In this hefty and impressive volume, photographer Audrey Hall brilliantly captures the spirit of the American bison and the landscape of the American West. Woven among her images is a beautifully written essay by author Chase Reynolds Ewald, sharing the bison’s history, cultural significance, and recovery from the brink of extinction, as well as insights from ranchers, wildlife managers, policymakers, and artists.

According to Ewald, “Like many North Americans, bison are the descendants of immigrants. Somewhere around 200,000 years ago, small herds of bison grazed their way east across Beringia, the broad grassy steppe that connected eastern Asia to Alaska when the sea level was three hundred feet lower than it is today,” becoming the first American bison.

The American bison goes by many names. “To scientists and park administrators, it is bison. To many native people, it’s buffalo. To the Lakota, it’s Tatanka.”

Paintings of the prehistoric bison have been found on the walls of caves at Lascaux, dating back as early as 15,000 B.C., and its image remains popular in artwork today. According to artist Terrance Guardipee, when creating a work of art featuring buffalo, “I’m honoring the animal that has sustained my tribe and family for thousands of years. That is what makes me who I am as an artist. I honor my ancestors as truthfully as I can. Hopefully they see me doing it and look favorably upon me.”

This informative and compassionate work of art also includes a forward by natural history presenter and filmmaker John Heminway and an essay by Montana Poet Laureate Henry Real Bird.

A magnificent tribute to this majestic creature.

About the Photographer

Audrey Hall has been working with a camera for two decades. Her career in the visual arts includes over a hundred feature, commercial, documentary, book and fine art projects for a wide variety of national and international clients. A Rotary scholar, she studied photography at the renowned Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. She lives in Montana.

About the Author

Chase Reynolds Ewald has been writing about design, travel and lifestyle for 30 years. She is senior editor of Western Art & Architecture magazine and the author of a dozen books. She resides in Tiburon, California.

Publisher: Gibbs Smith

As author and Montana-based reporter Robert Chaney contends, “Grizzly bears inspire fear in some, reverence in others, and fascination in all.” In his latest work, Chaney confronts the unintended consequences of the successful recovery of this magnificent creature.

Just four decades ago, estimates indicated that only six hundred grizzly bears remained in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, out of the presumed fifty thousand that Lewis and Clark “fought their way past” in 1805. As Chaney notes, “[t]he only predatory animal to receive more mentions in Lewis and Clark’s journals than the grizzly bear was the mosquito.” Further, “Before the War of 1812, North American grizzlies dominated the food pyramid from the one-hundredth meridian west of North Dakota to the California coast and deep into Mexico.” However, “By World War I, only the mountain ranges surrounding Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks sheltered the last breeding populations in the Lower 48 states,” a result primarily due to Americans deliberately removing the grizzly bear from landscapes for which they felt they had better use.

Since receiving federal protection under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the grizzly population in those three states has quadrupled. According to the author, thousands of others inhabit the region stretching from his hometown of Missoula, Montana to Glacier National Park, and tens of thousands more “inhabit northwestern Canada and Alaska, as well as other landscapes around the planet.” This burgeoning number of grizzlies has begun to collide with the increasingly populated landscape of the twenty-first-century American West, and responses to their success story vary, which Chaney explores.

While humans and bears have long shared space, today’s grizzlies are forced to navigate a shrinking amount of wilderness. Ranchers are losing livestock, and parents fear letting their children play in their backyards without supervision. At the same time, “the presence of grizzlies draws many other people to the same landscape in hopes of experiencing some dream of authentic Nature.” Additionally, to the indigenous tribes of the American West, grizzly bears are of a “tremendous cultural, spiritual, and ecological significance,” similar to the significance of the bald eagle as a national symbol for the United States.

Considering all these factors, the challenge now is what to do and where to start. According to the author, humans can begin by rethinking their acceptance of risk and tolerance for inconvenience. “This might require envisioning the management of landscapes less for short-term gain, and for more than just human benefit,” as both the grizzlies’ lives and ours depend on it.

A well-written and thought-provoking analysis of this pressing issue.

About the Author

Robert Chaney is a reporter for the Missoulian. A lifelong Montanan, he covers science and the environment.

Publisher: University of Washington Press

In this captivating travel memoir, author Aaron Gilbreath takes readers along on his journey through the vast interior of California, sandwiched between the mountains of the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Coast Range. Inspired by the 1938 boat trip of historian Frank Latta, from Bakersfield to San Francisco, Gilbreath retraces the trip by car during the drought of 2014.

Weaving Latta’s fascinating narrative with his own, Gilbreath notes that the Valley has become home to some of California’s fastest-growing cities and produces a substantial portion of America’s food supply, as well as some of the nation’s worst air pollution. As Gilbreath contends, “Latta’s boat trip was probably the last of those adventures in this semiwild place, and it marked the beginning of the time when people, not nature, determined the fate of California’s water.”

While the Valley has its problems, it also possesses unique beauty. Gilbreath introduces readers to intriguing individuals that he met on his journey, including farmers, truckers, fellow travelers, librarians, artists, waitresses, a cowboy, and a prostitute. He also describes the region’s nearly lost indigenous cultures and ecosystems, bringing this complex and often overlooked landscape to life.

An essential read to fully grasp the California experience.

About the Author

Aaron Gilbreath is an essayist, a journalist, and previously a contributing editor at Longreads. He has written essays and articles for Harper’s, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and the Dublin Review and his work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. Gilbreath is the author of two essay collections, Everything We Don’t Know: Essays and This Is: Essays on Jazz.

Publisher: Bison Books