Outdoors

BILLINGS – For more than 5,000 years, a stand of whitebark pine trees in the Beartooth Mountains were preserved in an ice patch.

LEWISTON – Fire lookouts occupy an uncommon spot in the world. Their function is simultaneously anachronistic and essential. They exist in wildly remote spaces yet are satellites of human infrastructure.

The first time Angel told me to cast it was off to my left, into a patch of bright blue water. It was the second day of 2025, and we were standing on the front of a panga in Ascension Bay, a pocket of the Caribbean on the southeastern side of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

Steelhead and coho salmon fishing will close on the Methow River on Monday, ending a fishing season that had been reopened for the first time in nine years.

Fly fishing

In case you missed it, I got to sit on stage for an hour last week with Patrick Hutchison, who is my carpentry spirit animal. Along with words and rudimentary craftsmanship, we have a similar love of cashmere and Carhartts – because we’re a sophisticated, writerly kind of wood worker.

LEWISTON – The return of upriver spring chinook to the Columbia River that starts in a few months will nearly mirror the 2024 run, according to fisheries managers.

A Ferry County woman has been named to the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission.

Two wolves in southeastern Washington were killed on Monday in response to a series of attacks on cattle.

SEQUIM, Wash. – Pick up any snowboard and odds are it was made overseas, which means board designers are typically far removed from production.

Conflict between wolves and livestock hit a high in Washington in 2024.

LEWISTON – Idaho, Montana and Wyoming lost their individual efforts to strip grizzly bears of federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Idaho wildlife officials are investigating the illegal shooting of a bald eagle near Sandpoint last month.

Fly fishing

I should have known I’d find them in the trees on their skis, an hour away from the rest of humanity. It was like I had suddenly landed in a flock of wise women or witches clad in Gore-Tex and Swix, swish-swishing their way through the forest. All was quiet beyond the soft rush of Priest River, Idaho, and, of course, the hen clucking of seven women with no particular agenda but nine separate, simultaneous conversations.

A small downy woodpecker forages near Usk, Wash., in this photo by Nia Patton.

Federal land managers plan to start charging day-use fees and increase overnight camping fees at a handful of sites in North Idaho later this year.

Conservation advocates and a federal wildlife agency are offering $20,000 for information on each of three recent wolf poaching incidents in Washington.