The Rocky Mountain Land Library asked a panel of Western writers a simple question: What books would you recommend to the next president? What does the next administration need to know about the American West? Our respondents were both generous and inspired with their suggestions. Although I’m sure they would all agree with author Rick […]
Dan Flores
Posted inMay 13, 2002: Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape
Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape
BITTERROOT VALLEY, Mont. – Remember that scene from Dances with Wolves, when Kevin Costner’s character spins through billowing, thigh-deep yellow grassland, his fingers lightly grazing the seedheads? I’ve spent a good stretch of this radiant summer morning working across a prairie in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley doing the same thing, but without that inspiring light touch. […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
In Montana: The view from the ranchette
Montana has its own special pathologies. But the one it shares most visibly with the Mountain West in general features a peculiar symptom – furtive glances at the horizon with the expectation of seeing silhouetted hordes there, as in a Western movie, except that these hordes are driving Land Rovers and eating sushi. There’s a […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
The West that was, and the West that can be
On Jan. 24, 1855, Henry David Thoreau sat down to his journal to reflect on all the ways his homeland had changed since the first English colonists had arrived on the shores of Massachusetts two centuries earlier. For several days, Thoreau had been reading the accounts of some of the earliest settlers. Compared to the […]