For we Westerners, no Earth element today unites us more urgently in common cause than water flowing through rivers, yet competing human uses often create battlefields of winners and losers. Ironically, among of the biggest casualties are the natural things rivers support. Few water management issues are more contentious and...

When a grizzly bear charged Keegan David, he had seconds to react. He shared his story with Mountain Journal. The sun beat down on his neck as he pushed through shoulder-high sage and branches of white bark pine. Tall Douglas firs threw spots of shade that at this elevation, despite the 82-degree weather, still held small pockets of snow. It wasn’t quite noon, but even in mid-May and high in the Montana mountains, Keegan David was hot. He removed his pack, took a sip of water from a nearby stream, and continued on. “I’m not going to see anybody,” the 33-year-old thought to himself. “I’m not even on a trail.”

Howie Garber’s new book touches on the beauty of wildness through a photographer’s lens. Today in Teton Valley, Idaho, straight across the high ridgelines of the Tetons from Jackson Hole, there is a contingent of citizens deeply concerned about the future of their community. Old-guard Mormon dirt farmers,...

Billings as a city sits along the Yellowstone River in a zone of transition, connecting two very different Montanas—the one in the boom-boom western part of the state where forest-coated mountains and breathtaking river valleys are coping with growing pains, and the rolling, largely treeless expanse of the state holding long vistas that stretch for hundreds of miles toward the rising sun.

Todd Johnson debuts a new column called "Protecting the Home Land" “Amy, I can’t take another day in this job.”. I had come home from another unfulfilling day at a financial firm I had started working at eight months prior, and I knew that my time there was coming to an end.

John Maclean writes the foreword to Hemingway’s early masterpiece in the recently published ‘Centennial Edition'. When I was a youngster struggling to reconcile a life split between a great community of learning in the Midwest and a log cabin in Montana, my father gave me Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” to read. The story came as a revelation. My parents hailed from Montana, where we spent our summers, and they both worked at the University of Chicago, my father as a professor of English and my mother as an administrator for the university’s medical center.

Teton County, Wyoming is unique. It’s 97 percent public land, consisting of the southern part of Yellowstone National Park, Jackson Hole and the Tetons, the headwaters of the Snake River and the National Elk Refuge, the Gros Ventes and the northern end of the Wyoming Range. It’s as lovely...

Park incident under investigation after witnesses report seeing man push bison calf up hill from Lamar River to roadway. Law enforcement officers in Yellowstone National Park are searching for an unidentified man who caused the death of a bison calf on May 20. In a May 23 statement, the National Park Service said the man “intentionally disturbed the calf [resulting] in the death of the calf.” The incident is currently under investigation.

My friendship with Ray Ring has been primarily as a cohort. We’ve both walked through the long fire of writing about environmental issues in the West, occasionally having bylines in the same publications and sometimes exchanging notes about stories we’ve been working on as competitors. In Greater Yellowstone,...

Wanting to name the priceless landmarks she visits in Greater Yellowstone’s great outdoors, MoJo columnist Susan Marsh explores the power behind magical places. In early spring (which is not until May most years), I often spend time in the low rumpled foothills between the Teton and Gros Ventre Ranges, where the roads are dirt, trails are few and official geographic names pretty much nonexistent.

In Park County, just over the northern border of Yellowstone National Park near Gardiner, Montana, the latest saga in a decades-long dogfight over proposed hardrock mines at the park’s doorstep involves a rare occurrence: a nonprofit conservation organization wants to buy mineral rights from a mining company in an attempt to protect the land, waterways and wildlife adjacent to the park.

Emerging with her 18th cub as part of a historic legendary life, 399 is 27, long in the tooth and still transforming our perceptions of grizzlies. Now it's our turn to be on best behavior. For 27 years, Jackson Hole Grizzly 399 has been strolling into human, biological and conservation...

At Mountain Journal, as our readers know, we salute the role that fine art can play in elevating public awareness. From the storytelling evident in pictographs, petroglyphs, indigenous pottery and ledger art to the paintings by Thomas Moran which helped convince Congress to set aside Yellowstone as the world's first national park—and in innumerable other examples—the arts cause us to stop and reflect.

As a conservationist who drags along the blunted shadow of George Washington Hayduke, hiring a law firm to do your business seems a little tame. You should be out there with some kind of monkeywrench, the folklore preaches. But protecting America’s grizzly bears—whose numbers, you sometimes hear 100,000, once roamed...

Struggling remote communities can benefit by keeping prehistoric bones in area where they are found, Adam Larson says in this piece from Writers on the Range. EDITOR'S NOTE: In this latest Writers on the Range essay, Adam Larson discusses the history of people coming West and digging up dinosaur bones in windswept badland areas of Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. Today, there is a growing movement, he says, to keep excavated bones in the region and have them displayed in local museums where they can attract visitors, educate the public and generate tourist dollars for the local economy. It's a better alternative to having the bones end up in distant big city museums or private collections. Larson makes an excellent point. We at Mountain Journal would add one note of caution, especially in the age of social media when sharing posts of "new discoveries" can result in large numbers of people showing up in places and disturbing sites that are unmanaged or unguarded. Whenever unscrupulous amateurs get involved in hunting for artifacts, petrified wood or natural foods (think edible mushrooms) that can be sold for huge profit, trouble has often ensued. We are now dealing with the negative impacts of people pilfering ancient indigenous cultural sites in order to sell pots, stone points and burial objects on the black or open market. With mushrooms, the industrialization of the once quaint pastime of searching for morels and other fungi has created conflict in some national forests over the years. In the world of dinosaur bone hunters, which dates to the late 19th century in the West, the legacy of amateurs destroying important paleontological sites or battling over possession is well known. Read Larson's provocative piece and let us know what you think by sending along a comment. We may print it at the end of Larson's piece. Whatever you write, keep it short, civil and on point. —Mountain Journal.

MoJo interviews Jill Ellwood with One Valley Community Foundation about Give Big's history and unprecedented success. One Valley Community Foundation launched the Give Big Gallatin Valley fundraising event in 2015 and over the years it has grown exponentially. The event is building support for the human threads of community that take multiple forms but underscoring it all is the natural environment; what makes the Gallatin Valley world class and so rare in the modern world.

This high-profile resort community is at 'very high risk to wildfire' and an emblem for the dangers of building in the Wildland-Urban Interface. Part 3 in MoJo's ongoing series. Driving south on Highway 191 from Bozeman, Montana, the earth is dry and cracked along the dropping Gallatin River. Fly fishers...

Two sets of sandhill crane families erupted in conversation this morning, checking out the landscape in the Cottonwood Creek drainage near the Crazy Mountains, still full of snow and ice but broadcasting their voices up and out from a natural Greek amphitheater. I could see the families, three birds in each, flapping, talking, taking wing, circling.

With a background in science and private land conservation, Wiese says the time is now to rally for Greater Yellowstone as the region comes under increasing human pressure. By the numbers, the Greater Yellowstone region is roughly 24 million acres in size, with threads of biological connectivity that stretch like tendrils out much farther. Its rivers affect the lives of millions of people hundreds and thousands of miles away. Its terrestrial wildlife intermixes with species from other ecosystems and is unsurpassed.

Grizzlies are out and wildlife is severely stressed. States issue warnings that recreationists need to be smart and, most importantly, respect space of animals or they could perish. by Todd Wilkinson. It’s been a long winter for people, and a grim one for wildlife and livestock in the interior West,...