Can two countries come together to save a pristine valley?

Excerpt:

Yet isolated though it is by geography, bad roads and weather, the North Fork has been at the center of some of the continent’s thorniest struggles over development.

For a century, people have tried to pull fossil fuels from the ground beneath the valley—on both sides of the border—without much success. A well drilled in the early 20th century in what is now Glacier National Park didn’t produce. During a spike in energy prices in the 1970s and 1980s, oil companies punched deep holes on the Canadian side of the border, seeking oil and gas. In Montana, oil and natural-gas developers purchased rights to drill along parts of the river. In the end, however, the prospective cost of building a permanent mining infrastructure up the wild, 80-mile valley kept the drilling rigs at bay.

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While most bear attacks on humans can be explained, last summer’s predatory attacks near Cooke City remind us that occasionally, bears see humans as food.

After 15 years, millions of dollars and a raft of lawsuits, wolves are here to stay. But who will call the shots?

Scientists in the Northern Rockies labor hard to protect the increasingly rare Canada Lynx. But first, they have to find the elusive creature. And that means diving into the deadfall. There’s no guarantee of success.

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If you hunt in grizzly country, chances are you’re breaking the rules.
That’s because you creep around. You hunt during early morning and evening. You mask your scent and walk into the wind. You usually hunt solo. You stay intensely focused on your prey. This is what hunting requires.
But it’s also the opposite of what bear safety experts say you should do in grizzly country.

Big Sky Journal

Fall, 2007

For me, October is the squinting season, a time to throw my eyes as far as I can, to find little white speckles on a vast sagebrush plain, track them down and make meat of them.

In the process, I’ll become mudded and blooded, dehydrated, scraped up, and wind chapped. It’s something I look forward to every year, right up there with Christmas and the first raft trip of the summer.

The toughness that drove most settlers from Hells Canyon is what kept this place so fruitful for wildlife. For the most part, it’s been spared the energies and damages of mankind, the opposable thumbs and the itch to tinker. Hells Canyon still supports that amazing diversity of life, still has what the rest of the American West once had: vast acreages of native plants and big populations of native critters to eat them and each other. It’s an ecosystem that works.
But much of this is threatened. We saw the invaders.

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Montana Quarterly

Fall 2006

Photography by Thomas Lee.

Ranchers, environmentalists and the government forge an ambitious plan to save the grayling’s last habitat in the lower 48 states.