, but some report having Plunkett’s luck with the draw. The system piggybacks on a similar method the park instituted for reserving permits for limited-access canyoneering routes years ago. “You’re buying an opportunity to be told yes or no,” said Brandon Price, an entrepreneur from nearby St. George, Utah, who has for years been using the park’s lottery system for canyoneering permits.

For $6 under the new system, users get the chance to throw their name in the ring with whomever else wants to hike Angels Landing at the same time and on the same day. In the event your name is drawn, it’s another $3 per person for groups of up to six people. Still worth it but enough to make you think twice, especially with the randomness and planning wrench of a paid lottery standing in the way.

Several people I heard from didn’t win the lottery despite putting in for multiple days. Some had to cancel their trips to the Zion area; others left unfulfilled. Some just wanted to know what they’re paying for.

Part of the money, according to Zion and recreation. gov spokespeople, goes to manage the system itself.

Consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton nabbed a 10-year, $182 million federal contract to modernize and manage recreation.gov, the interagency portal that lets users do everything from reserving a BLM campsite to entering a lottery for a prime national parks experience.

Rangers now check permits on the trail to Angels Landing.

The lottery system pays for staffing, but some argue too much money is going to a private contractor who operates the system.

PHOTO ABI FARISH / NPS

But some question the costs. To run all of Zion, NPS only spent $8.5 million in 2021. That’s well under half of the $18.2 million one private contractor got to run some reservation systems across multiple agencies in the same year. It’s unclear how much money is returned to the parks and agencies. Or even if the money is earmarked for the park or agency from which it originates.

Smith, the spokesperson for recreation.gov, said parks’ demands and desires are driving the recently renovated recreation.gov, with the contractor simply building out parks’ wish lists. She added that the costs are justifiable, comparing it to online ticketing services for concerts and events that tack on fees for the service. But in those portals, the difference is you always get the ticket when you pay the fee. It’s not the case with the lottery system.

“That’s a customer without having to provide a service,” said Price, the St. George entrepreneur. “They don’t even have to give you a hamburger.”

Still, according to Smith, the fees support platforms that require upkeep and oversight. They also offer a valuable service to the agencies requesting aid with visitor management. Along with the infrastructure and technology to run the lotteries, the contractor also subcontracts a call center staffed seven days a week, 14 hours a day. “That alleviates a lot of pressure on the agencies,” Smith said. Even so, some have complained about long waits and unfriendly routing at the call center.

A portion of the money from the lottery goes back into the park in the form of hiring new rangers, providing emergency services and orientation services, and enforcing the program itself, said Zion spokesman Jonathan Shafer. People who hiked Angels Landing since the permits landed have already noted permit checkers on the route at multiple points.

Despite the drawbacks of limiting access to a public commodity, many people are reporting a positive experience with the lottery, and more importantly, the hike itself. “I absolutely loved the experience,” reported Darin Robillard, an outdoorsman

who responded to my Facebook query. He spent 20 minutes alone on top of Angels Landing. “It was eerie but beautiful to hear nothing but the wind while climbing the chains.”

From early adopters of the system who actually got from the experience what they paid, it’s a common refrain.

“Compared to pictures people have shared, it was empty,” said Southern Utah Hikes Facebook page member Danielle Paquette, who planned an entire trip around her lottery time. “Honestly, we had no idea how hard the lottery was until we got there and saw how many people were being turned away and were not able to get spots.”

Some worry that it will impact the overall visitor experience. Brent Doty is an RV park owner in the area who said COVID has already forced some would-be visitors to reschedule their Angels Landing ascent for two years.

“It’s so disappointing for folks,” Doty said. “Two years later and finding they are not able to accomplish a multiyear dream. It’s a shame.”

Zion calls the mass permitting and lottery at Angels Landing a pilot program. The park designed the system with four seasonal lotteries and the day-before lottery to accommodate both planners and last-minute travelers. “The number of permits we’re issuing and the ways we allocate them are still changing,” said Zion spokesman Shafer. “As we observe conditions on the trail and get more perspective on permit demand, we may shift when and how many permits we issue per day.”

But is it a gamble that will pay off in terms of conservation and overall visitor experience? Not everyone is convinced, but Shafer expressed confidence the program would address visitors’ concerns while conserving the park and providing access long into the future.

Call to Action:

Since some parks are still piloting many of these new systems, now is the best time to voice how you feel about the changes. You can reach out to Zion or Yellowstone by phone or email at their general contact pages and your comments will be forwarded appropriately. nps.gov/zion/contacts.htm, nps.gov/yell/contacts.htm Mark Wilcox is a veteran storyteller from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Most days, he helps business owners tell their stories better online through his growing digital marketing agency Skymark Creative.

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One Wyoming ranch’s fight to keep operations on the market

BY EMILY REED

Cowboys drive a herd of weaned Hereford calves toward Whit Ranch during the winter of 1933.

PHOTO BY CHARLES BELDEN

The entrance to the famed Pitchfork Ranch. PHOTO BY DELLA FREDERICKSON

utside the office windows of the Pitchfork Ranch, black cattle meander across the Wyoming prairie under the shadows of the Absaroka Mountain range. While it’s a picture of wide-open space, the famous ranch isn’t quite what it used to be. Inside the office, ranch managers Ben and Lindsey Anson pull black and white photos off the walls that tell the stories of the Pitchfork’s early days.

Ben taps the glass on the picture frame. “When these photos were taken,” he says, “the Pitchfork used to encompass seven ranches extending across the base of the Absaroka Mountains for 250,000 acres. At that time, the ranch supported over 10,000 Hereford cattle and 20,000 Rambouillet sheep.” He takes a long pause.

“The Pitchfork is smaller now. It’s about 100,000 acres and supports about 1,100 angus cattle.”

The photos on the wall were taken in the early 1920s by photographer and former Pitchfork Ranch owner, Charles Belden. With his medium-format camera in one hand and horse reins in the other, Belden made the Pitchfork and the ranching lifestyle famous, publishing photos in popular magazines such as National Geographic and newspapers in Los Angeles, Detroit, New York and beyond.

Belden’s collection is a rich historical record of the

ranching tradition, drawing attention to the romantic yet harsh reality of day-to-day life in the West. Both the photos and the stories behind them reveal that history has a way of repeating itself in ways that Belden might never have imagined.

Today, the Pitchfork is owned by the Baker Family.

Ben and Lindsey Anson manage it. While the harsh weather and rugged landscapes of Wyoming can make ranching difficult, the couple says the biggest challenge has been the market structure.

The beef market is controlled by four meatpacking companies: Cargill, JBS, Tyson Foods and Marfrig Global Foods, often referred to as “the big four.” By controlling nearly 85 percent of the market, these companies set prices for all other cattle producers as well as consumers. The first few years the Ansons managed the Pitchfork, prices were set so low that the family ranch struggled to even turn a profit.

Belden’s black-and-white shots from the early 1900s reveal that Ben and Lindsey’s modern-day battle with Big Beef isn’t anything new. His photos show cowboys trailing Pitchfork cattle to Cody and loading them into railcars. Those cattle were shipped to a terminal stockyard—most likely in Denver—where they were sold to the five meatpackers that dominated the market at the time.

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purred by Federal Trade Commission reports citing corporate monopoly alongside newspaper articles about unsafe working conditions at the five largest plants, Congress sent the Packers and Stockyards Act to President Warren G. Harding’s desk in 1921.

By dispersing control of the beef market through merger regulations, the legislation addressed the issues in the 1900s; but over time several Supreme Court cases weakened its enforcement, allowing a few large companies to once again dominate the market.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch and desperate to make a profit, Ben and Lindsey took a risk and converted some of their herd into a direct-to-consumer beef program in early 2020. By deciding to sell a portion of their meat themselves instead of through the big four, they reclaimed the power to set their own prices.

Transitioning to a direct-to-consumer program came with its own set of challenges. The Ansons rattle off a long list, ranging from installing cold storage to finding a U.S. Department of Agriculture-certified butcher and producing marketing materials. Then, right before they were about to launch their new beef program, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, giving the Pitchfork a window of opportunity.

“When we started meeting with our first customers, they were mostly buying from us because they were concerned about not being able to buy beef at the grocery store,” Lindsey says. “They were looking to local ranchers for food, not because it was a new hot trend but because they literally could

not get it from a store.”

In the wake of the pandemic, the Pitchfork’s direct-toconsumer program has continued to thrive. The Ansons attribute much of their success not only to their high-quality beef but to their social media marketing. After nearly 80 years, photography is once again putting the Pitchfork on the map, only this time it’s on Instagram.

“You can recreate almost every photo Belden took on the Pitchfork today,” Lindsey says. “Very little has changed over time in regard to how we work and brand the cattle.”

Ben adds that he’s only noted a few subtle differences. “You can see in the photos that the range health during Belden’s time was not nearly as good, and as a result of that he was feeding hay to his cows and sheep all through the winter,” he says. “We also are using our horse trailer to get from the barn to the pastures, which cuts down on our need for ranch hands and makes everything a lot quicker.”

Even though the Pitchfork’s hybrid approach of commercial and direct-to-consumer sales is allowing them to make more money than before, the couple is still concerned about what the future may hold for the ag industry so long as the monopolized market stays intact. In the past year, the big four have increased the price of meat by nearly 14 percent, according to an April 2022 report by the Department of Agriculture. Ranchers, on the other hand, receive just 37 cents for each dollar spent on beef, a historic low, reads a report from the Open Markets Institute.

You can recreate almost every photo Belden took on the Pitchfork today,” Lindsey says. “Very little has changed over time in regard to how we work and brand the cattle.

Ben Anson pushes cattle to an upper pasture on the Pitchfork Ranch.

PHOTO BY EMILY REED

Similar to what happened in the early 1900s during Belden’s time, recent economic reports and media surrounding the beef market have sparked the Biden administration to take action. In December of 2021, the USDA announced it will allocate $1 billion from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act to reduce the consolidation of meatpackers and increase competition in the livestock industry.

The department also said it will work on three proposed rules to tighten enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act that will provide producers with more leverage and the ability to sue for unfair competitive practices by meatpackers.

Still, ranchers like Ben and Lindsey are concerned that the federal money and regulations will take too long to implement, and history will again repeat itself—but this time there will be more landmass lost. Between 2001 and 2016, more than 11 million acres of farmland and ranchland were converted to residential land use, according to the American Farmland Trust: Farms Under Threat report.

“These meatpackers are pricing family farms and ranches out of it,” Ben says. “They have already figured out who's left and they're going to have these huge corporate ranches and if those ranches are not bought up by the packers, they’re going to be bought by developers and turned into houses.”

The Ansons believe the answer to breaking this cycle won’t be found in federal policy, but rather in shifting consumer behaviors.

“Change will only come if people show up, and that really starts at the local level,” Ben says.

He explains that if consumers want beef that’s raised sustainably and also affordable, they need to start buying product directly from ranchers

A Pitchfork ranch hand heels a calf during a branding. PHOTO BY EMILY REED

instead of going to the grocery store and buying it from the packers. But it can’t stop there. Ben suggests that consumers should also be thinking about the land required to sustain the food we need.

“If you want to eat good beef, you also need to show up at local planning and zoning meetings, commissioner meetings, etcetera,” he says.

These local decisions about subdivisions and zoning codes have massive impacts on food availability. In short, if you want to buy beef from a local rancher in 10 years, you need to ensure that your community leaders aren’t paving over the pastures needed to produce it.

In the Pitchfork office, Ben and Lindsey hang Belden’s photographs back on the wall. The images are not only a relic of the past and what’s been lost but are also a reminder that the story of the Pitchfork Ranch is not over, and it’s one worth fighting for.

A cowboy riding a pale horse ropes a calf out of the Hereford herd for branding, circa 1930s. The Absaroka Range looms in the background.

PHOTO BY CHARLES BELDEN

CALL TO ACTION Building a local food system in your community starts with you, the consumer. You have the power to demand locally sourced products to support your local ranchers and farmers while advocating for sustainable land-use planning. Encourage your community to work together to establish the infrastructure needed to support that local system, from land zoning codes to your dinner plate.

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T

Learning

he term “human footprint” has become a near constant in the news as we’ve grown more aware of how our presence, in all its forms, impacts the variety of landscapes around the world. The Greater Yellowstone landscape is among the wildest. And we need to recognize how our human footprint can affect this land.

I’ve spent my adult life considering the designs of structures and where and how they fit. I was educated in design school on the heels of Ian McHarg’s landmark call-to-action book, Design with Nature, published in 1969. His notion that we were experiencing an ecological crisis matched what ecological researchers and wildlife biologists already recognized: that our impact on other creatures and the planet was far exceeding its ability to recover and sustain itself.

McHarg’s belief that the sciences and design must work together to provide better solutions for the planet was largely focused on cities. Now, 50 years later, we know that the impact of our human footprint extends far beyond large population centers.

In the late 1990s, I founded Remote Studio, a handson educational program aimed at helping architecture

A designer’s take on building—and living—responsibly in Greater Yellowstone

BY LORI RYKER

Located on a 45-acre parcel of natural land, this house sits between the folds of rising hills hidden from view and was the author’s first home design. Fencing was removed to allow for clear elk migration and other wildlife to roam freely. PHOTO BY PAUL WARCHO

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students understand their responsibility for how they interrelate with the natural world. They learned the profound reciprocal influence that nature can have on their creative process if they come to intimately know it.

Over the span of almost 20 years, Remote Studio curriculum combined backcountry immersion and discussions about philosophy and ecology with a community design-and-build project located at the interface between “built” and “natural” landscape.

I relocated to the Northern Rockies in 1998 to ground Remote Studio in the Greater Yellowstone region with the belief that immersing students in the most wild and intact ecosystem in the Lower 48 would enrich their understanding of the importance of a nearly whole and wild part of nature.

These experiences were also meant to provide the means for reflection on what can be lost when we don’t pay attention to our impact on wild places and their nonhuman inhabitants.

When I arrived in Montana, the Yellowstone region still felt largely undeveloped, a mixture of rural and wild sensibilities. Big Sky was a small resort and Jackson, Wyoming, was a developing but remote location for both top outdoor athletes and the extremely wealthy. As a small college town, Bozeman was an outlier of quasi-hipdom and the transport hub for southwest Montana.

Today, these descriptors are history and the area is experiencing rapid development at a pace that’s difficult for any city planner or county commissioner to respond to. Despite warnings in the mid-2000s that the region would become the next trampled and overdeveloped landscape following the pattern of Boulder, Colorado, or Boise, Idaho, regional leaders seemed to largely ignore what was coming.

Now, our towns and counties are scrambling to respond.

Some are more development friendly; others are searching for processes that educate the population while hoping to quell the potential that all remaining land will have a house on each 5-acre lot.

During these times, no town in Gallatin County had formal input or support from professional staff ecologists skilled in conservation biology, even though the region is unique to all others in the U.S., with wild inhabitants that represent a full spectrum of creatures that have been here since before Lewis and Clark’s expedition.

The region is feeling the pains of missing advisement and influence from having no staff ecologists to support the incorporation of knowledge from field biologists who study wildlife and the ecosystem as a whole—in the plans for development, and expansion of the human footprint.

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W

As part of Remote Studio, Lori Ryker assigned students to design and build a series of vessels as an exercise for students to spend time in a place, contemplating, exploring and learning to build with their hands.This vessel involved aspen trees and horse grass. PHOTO BY PATRICIA FLORES

Call to Action:

Pine Creek Pavilion, a Remote Studio project, was designed and built by Ryker’s students in 2006 at Pine Creek trailhead in Paradise Valley using nearby natural resources. Its roof was developed to water the aspen trees and its shape honors the nearby Absaroka Range. PHOTO BY AUDREY HALL

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When I work with clients, I share the message of conservation with them in hopes of helping them become better stewards. Here are some of the principles: • The ecosystem is not solely your playground, but home to wildlife. And it’s their last wild place left.

• Unless you’re an expert in this region or an ecologist, find someone to advise you on the responsibilities that come with living in this place before you buy land here.

• Work with a designer or architect committed to designing for the total place, including land, water, fish, bird and all animals.

• Learn how, where and when wildlife move across the land, where they come from and where they are going. Consider which location on the land is the least beneficial to wildlife and the ecosystem, or which area is the most environmentally

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hile teaching Remote Studio, I also began a private practice designing custom homes, primarily in the Northern Rockies, focused on concepts of sustainable construction methods and energy systems. What I learned early on was that, in this place, it’s not enough to just focus on building conditions and energy efficiency. We must also consider where the house is placed as well as the human impact and movement on land that came into private ownership.

Some of my earliest lessons came from the B-Bar Ranch, located in Tom Miner Basin, a drainage not far from Yellowstone National Park that remains a key corridor for grizzlies, elk and wolves. From their ecologically based ranch practices, the B-Bar selected areas for development and respected the wildlife. My eyes were opened to how decisions, for better or worse, can affect the ecological system we live in.

After years of striving to understand this landscape, I now see that if we don’t view ourselves as part of the whole, responsible for keeping this place whole, our impact will fracture the ecosystem to its breaking point.

We also can’t sit idly by. Thousands of new people arrive in the region every year, and we’re creating a legacy. As citizens of Greater Yellowstone, we must take action by making better choices on behalf of the native wildlife that for millennia have evolved in this specific ecological system. Each of us, regardless of our financial net worth or amount of land owned, must recognize that we are responsible for the future of this place.

Lori Ryker has called Montana home since 1998. She has a design practice in Livingston, Montana, and is the founder of the nonprofit Artemis Institute, which focuses on the relationship between nature and culture.

• •

•

compromised. Build away from these historic animal travel ways and sensitive spots.

Understand that wildlife does not recognize human insinuated boundaries, including fences that can be dangerous to them.

Choose the land you purchase wisely and understand your role, no matter how many acres you can afford. If you can’t be a steward for the place, don’t buy the land.

A smaller house footprint is critical, and when located thoughtfully, it will minimize overall impact. Always consider building less, because no matter what we perceive is necessary to fulfill our desires, wildlife need this place more. We are, after all, moving into their neighborhood. If you want them to stay, become a gracious guest.

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TAKE A DEEP BREATH. The air being pulled into your lungs helps your body obtain energy and function properly. OXYGEN IS ESSENTIAL TO LIFE. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON’T GET ENOUGH? Most mountain ski resort towns have 30% less oxygen than at sea-level and you run the risk of your vacation plans being interrupted by unfavorable symptoms. In the mountains of Montana a lack of oxygen at higher altitudes can start significantly affecting people as headaches, fatigue, malaise, digestive upset, and

insomnia set in. YOU MAY JUST HAVE ALTITUDE SICKNESS. ALTITUDE O2 HOME OXYGENATION

BY SMART HOME SYSTEMS can be thoughtfully incorporated into your home to help you avoid altitude sickness symptoms, and allow your body to naturally acclimate to a higher elevation. Sections, specific rooms, or individual areas of your home can be converted into oxygen rich environments.

These environments PROMOTE HEALTH, SUPPORT AN ACTIVE LIFESTYLE, GIVE YOU A CLEARER MIND, AND HELP YOU SLEEP MORE SOUNDLY.

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Jereco Studios brings customized AV innovation to your home

Bringing Art into a New Era You’re settled into the recliner in your home theater, popcorn popped, beverage nestled in the LED-lit cupholder, room lights dimmed. With remote in hand, you hit play.

From in-home theaters to wine cellars, today’s homeowners covet lavish amenities. Smart home technologies are at the front of those desires.

The customization of audio and visual integration in homes is much more than a home theater system and surround sound—it is about bringing the industry of artistic entertainment to the modern age.

Design is a critical focal point for integrating these technologies. Jeremiah Slovarp, founder of Bozeman’s Jereco Studios, brings personalized design to the forefront of his business.

“We design AV solutions to fit the needs of any project, residential or commercial; we do it all,” says Slovarp. He’s won 12 Emmys for his work in Sound Engineering and Audio and is nominated this year for four more. “We pride ourselves on custom solutions. ‘Standard’ really isn’t in our vernacular. Each customer is going to have their own customized program based not only on their needs but on their environment—if you can dream it, we can build it.”

Following the pandemic pause, the audio/video industry has been packed with new tech trends. From AV integration to NFTs, quantum computing and human augmentation (which strengthens a person’s physical and cognitive ability by implanting “wearables”), navigating these trends is an art, particularly with products and services becoming hyperpersonalized. Keeping up with technology trends can turn into an overwhelming task with the number of options facing us.

One adage you’ve likely heard from a parent, boss, or your eighth-grade biology teacher is, “Don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions.” And this resonates with Slovarp. During the pandemic, his problem-solving 152

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skills kicked into high gear as he pivoted to live-streaming services as a way to connect local organizations and businesses that were otherwise scrambling to stay connected to customers. Slovarp proved that he can always bring innovation to serve the community.

Solutions in the tech world are implemented as a furious pace, posing a risk of product obsolescence before the public is even aware of these new technologies. According to the International Data Corporation, global annual spending will hit a whopping $2.3 trillion this year, which is why Slovarp and his team in Four Corners keep up with technology—so you don’t have to.

“Staying on top of the latest and greatest is what we do,” says Slovarp.

Jereco Studios’ expertise in live events, studio recordings, voice-over work and post-production comes in handy for the customer who wants to go beyond a home theater.

The sophistication of AV integration includes personal customization of literally anything that happens in your house: lighting, acoustics, HVAC, alarms, climate systems and window treatments, all controlled by a single centralized unit. Especially appealing to Montana residents is bilevel radiant floor heating set on its own thermostat.

“And if you want the shades to open every morning at 8 a.m., we can do that too,” says Slovarp. “Or we can set it on occupancy sensors so as you walk through the rooms, shades go up only in the rooms you’re in and they go down when you leave.”

Jereco Studios in Four Corners just outside of Bozeman, has audio and video installations down to an art form, bringing high-quality entertainment to your home theater, and art into a new age.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF JERECO STUDIOS

Using Crestron, Jereco’s brand of choice, interfaces are programmed individually for each customer based on their specific needs. This includes the potential for actors from major motion pictures to record custom phrases and interact with anyone in a room.

The Jereco design and installation team includes specialized staff with multiple technical certifications in the technology from dealership lines including Yamaha, Crestron, Bose, Dimarzio and Genelec. Your AV solution will be implemented with commitment, attention to detail, and impeccable service with 24hour response for any support calls.

As a company moving toward more cost-saving green options with award-winning products designed for residential as well as commercial needs, Jereco Studios is devoted to solutions, not just for the customer, but also for the environment. Slovarp and his team see AV integration as an art and they’re committed to bringing that art into a new era and a better world.

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Ryan Busse’s

GUNFIGHT

BY JOSEPH T. O’CONNOR

When Ryan Busse talks about guns, people listen.

That’s in part because of the statistics he rattles off.

In January, Busse delivered a powerful talk at a TEDx event in Big Sky, Montana. Twenty-five years ago, he told the audience, Americans purchased 350,000 guns each month. Today, that number is nearing 2.5 million.

Each month. The reason, he says, comes down to fear.

Busse wrote about guns, fear and a divided America in his groundbreaking 2021 book, Gunfight.

Busse is definitely not afraid of guns. He owns dozens of them, hunts regularly, and in fact worked in the gun industry for 30 years. He’s afraid that firearms are finding themselves in the hands of some Americans who are unfit to own them.

Two main types of people are of particular concern to him: individuals killing innocent citizens in an increasing amount of mass shootings across the country: the Lanzas, the Harrises and Klebolds, the Roofs; and radicalized far-right extremist groups aiming to

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overthrow our democracy: the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters.

America’s fate, Busse says, is at the heart of his book.

He writes about Kyle Rittenhouse who, at 17 years old in 2020 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot and killed two men, wounding another with an AR-15-style rifle. Rittenhouse was acquitted last year on the basis of self-defense.

“The moral question is different than the legal question,” Busse told Mountain Outlaw a day before taking the TEDxBigSky stage. “You don't borrow an AR-15 and go into the heat of a battle if you don't have some sort of dream of deploying it. Do we want to live in a country, legal or not, where those sorts of norms are broken? We, as citizens in a society, establish the norms and I fear the speed [with which] those are breaking apart.”

Busse sat down with Mountain Outlaw to discuss his book Gunfight, his respect for firearms, freedom versus responsibility, and how the gun industry and the National Rifle Association are tearing America at the seams. The following is our conversation, edited for brevity. Visit mtoutlaw.com to watch the full interview.

F E AT U R E D O U T L AW

Ryan Busse in Montana with his lead dog Brittany and carrying his favorite shotgun, a 1912 AH Fox that he restored. PHOTO BY ADAM PECHT

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Hundreds of protesters gathered on June 6, 2020 in Kalispell’s Depot Park for a BLM rally to denounce police violence against people of color. Nationwide protests were sparked after George Floyd’s death in May 2020. PHOTO BY HUNTER D’ANTUANO

Mountain Outlaw Ryan, thanks for joining me. Talk about the inception of Gunfight.

Ryan Busse I grew up on a ranch with guns as an important part of my life. I then got what I thought was a dream job in the firearms industry, kind of like a kid playing baseball.

It's like I made the Major Leagues. The book is really my memoir and my family's memoir, narrow lens, and a broader lens on the change in our nation and the change in the industry.

M.O.: There are a lot of different ways to get your messaging out there. When did you first think, “I’ve got to write a book about this?”

R.B.: I thought about a book a long time ago. But really, I'd say after the Trump inauguration in 2017. I was at the industry trade show and the industry basically shut down the entire trade show to kind of worship the Trump inauguration that day. One of the largest trade shows in the world, they piped the audio in and it was on flat-screen TVs everywhere. It was kind of like a Catholic mass and it shook me to my core and 158

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frightened me and I thought, “I need to document this and I think a book is the best way.”

M.O.: Going back to that day, the inauguration of former President Trump, did you see that as being the connection between politics and the gun industry?

R.B.: No, the connection had been happening for a long time and had certainly accelerated during the eight years of the Obama administration. The NRA had always claimed and still does claim to be a nonpartisan organization or bipartisan. In reality it hasn't been for a long time, and everything that we did in the industry since 2000 at least has always been overtly political.

The Trump thing for me represented a dangerous combination of where it was going. It just kept getting worse and it was more overt. I never thought I would be at a business trade show for a trade group where one political candidate was celebrated.

M.O.: You grew up in Kansas and you were in the gun industry for 25 years. Talk about your relationship with guns.

R.B.: Many of the best parts of my life have been spent

with guns, around guns, with my father, with my brother, with my boys, with my wife hunting, shooting. I appreciate the right to own guns. My parents gave me guns as gifts. I believe that I have the right to defend myself with a gun. But those times were always balanced with responsibility. I believe that a right, a freedom that important, deserves a commensurate responsibility. As my dad would say, “These things can take a life in an instant.” And in the end, that's what a gun is built to do. I think our responsibility-tofreedom scale is badly out of whack.

M.O.: It’s leading to a lot of division in the country. I've heard you use the word responsibility quite a bit, along with decency. Talk about that relationship.

R.B.: I start my book with my young son Badge being attacked at a Black Lives Matter rally [in Kalispell] where there were at least 100 armed people with AR15s and handguns and tactical gear in a crowd of maybe 1,000 or 1,500 people, most of them high school kids. Badge was a junior high kid at that point. There were all these armed guys there and I thought, “What are you guys going to do, shoot high school kids?” There's nothing decent about that. There's nothing responsible about it. That violates every gun safety rule I've ever heard of.

I think we have lost this connection with decency and responsibility because there's so much hate now and distrust in our political system and in our society that we're looking for ways to celebrate indecent activities like killing other citizens.

M.O.: You’ve said you don’t have anything against AR-15s. Do you own an AR-15?

R.B.: I don't. Never have. They just don't really appeal to me. The sort of hunting and shooting I do, I don't need that as a tool. In fact, it's a very ineffective tool for the stuff that I like to do. I'm very worried that it has become more than a tool. Now it's a very divisive political symbol. And I really don't want to play a part in that sort of divisiveness.

I saw an ever-radicalized marketing effort in the firearms industry. If we pump gasoline and open flame into a system, are we really surprised that we have these explosions?

M.O.: Some make a political argument that pits Democrats against Republicans or vice versa, in that a Democratic political candidate might take away your guns. Is that a legitimate argument?

R.B.: I don't think so, no. And that question gets at one thing I believe: it's not anti-gun or irresponsible to talk about norms, and decency and responsibility. We accept regulation on guns in our lives every day. For instance, if you want to go buy a howitzer today, you're going to find it very difficult because it's illegal. We don't say that’s some crazy communist, socialist thing. It's just an accepted regulation. It's not anti-gun to have those regulations.

It's pro-responsibility.

M.O.: Over the past 10, 20 years, we've seen an increase in mass shootings. We've also now seen—and you can especially look at January 6—the rise of certain extremist groups of gun owners. Are those mutually exclusive?

R.B.: I don't think we should say that now these radicalized groups are just like Adam Lanza or Nicholas Cruz. Those are troubled, usually young white kids or young men who are doing very deranged, horrible things.

That's different than these very organized, concerted, angry, radicalized groups: the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, lots of militia groups, many of which we saw manifest on January 6. I didn't see any Chevy trucks on flags. There were two types of flags: Trump American political flags and “Come-and-take-it” AR-15 flags.

Guns are at the very center of that.

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Where they are the same is I think they're byproducts of focusing only on this unfettered right or unfettered freedom, both to own guns and to make money from them. I saw an ever-radicalized marketing effort in the firearms industry. If we pump gasoline and open flame into a system, are we really surprised that we have these explosions? Some of them are big, controlled, slowburning and probably growing explosions like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, and then some of them are ugly little flash fires—Sandy Hook, Parkland—they’re individual but there's flame and gas going into the system.

M.O.: We talked quite a bit about the media. Now you're going on this book tour, you're dealing with media and you're also referencing these large, glossy advertisements for specific guns.

What role does media play in all of this?

R.B.: I think social media, controlled partisan media, that's part of the fuel that's going into this system and guns are part of it, too. There are now tactical [gear] influencers with 2 million followers on YouTube. And they talk about the only way to be an awesome American male is to wrap yourself in a flag and have AR-15s and talk about how you want to own the libs. Very dangerous.

M.O.: Echo chambers.

R.B.: Yeah.

M.O.: You discuss the NRA: it was certainly a big part of your career, a big part of your book. How powerful is the NRA? R.B.: I listen to NPR in the mornings. I’m probably the only firearms executive that can lay claim to that. And I've heard many times on NPR this idea that the NRA is the tool of the firearms industry. I found that to be 100 percent wrong. It's exactly opposite. The NRA ran the industry unofficially; everything it did set the pace for the gun industry. Nobody I ever met in the industry spoke ill of the NRA, ran afoul of them, ever did anything that the NRA didn't tacitly approve. It was such an incredibly effective and aligned messaging machine. NRA-ism is not going anywhere, even if the NRA as an organization is somewhat weakened.

M.O.: You write about racism in relation to the NRA and the culture war. Talk a little about that.

R.B.: Most of the industry pushback [about Gunfight] was quiet and I think very purposely trying not to give the book any oxygen. But the most vocal pushback I got was 160

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over my claims of racism in the industry. I want to be really clear about what I mean. It's not like I saw KKK hoods marching up and down tradeshow aisles. What I saw is that anything that could drive angst and fear and division would either be overtly used or overtly forgotten or excused.

People in the industry, I'm quite sure, believe themselves not to be racist and probably aren't racist.

Yet, the NRA tolerated, I believe even sometimes encouraged, very racist things. That really accelerated in and around the election of President Obama. Fast forward to the Trump administration where Trump would claim he's not racist. But then so many racist elements were used or winked at. Again, it’s another component of what was first developed by the NRA as a way to drive social angst or a way to look away from it or just quietly fuel it. The NRA did it and then Trump did it. The parallels are just too uncanny.

M.O.: So, let's go back to responsibility. What does that look like in your mind for politicians, for the NRA, for the gun industry?

R.B.: I start with the freedom and responsibility balance.

I don't think responsibility looks like eliminating freedoms. I think it looks like tempering freedoms. We value a freedom to drive from one place to the other. But we don't value it so much that we think it's OK to go 90 mph in a school zone. Our freedom is limited: you may be late to work, you may want to speed, but you don't do it. The same thing needs to apply to guns. There's almost nothing I can imagine that's more important to be responsible with than a gun.

M.O.: We were talking earlier about some of the response to your book. What pushback have you received?

R.B.: When it was published on October 19, I thought, “Here we go.” And something very odd happened: the exact opposite response that I anticipated. [The correspondence was] largely from centrist—some center-right, some center-left—people who identify with the book and love it. And certainly, there are progressive people who like it too and I get kind messages from them and almost all of it’s positive. It's a very rare day that I get a negative one and most of those are just thoughtless, trolling: “You hate guns and you're a commie and you're an asshole and hope you fall off the earth and die.” Our social media world has encouraged those kinds of comments. The stuff I'm getting though, the positive stuff, is heartfelt.

Ryan Busse, then a vice president of Kimber firearms, speaks at the Rally for Public Lands in the Montana state Capitol in 2019. PHOTO BY THOM BRIDGE/ INDEPENDENT RECORD

M.O.: You've heard from some NRA members. Have you heard from the industry or the lobby itself ?

R.B.: No response. And I think that's quite purposeful.

Again, there's really nothing to debate in the book. It's just my life and my history and what happened to me, so I'm happy to chat with any of them.

M.O.: In the book, you talk about a scale of how many guns are sold in the U.S. R.B.: I think it's important for readers to understand that what's going on in the United States, the amount of guns being sold directly corresponds to the amount of hate and vitriol and political division in your life. If you think back to the most tumultuous cultural time that you and I have ever lived through, that was probably that COVID March of 2020 to election time. BLM rallies, riots in big cities, people being shot, people intimidating my son at protests. COVID lockdowns, election fraud. Holy smokes did we live through a lot.

Well, what 11 months do you think the highest gun sales in the history of the country are? Those 11 months.

Why is it that the same thing that drives the most hatefilled, tumultuous, divisive time in our cultural and political life also drives gun sales? That's where we are. There's this weird, dangerous symbiosis between those two.

Busse published Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America in October of 2021. The New York Times described the book as “part memoir, part treatise on gun policy in America.” OUTLAW PARTNERS PHOTO

M.O.: Is it fear?

R.B.: It's all based on fear. And nobody that I've ever seen is better at stirring up irrational fear than the NRA. When I started in the industry, an average of about 350,000 guns a month were sold in United States. And that sounds like a lot. During that political tumult that we just described, between 2 [million] and 2.5 million guns a month were sold in the United States. And if you need me to do the math for you, that's a 614 percent increase. If you need me to do the math on the hate and division, and vitriol in our lives, I think it's an infinite percentage increase. Do I think the fact that both of those graphs [lie] right on top of each other as a coincidence? No, I don't.

M.O.: Continue that graph. What does that look like?

R.B.: That graph in and of itself is pretty frightening. To me, the exceptionally frightening part is where the graph is headed. What do the next two to five years look like?

It's a steady line. In both cases, anybody that looks at graphs would say this is going further up and it's going further up fast. That should frighten the hell out of us. What does that look like? More guns, more hate, more division, more conspiracy theories. We either do something about it or that's where the graph is going.

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Armed men stand near the Flathead County Veterans Memorial as hundreds of protesters gathered in Kalispell for the BLM rally to denounce police violence against people of color on June 6, 2020. PHOTO BY HUNTER D’ANTUANO/FLATHEAD BEACON

M.O.: What do we do?

R.B.: First, we understand where it started. And then … we start leaning on our friends and family. It has to start individually with us starting to insist upon responsibility again. I don't think politics is going to fix culture. I think culture has to fix the politics. Let's be a leader on this.

Somebody needs to stand up in the room and say it's OK to do it. That's what I hope the book does.

M.O.: That it brings some level of accountability to the situation.

Busse and his son Badge at the June 2020 Kalispell BLM rally.

A few minutes after this picture was taken, the opening scene in Gunfight occurred. (An armed counterprotester attacked Badge as described in the book.) PHOTO COURTESY OF RYAN BUSSE

R.B.: Yeah. And reframes the argument, right? Again, it's not taking people's freedoms. No, this is responsibility.

This is what has to happen in a society or we're going to have dead kids in the school zone. We don't want that. You ask about this proliferation of guns. You're scared, I'm scared, everybody's scared. We all buy guns; we all are Kyle Rittenhouse. We all go down to the rally. We're all on different sides and we all shoot each other. It might all be legal, but it doesn't sound like the society I want to live in. We as individuals have to start reinserting responsibility in our everyday lives.

CALL TO ACTION:

Busse says responsibility and commonsense laws should be implemented, including increased background checks and red flag laws allowing law enforcement officials to remove guns from those posing a threat to themselves or others.

M.O.: What do you recommend for how to unite Americans around a common cause on guns, and move beyond the rhetorical weaponization that has made it a political polemic?

R.B.: First, we need to demand a return to basic norms of responsibility. That means decent people must pressure those who are irresponsible.

Second, we must embrace responsibility as a necessary counterbalance to our rights. This means commonsense regulations like background 162

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checks or red flag laws should be no-brainers because responsible gun owners want to keep the bad guys from getting guns.

M.O. Is there a political fix?

R.B.: There should be a political fix for some of these things, yes. But politics follows culture and that means responsible gun owners will need to demand legislation and return to norms before the politics kick in.

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7th Annual Big Sky Art Auction

Collectors Collecting July 13th-16th, 2022

Join us in the Grand Tent on the Plaza of the Wilson Hotel in Big Sky, Montana.

The 7th Annual Big Sky Art Auction will feature carefully curated paintings, photography, bronzes, furniture, and jewelry crafted by skilled artists.

This year’s theme is Collectors Collecting.

There will be three panel discussions that will highlight the theme.

A portion of sales will go to this year’s beneficiaries: Warriors and Quiet Waters, Big Sky Bravery, Bozeman Art Museum, Gallatin River Task Force, Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Big Sky Arts Council and Big Sky Community Organization.

Trish Stevenson, Hot Pursuit, 12” x 15”

Terry Nybo, Winter Silence, 18” X 24”

Gary Bryd, Wondering What’s Beyond, 22” x 28”

Cliff Rossberg, Standing His Ground, 24” x 20”

Averi Iris, The Story Inside, 24” x 20” x 2”

Auction Schedule July 1st at 5:30pm Preview at Bozeman Art Museum and Virtual Bidding Begins July 8th at 5:30pm Art Walk in Big Sky July 13th at 4p.m. Grand Tent is Open July 16th at 6p.m. Live Bidding takes place July 16th at 8:30p.m. Virtual and Live Bidding ends

PRE-REGISTER WITH AUCTRIA Ott Jones, Precarious Pinnacle, 8.5” x 6” x 3.5”

Information and schedule also available at bigskyartauction.com

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LAST LIGH T

Look down on our reality. Is this image a mirror for where we are and where we’re going? We decide our path forward.

Which direction will we choose?

CALL TO ACTION

Send us your thoughts. Submit a letter to the editor to joe@outlaw.partners and we’ll publish them online and in the winter 2022-2023 edition of Mountain Outlaw magazine. Thank you for reading. Let’s take action.

PHOTO BY CHRIS KAMMAN

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