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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How Montanans are conserving the state’s remaining native prairie.

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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       Go outside. Walk Slowly. Pay attention. Listen. Smell the air. Taste it. Look at the soil and see how it responds to your step. Notice which grasses shine brightest in the morning dew. Compare birds, the differences in wing and shape and flight pattern. Maybe kick over a rock, see what’s under there.
       This is land snorkeling. Doing it could take you almost anywhere, even if you never leave your own neighborhood.
       Think of it like snorkeling a reef. You drift over mysterious turf. You keep your head down, mostly. Everything is cool, so you look it all over, and you wonder. You come back smiling.

Brandon Renkin isn’t very big. Though he’s 15 years old, he weighs just 38 pounds. But it’s almost all heart. The rest of it is brain and spunk, wrapped in a layer of patience. These are things that make a hunter.

Western Art & Architecture

Winter/Spring 09

     Every afternoon for 10 days, John Banovich went to the banks of Botswana’s Khwai River, where families of elephants gathered to eat and drink and bathe.  With 25 trips to Africa under his belt, he’d seen a lot of elephants, but he wanted to see more, to learn more.

     Then, on the eleventh day, he decided to join a group of 12 bulls in the river, slipping into the chest-deep water, among the hippos and crocodiles, trying not to think about mysterious bugs and parasites.

 
Montana State University researcher Gary Strobel’s newest discovery, “myco-diesel,” just might change the world.

The rain has finally stopped, but Ben Renfro is stuck inside on this sunny Florida morning, pushing paper and licking his pencil. He knows he has to do the paperwork — has to, that is, if he wants to set the woods on fire today.

Renfro runs a firetruck for a living, managing a crew for the Bureau of Land Management in Prineville, Oregon, on the dry side of the Cascade Range, where wildfire is no stranger. Over the years, he has learned a thing or two about putting out fires.

But he has traveled to Florida to hone a different set of skills: He’s learning how to start fires and how to make them behave.

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