Dear Friends On a July day in 2019, I navigated my pickup truck up the endless logging road switchbacks that wound their way upward and across the North Fork of Hat Creek drainage in the Salmon River Mountains. With me were four scientists from all over the US; specialists in fields somehow …
The Last Beaverslide
Photos in this story were taken by Kathy Hunt. Currently based in Arizona, she still is passionate about telling the story of ranching in the West through her pictures. You can see more of her wonderful images on her Facebook page Here. Dear Friends “It’s gone,†Caryl plainly stated as …
The Wild Ones
This story comes from Abby, second of the Elzinga sisters. Abby lives a few miles from the ranch with her 3 kids and husband, Ethan. It was just Becky and I in the front, driving the long, dark road home from Salmon. My three little kids snored in their car seats in the back, rocked to sleep by …
Are Fearsome Herbivores History?
Dear Friends Sometimes I am grateful to be clad in the cover of steel and safety glass. And to be racing along at 55 MPH. Because if I was simply a human on two legs in the deep winter white as we drove through in a sort of snowplow carved tunnel, I am almost certain the fiercest herbivore would …
Who Chose Who
My eyes notice them, but my mind does not. It's a subtle peppering of dots, blending into the natural mosaic of grassland and sage on a distant ridge. I'd see it, register it, but the conscious level of my brain would dismiss it as rocks or a sporadically placed stand of antelope bitterbrush. But …
Death on the Trail of Yellow?
“There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;It’s luring me on as of old;Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wantingSo much as just finding the gold.†-Robert Service, from ‘The Spell of the Yukon.†“Hey Marc. Chris. Check this out.†I gestured into the murk of a thick …