“I want to see people enjoy this country the way it was meant to be enjoyed, the way God created it,” says Tim Faber, speaking about Montana’s arid, rough-hewn Missouri River Breaks. “It’s a place like no other place in the world.” Faber grew up on a cattle ranch in the Bear’s Paw Mountains east […]
Ron Selden
Fighting for the Rocky Mountain Front: Montana rancher Karl Rappold
DUPUYER, Montana — Montana’s spectacular Rocky Mountain Front is known for its window-rattling winds. But Karl Rappold, a former rodeo cowboy who raises cattle here, says he was still surprised to get blown out of his saddle — literally — while herding stock last year. The winds that day were clocked at over 120 mph, […]
Journalism’s dirty little secret
Ray Ring’s excellent piece on the shortcomings of Western newspapers (HCN, 10/13/03: The Big Story Written Small) brought back a lot of memories from my own daily reporting days. His story, and the recent report from the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources, reveal a dirty little secret: Too many of our newspapers are skewering […]
Battle brews over a wilderness mother lode
Activists say Montana’s Rock Creek Mine would harm grizzly, bull trout and clean water
Montana guts a green law
Environmentalists fear life in the post-MEPA era
An activist to the end
As a writer in San Francisco in the 1970s, Tary Mocabee was one of the first to explain the inner workings of automatic teller machines, a technological advancement that she jokingly equated with psychoanalysis: Both involve pressing crucial buttons. Ironically, Mocabee pushed a lot of political buttons over the past 20 years as a Montana […]
Republicans undermine a bedrock environmental law
Industry launches an all-out assault on the Montana Environmental Policy Act
What’s best for a crumbling treasure?
Plans to rescue Glacier’s hotels could be a sweetheart deal for big business in a national park
A test case on access
MONTANA A federal judge says a family living inside Montana’s Glacier National Park can no longer use a snowmobile to access their property. Former Denver residents Jack and Stephanie McFarland sued Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in Missoula’s U.S. District Court on Feb. 2. The McFarlands said park officials had acted improperly when they refused to […]
One proposal nearly runs aground
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Last spring, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt got to have some fun. He took a raft trip on Montana’s Missouri River Breaks accompanied by author and filmmaker Dayton Duncan and historian Stephen Ambrose, author of Undaunted Courage, a recent and highly popular telling of the […]
Tribes beat back oil giants
PABLO, Mont. – In a last-ditch effort to renew an easement for a petroleum pipeline through the Flathead Indian Reservation, the Yellowstone Pipe Line Co. ran an extraordinary full-page ad last summer in the Char Koosta News, the newspaper of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes. “We’ve done serious damage to the land,” the company […]
