Baby, it’s cold outside
Our first taste of real winter has arrived in Montana with a vengeance, just in time for Thanksgiving. It was 9 degrees above zero when I made this picture of Katie and the forecast calls for “significant accumulations” of snow for the next few days with lows reaching down 13 degrees below zero on Tuesday. Can you smell the ski wax being applied in the garage?
Strong Woman
Meet Elsie Fox, 101 when I photographed her in 2009 at her Miles City home. Elsie grew up on a hardscrabble ranch near Broadus, rode a horse to the one-room school a mile away and was a member of the Communist Party during the Great Depression. J. Edgar Hoover called her a “dangerous woman.”
Great Workshop
Doug Loneman and I run Montana Photography Workshops together and we currently have an excellent group of students learning the basics of photography. On Saturday, we went downtown and worked in an urban setting. The students made some great pictures.
I’m flattered
It’s always nice when people pay you a compliment. It’s nicer when they pay your several. And it’s still nicer when they do so in writing. Thanks to Todd Wilkinson and Wildlife Art Journal for this article.
Winter’s coming
We’ve had a cold spell recently here in Montana, a reminder that winter is coming soon. This picture of ice forming on the Yellowstone River south of Livingston was made in 2006.
True Western Trashion
Even though we can get a little isolated up here in Big Sky Country, we still have people who are passionate about making the world a better place. Like the Engineers Without Borders chapter at Montana State University here in Bozeman. Every year, they get people to make costumes out of trash — everything from newspaper to gum wrappers to old tire inner tubes to shopping bags — and then parade down a runway to show it off. The money they raise goes to bringing clean drinking water and improved sanitation to rural areas of Kenya.
World-Wide Montana
Don and Ramona Linabary of Belgrade raised two biological children and then adopted these four kids from Sierra Leone and Bogata. The first two arrived in 2000 and the remaining two came in 2006. It hasn’t been all smooth sailing, but all four are doing great now.
Farming’s Future
These young people are actually getting into farming in Montana. And that means going against the current trend. They’re all going in with their eyes wide open and they’re all trying something new, growing organic wheat and produce on the small plots of land they have access to.
Time for Something Pretty
Glacier National Park celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2010. Even if global warming is melting the glaciers inside Glacier, it’s still a fantastically beautiful place.
World Wide Bozeman
Eldon Leep, carrying the door, and his son Bruce own a construction company in Bozeman, Mont., but were tired of building trophy homes and wanted to do something to make the world a better place. So they started making these “Habihuts” which can be shipped easily, constructed on site easily, and give durable shelter to places like Haiti and rural Kenya, where housing needs are crucial, immediate and woefully under served.
Thomas Lee True West 
