My Wilderness Life: One Man's Search for Meaning in Montana's Wilderness

My Wilderness Life: One Man's Search for Meaning in Montana's Wilderness
Author: John Fraley
Publisher: Farcountry Press
Total Pages: 348
Release:
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1560378344

A wildlife biologist's journey of discovery through Montana's wilderness As young men, John Fraley and Terry McCoy were kindred spirits, drawn to Montana’s most remote, rugged, wild places. Tragically, one of them died young, his wilderness dreams cut short. The other went on to a forty-year career studying fish and furbearers in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. My Wilderness Life chronicles John Fraley’s lifelong love of all places wild and his obsession with uncovering what happened on the August 1974 morning when Terry McCoy’s airplane crashed in what would become the Welcome Creek Wilderness. Join Fraley on a frantic search to find his friend, and also on epic treks to traverse an impassable river canyon, snorkel with pure westslope cutthroat trout, retrace the footsteps of conservation icon Bud Moore, track lynx and mountain lions across the Great Bear Wilderness in winter, hike 42 miles through the Bob in a single day, and much more. At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, My Wilderness Life reveals how one man’s unfulfilled dreams can inspire another’s adventures. Wilderness risks and rewards come alive in first-hand accounts of daring escapades, solo treks, and a few foolhardy misadventures. An inside glimpse of the life of a fisheries biologist in the backcountry. Amply illustrated with 100 black-and-white photographs.

My Wilderness Life: One Man's Search for Meaning in Montana's Backcountry

My Wilderness Life: One Man's Search for Meaning in Montana's Backcountry
Author: John Fraley
Publisher: Farcountry Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-11-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781560378228

As young men, John Fraley and Terry McCoy were kindred spirits, drawn to Montana's most remote, rugged, wild places. Tragically, one of them died young, his wilderness dreams cut short. The other went on to a forty-year career studying fish and furbearers in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. My Wilderness Life tells of John Fraley's life-long love of all places wild, and his obsession with uncovering what happened in August 1974 when Terry McCoy's airplane crashed in what would become the Welcome Creek Wilderness. Join Fraley on a frantic search to find his friend, and on epic treks to traverse an impassable river canyon, snorkel with pure westslope cutthroat trout, retrace the footsteps of conservation icon Bud Moore, track lynx and mountain lions across the Great Bear Wilderness in winter, hike 42 miles through the Bob in a single day, and much more. At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, My Wilderness Life reveals how one man's unfulfilled dreams can inspire another's adventures.

A Woman's Way West: In and Around Glacier National Park, 1925 to 1990

A Woman's Way West: In and Around Glacier National Park, 1925 to 1990
Author: John Fraley
Publisher: Farcountry Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2020-02-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1560377712

Doris Ashley left Iowa and came to Montana as the frontier era came to a close and the hard transition to the modern West began. In 1925, already a widow at the age of twenty-four, she took a job as “cheap help” in Glacier National Park and thus began a lifelong affair with Montana’s landscape, wildlife, and people. Doris soon met the love of her life, native son Dan Huffine, another park worker with an abiding love for the region. Together, they shared many adventures over the next sixty years, helping to shape the character of northwest Montana and participating in the growth of Glacier Park on both sides of the Continental Divide. Between them, the Huffines shared stints as backcountry park ranger, driver of the classic red tour buses in the park, and cook for the crew that did the perilous work surveying the famous Going-to-the-Sun Road. The couple operated tourist camps along the Glacier Park boundary and became co-proprietors of the Huffine Montana Museum. Many people considered the couple endearingly eccentric, and for good reason, as they kept skunks, badgers, coyotes, bears, a mountain goat, and a beaver as pets. The Huffines were also world-class raconteurs, and enjoyed telling their tales later in life to author John Fraley, who shared their love of the outdoors and of Glacier Park. Using many hours of tape recordings, numerous journals, and a great deal of research, Fraley has pieced together the story of Doris’s early life in Iowa, her fateful meeting with Dan, and their love story, which is also very much a work story—a tale of building a life together while at the same time helping to shape the “Crown of the Continent” region.

Wild Spectacle

Wild Spectacle
Author: Janisse Ray
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1595349588

Looking for adventure and continuing a process of self-discovery, Janisse Ray has repeatedly set out to immerse herself in wildness, to be wild, and to learn what wildness can teach us. From overwintering with monarch butterflies in Mexico to counting birds in Belize, the stories in Wild Spectacle capture her luckiest moments—ones of heart-pounding amazement, discovery of romance, and moving toward living more wisely. In Ray’s worst moments she crosses boundaries to encounter danger and embrace sadness. Anchored firmly in two places Ray has called home—Montana and southern Georgia—the sixteen essays here span a landscape from Alaska to Central America, connecting common elements in the ecosystems of people and place. One of her abiding griefs is that she has missed the sights of explorers like Bartram, Sacagawea, and Carver: flocks of passenger pigeons, routes of wolves, herds of bison. She craves a wilder world and documents encounters that are rare in a time of disappearing habitat, declining biodiversity, and a world too slowly coming to terms with climate change. In an age of increasingly virtual, urban life, Ray embraces the intentionality of trying to be a better person balanced with seeking out natural spectacle, abundance, and less trammeled environments. She questions what it means to travel into the wild as a woman, speculates on the impacts of ecotourism and travel in general, questions assumptions about eating from the land, and appeals to future generations to make substantive change. Wild Spectacle explores our first home, the wild earth, and invites us to question its known and unknown beauties and curiosities.

Grizzly Years

Grizzly Years
Author: Doug Peacock
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 142993347X

For nearly twenty years, alone and unarmed, author Doug Peacock traversed the rugged mountains of Montana and Wyoming tracking the magnificent grizzly. His thrilling narrative takes us into the bear's habitat, where we observe directly this majestic animal's behavior, from hunting strategies, mating patterns, and denning habits to social hierarchy and methods of communication. As Peacock tracks the bears, his story turns into a thrilling narrative about the breaking down of suspicion between man and beast in the wild.

The Stranger in the Woods

The Stranger in the Woods
Author: Michael Finkel
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2018-01-30
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1101911530

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The remarkable true story of a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, making this dream a reality—not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his own. “A meditation on solitude, wildness and survival.” —The Wall Street Journal In 1986, a shy and intelligent twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the forest. He would not have a conversation with another human being until nearly three decades later, when he was arrested for stealing food. Living in a tent even through brutal winters, he had survived by his wits and courage, developing ingenious ways to store edibles and water, and to avoid freezing to death. He broke into nearby cottages for food, clothing, reading material, and other provisions, taking only what he needed but terrifying a community never able to solve the mysterious burglaries. Based on extensive interviews with Knight himself, this is a vividly detailed account of his secluded life—why did he leave? what did he learn?—as well as the challenges he has faced since returning to the world. It is a gripping story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude, community, and what makes a good life, and a deeply moving portrait of a man who was determined to live his own way, and succeeded.

God in the Wilderness

God in the Wilderness
Author: Jamie Korngold
Publisher: Harmony
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2008-04-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0767929071

Rabbi Jamie Korngold has always loved the outdoors, the place where humankind first met with God. Whether it’s mountaineering, running ultramarathons, or just sitting by a stream, she finds her spirituality and Judaism thrive most in the wilderness. In her work as the Adventure Rabbi, leading groups toward spiritual fulfillment in the outdoors, Korngold has uncovered the rich traditions and lessons God taught our ancestors in the wild. In God in the Wilderness Korngold uses rabbinic wisdom and witty insights to guide readers through the Bible, showing people of all faiths that, despite the hectic pace of life today, it is vital for us to reclaim these lessons, awaken our inner spirituality, and find meaning, tranquillity, and purpose in our lives.

Wild River Pioneers (2nd Ed): Adventures in the Middle Fork of the Flathead, Great Bear Wilderness, and Glacier Np, New & Updated

Wild River Pioneers (2nd Ed): Adventures in the Middle Fork of the Flathead, Great Bear Wilderness, and Glacier Np, New & Updated
Author: John Fraley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2021-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781560377948

"Montana retains much of its wild character, including big, unspoiled landscapes and grizzly bears, wolves, and mountain lions. Montanans themselves can also be wild characters, prone to less than civilized adventures. Perhaps no corner of the Big Sky exemplifies this double quality more than the Middle Fork of the Flathead River drainage. From its headwaters in the Bob Marshall Wilderness to the long run along Glacier National Park’s southern boundary, the Middle Fork defines “wild and scenic.” And its human stories are equally wild and epic. In Wild River Pioneers, you’ll find true stories of outlaw shootouts, grizzly bear attacks, a murder (and a hanging), secret caves, fortunes won and lost, the Cattle Queen of Montana, a wily Josephine Doody bootlegging liquor in Glacier National Park, and an ice cream-eating pet bear. This new second edition features additional photographs and updates on many of the characters and their final resting places. Come along to the top of the Great Bear Wilderness with the ashes of Betty the Trapper. The Bootleg Lady, Josephine Doody, is now a celebrity in Glacier’s folklore; learn the fate of her homestead in Glacier. And after nearly a century, Flathead County’s first sheriff, Big Joe Gangner, finally gets the monument and headstone he deserves. Come learn about Glacier National Park and the Great Bear Wilderness and a lot more." – publisher description.

Satellites in the High Country

Satellites in the High Country
Author: Jason Mark
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1610915801

In Satellites in the High Country, journalist and adventurer Jason Mark travels beyond the bright lights and certainties of our cities to seek wildness wherever it survives. In California's Point Reyes National Seashore, a battle over oyster farming and designated wilderness pits former allies against one another, as locals wonder whether wilderness should be untouched, farmed, or something in between. In Washington's Cascade Mountains, a modern-day wild woman and her students learn to tan hides and start fires without matches, attempting to connect with a primal past out of reach for the rest of society. And in Colorado's High Country, dark skies and clear air reveal a breathtaking expanse of stars, flawed only by the arc of a satellite passing--beauty interrupted by the traffic of a million conversations. These expeditions to the edges of civilization's grid show us that, although our notions of pristine nature may be shattering, the mystery of the wild still exists--and in fact, it is more crucial than ever.