montana photograph Working Together
I’ve written before about how good land stewardship is a common trait among environmentalists and the agriculture industry. Both want a healthy ecosystem, but there have been problems in the past communicating and working together.
The Gallatin Valley Land Trust is working with local farmers and ranchers to preserve farms and ranches from future development, preserving healthy rivers and wildlife habitat — something many local farmers and ranchers have been doing for generations.
Last summer, I met several of the local landowners that have worked with GVLT. Here’s some of what I saw:
See these on my website.
montana photograph Something Goes Right
These are trying times for all of us. And it’s easy to get sucked into current events that make us feel like everything is going wrong.
Meg Singer of the Montana ACLU gave a presentation about things we can do to improve life on Montana’s Indian reservations the other night here in Bozeman. During the presentation, Ms. Singer talked about the media’s fascination with what she called, “Poverty Porn.”
So often the stories we see about Native Americans are about the despair in their lives. And I’m not saying there isn’t desperation on Montana’s seven Indian reservations. But there are good things happening too.
So it was great to be sent up to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northwest Montana by World Wildlife Fund to cover what’s working up there. I found that most of the efforts center around the bison, which is seen as an anchor for the culture of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes, who call themselves the Buffalo People.
Here’s a few pictures:
The Fort Peck tribes now have a herd of bison culled from Yellowstone National Park that have been quarantined to be sure they are free of disease. The keep them at a place called, the Fort Peck Tribes Cultural Buffalo Herd Ranch Facility .
That was where they held the Buffalo People Summit, where local school children were bussed in to be introduced to the buffalo’s importance to the Assiniboine and Sioux identities.
Also on the Fort Peck Reservation, language skills are being passed on. Young Ethan Three Stars studies with Del First. Three Stars is said to be nearly fluent in the Dakota language.
Ramey Growing Thunder and her husband, Darryl, are big parts of the cultural preservation efforts at Fort Peck. Here, they pick wild turnips with their three children on the reservation.
Family is everything — people within the tribes are rarely just “friends.” They are often referred to as cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. The buffalo are also part of their cultural family.
See these pictures on my website.
montana photograph Time
Our daughter, Katie, has moved out and our nest is empty. While this brings Rena and I feelings of new freedom and pride in the person our daughter is becoming, it also brings an unexpected emptiness to our house and a realization that time moves ever forward.
We’ve been very lucky thus far and we’re grateful. May we all have such happiness in the days ahead.
montana photograph Trying Times
We are a nation divided. And in our house, that doesn’t settle well.
I feel isolated, foolish and stupid to be so surprised that so many of my neighbors feel so radically different than I. And when I look to the future, I’m hard pressed to know what to hope for.
It’s scary.
So when my wife suggested we attend a march and rally in Bozeman yesterday, we went and I’m glad of it. It was nice to connect with others with similar feelings. And the only gestures I saw from passing vehicles were peace signs and thumbs up. So that’s nice.
montana photograph Smokejumpers
I had the great pleasure to work for the fine folks at Bleacher Report this summer on a story about smokejumpers — women and men who jump out of perfectly good airplanes into forest fires. I spent a couple of days at the Aerial Fire Center in West Yellowstone, Mont.
The jumpers are an elite group — experts at a variety of skills who have worked their way up through the ranks of Forest Service fire fighting.
They’re supremely fit people, each given 90 minutes a day to devote to their own personal fitness routine.
They jump wearing 100 pounds of firefighting and camping gear — enough to sustain their efforts unassisted for three days.
And the gear they use is so specialized, they must make most of it themselves. And what they don’t manufacture, they often adapt from other applications.
Time not spent fighting fires is spent maintaining and repacking gear. Parachutes are inflated and inspected before being repacked.
The hours are long and a lot of time is spent away from home and loved ones.
Read the story on the Bleacher Report blog here. See these pictures and more on my website here.
montana photograph Birds of the Hi-Line
During the summer of 2015, the good people of the World Wildlife Fund hired me to spend a couple of weeks up on the Hi-Line in northern Montana photographing a multitude of things. Among those things were the birds in and around the Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge near Malta. Here’s some of what we found:
Black-crowned night heron.
Prairie falcon.
Godwit.
Raven.
Swallow.
Meadowlark.
Burrowing owl.
Cormorant.
Yellow-headed blackbird.
Swallows.
To see these on my website, visit ThomasLeePhoto.com
montana photograph Saco
Grain is a big part of the history of Saco and northern Montana, but locals say this elevator, standing above the railroad and U.S. Highway 2, Saco’s main drag, is scheduled for demolition.
Shaped like a sleeping buffalo, this boulder, once perched above the nearby Milk River, is honored by Montana native peoples in traditional stories and through offerings like tobacco. It was moved to its present location along U.S. Highway 2 just west of Saco in 1967, according to a sign nearby.
Nena Magmend waits on the regulars at the Cabin Cafe she owns with her husband, Andrew, in downtown Saco. Magmend says they remodeled the cafe a few years ago, but kept the original counters, showing the wear from years of elbows.
Robert Plouffe says that when his brother moved into a new home, there was no room for all of his hunting trophies. So Plouffe put them up in the Pay N Save, one of the main businesses in downtown Saco. Plouffe is renowned for his smoked meat products and has a first-rate custom meat processing business.
“We found a nice house for a good price,” says Patty Pollock, 19, of moving to Saco with her boyfriend and family about two years ago from Cut Bank. Pollock’s co-worker at the Pay N Save, Patti Minnerath says she has lived in Saco for 32 years. “It’s very quiet,” she says. “The way I like it.”
Saco lies in the northern great plains, described by some as a desolate place. Still, there was enough traffic at this crossroads for a candidate to think it worthwhile to put up a sign. The candidate, Bruce Meyers, won election to Montana’s House of Representatives in 2014. This picture was made almost a year after that election — or maybe a year before the next election in 2016.
Howard Pippin, 76, remembers his youth in Saco when a lot of small farms added up to a population of about 500. Now, Pippin says outside his home, those small farms have consolidated into larger ones and Saco’s population is more like 170.
Saco’s downtown faces south, toward U.S. Highway 2 and the railroad, so business owners like Dan Desler have to keep up with building maintenance. Desler says he lives most of the year in Eugene, Ore., but has been coming out to Saco for more than 25 years to hunt and fish. Some years back, he went in with Rick Nelson and bought the Saco Motel.
Saco sits atop a natural gas resource known as the Bowdoin Dome. The town has its own gas well and offers residents natural gas for their homes at low prices.
A short drive from Saco, Nelson Reservoir is one of the best places in the state to catch a walleye.
See these on my website: http://bit.ly/2c0Hl3n.
montana photograph Favorite Things Revisited
A batch of favorite things from a good friend with agricultural roots and an urban present:
And this acorn I found last fall but can’t throw away:
You can see more from this project at ThomasLeePhoto.com.
montana photograph Cinderella’s Stash
“You should be Cinderella at least once in your life,” says The N’ Thing’s owner, Bonnie Poser. “And that happens in high school.” Poser stocks more than 1,000 prom dresses at her store in Conrad for customers from all over Montana and into Canada and beyond. Prices are usually around $500, Poser says.
Sixty miles north of Great Falls, Montana, surrounded by grain fields, the ribbon of Interstate 15 passes by Conrad on the plains of northern Montana. Conrad is the unlikely home of a dress shop frequented by people from hundreds of miles away.
Conrad’s agricultural roots aren’t easy to miss. It is the headquarters for Frontline Ag Solutions, one of the largest John Deere dealerships in the region.
“Dresses take on a personality,” Bonnie Poser says. “And that’s how it’s supposed to be.” Poser, 70, opened The N’ Thing, a dress shop in Conrad specializing in prom wear, in 1975.
You won’t find a single computer in the store, Poser says. So to honor the promise not to sell two similar dresses for the same prom, records must be kept on paper.
Styles change and Poser must be current, so new dresses arrive frequently. Yet, the buying process is a skill not easily mastered, Poser says. Dress styles come and go and Poser must choose age-appropriate attire that will appeal to her customers and their parents and chaperones.
An extensive supply of spare jewels is on hand so that in the event a dress loses a sparkle or two, an exact match can be found and sewn into place.
montana photograph Pollinator Patrol
Pollinators, like bees, are important part of the lives of innumerable plants and animals. Without them, many food crops would not exist. And pollinator numbers are declining, according to an article in the current issue of Montana Quarterly.
Laura Burkle is an ecology professor at Montana State University. She and U.S. Forest Service entomologist Kevin Runyon are leading a study of pollinators near Bozeman. They’re trying to determine the effects of global warming on pollinator numbers.
On a hillside south of Bozeman on a sunny April afternoon, the team sets up equipment to measure the scent of small yellow flowers called glacier lilies. While the machines work, the pollinators feeding on the flowers will be caught and then brought back to the lab to be identified, Burkle says. The idea is to gather data over time that may help map the effects of global warming on the plants and the pollinators.
Graduate student Will Glenny sets up to measure the scent of one of the glacier lilies.
From left, Laura Burkle, Justin Runyon and Will Glenny.
http://thomasleephoto.com/True-Stories/20160421MSUPollination/1/
Thomas Lee True West 