Guest Post: Ice Discs

Enjoy this guest post about an unusual ice phenomenon from naturalist Larry Youmans, who lives in the Flathead Valley: I had the camera trained on a perfect 40-foot circle of ice. This was my second disc sighting, same place, and same disc size. I looked down on the...

Traveling in the Backcountry: the essentials

by Tom McKean A cold sweat chills me from under my backpack straps. The rhythm of my ascent up the clean white mountain side hypnotizes me. Slide-clack slide-clack. My skis cut a new climbing track up the wind-drifted slope. I climb up along a sub-ridge with a friend,...

Guest Post: Mystery Butterfly

Observations & photos submitted by naturalist Kim Birck, late July 2014. Yesterday a butterfly I’d never seen before visited my yard. It had the colors of a swallowtail, but no tails, and it didn’t match anything I could find by doing a Google image search for...