The importance of wild rivers hits home to me again on a rainy September weekend as I explore my way deep into a notch valley of the Incomappleux River. I am searching for one of the last remaining stands of old growth cedar and hemlock in the upper Columbia Basin. It’s the last stop on […]
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In search of Springbank Clover
Phase II of my 6,000 mile search for beauty took me on another road trip last week – to the Broughton Archipelago. This smattering of rocky islands between the west coast of British Columbia and Vancouver Island has been home to the Kwakwaka’wakw indigenous tribe for thousands of years. I was drawn to feel for […]
6,000 miles in search of beauty
On the last, long day of driving, La Tortue hauled me up and over Montana’s slice of the Continental Divide between Bozeman and Butte. There, I found a raw yet mystical beauty: rolling dry-scrub mountains dusted with new snow. A rising sun casting an etherial glow. Puffs of low cloud scoured loose to unveil something […]
Finding the headwaters
I cross into Montana and head west, drawn by the allure of Headwaters State Park, about 30 miles west of Bozeman, Montana. The second-longest river in North America begins here, tucked into a wetland east of the Rocky Mountain divide. Every river begins differently. The Missouri’s alpha is actually the confluence of two rivers, the […]
Expansion into Sky
Nebraska shares a boundary with the state of my dreams: Wyoming. I say this not because of the side-by-side signs I saw in a town called Grey Bull (“Obama is a pile of excrement” said one. “Trump hats for sale,” said the other.) Wyoming is the state of my dreams because of its expansive, exhilarating […]
The Keepers of History
A seemingly innocent question posed by my sister led me to spend a day at the county records office in Stockville, Nebraska. “Do you think our grandfather was born in Frontier County, like his older brother?” Our maternal great-grandfather met his wife, married and started a family on a farm near Stockville in 1899. As […]