“We’re moving to Montana,” I told my wife one day in late March, 1998.

I had just been offered a job as the photographer for the Hungry Horse News. It was a newspaper I knew nothing about, other than it had won a Pulitzer Prize and it was close to Glacier National Park.

I grew up in a suburb of Rochester, New York, but my grandparents and their  sons ran a dairy farm in a small town between Rochester and Buffalo, so I spent every school vacation I had and every summer on the farm until my late teens.

But I found writing, fishing and wandering around in the woods to my greater liking in my  late teens than “jerking teats” as dairy farmers called it.

So I stopped working at the farm and fished and worked odd jobs my senior year of high school and well into college. I think one year I figured I fished more than 200 days.

After high school I got a degree in English from the state University of New York in Brockport (my grandmother, in addition to being a farm wife, was also the editor of the Albion Advertiser, a community weekly) and met my wife shortly  before I graduated.

We moved from the Rochester area to a little town called Almond, New York. I started my journalism career writing news for a local radio station and then took a reporter job at a daily newspaper in Hornell, New York, called the Hornell Evening Tribune, which was about 10 minutes or so from Almond.

Hornell was a run-down depressed little town at the time and the reporters had to shoot their own photos and mine, early on, were awful. I got sick of them being awful and got some advice from a well-known wildlife photographer named Charles Alsheimer. He namely told me to stop using the cheap camera I had and buy some decent Nikon gear. 

I took that advice and while I could always turn a word, photography was still much more difficult, so I enjoyed it more.

My favorite camera back then was a Nikon F4, a beast of a 35 mm film camera that I used until the mount literally fell off the camera.

I got better though and eventually the editor of the Tribune made photographer much of the newspaper and while they wouldn’t pay me any overtime or even mileage, they did help get me press passes to shoot Buffalo Bills games.

I would make the 80-plus mile drive from my house to Rich Stadium for almost every home game for about three years. The most notable photo I can remember was shooting quarterback Jim Kelly’s last play as a Bill. He was sacked by a New York Jet lineman and never played again.

The Bills games as well as plenty of local sports and other photos caught the eye of Brian Kennedy, who was the owner and editor of the Hungry Horse news at the time.

My goal was always to move out West, so I accepted the job with virtually no planning, though it did pay more money than the job I had.

My wife was 8 months pregnant when I put my canoe on my pickup truck and drove to Columbia Falls in three days.

I had never been to Montana and when I got to Billings and then Bozeman and then Missoula I thought I made a grave mistake, as there were no trees to speak of and I love trees. But once at Flathead Lake forests came into view and I immediately was enamored with Columbia Falls.

“It’s so pretty it makes your head hurt,” I told my brother-in-law.

I went to work the day after I arrived and Kennedy’s assignments early on were all “grip and grins” of one sort or another. I didn’t get a Glacier Park assignment until later in the spring when crews plowed the Going-to-the-Sun Road. If I really wanted to photograph Glacier I’d have to do it on my own time, I quickly learned.

I learned a lot from Kennedy and Mel Ruder on how to photograph this landscape. Although I knew Ruder only briefly, and only worked for Kennedy about 8 months, their insight was invaluable. 

 Kennedy was often gruff but his advice was spot-on.

We found a house to buy a few months later just down South Nucleus Avenue from the newspaper. 

The decades since have seen tremendous changes in the newspaper industry, of course.

The Hungry Horse News was the first weekly in the state to buy a digital camera, a Nikon D1, in the summer of 2000. It had a whopping 2.7 megapixels and trees would often turn out purple, but it saved us thousands in film costs and hours in the darkroom and we never really looked back (although film was still king when it came to critically important photos up until about 2006).

The cameras got better and better over the years and the main camera I use today, by comparison, has 45 megapixels.

From a news perspective, Columbia Falls saw a sea change from an industrial town with several mills to a more resort-oriented community. Still, timber is an important part of the economy with mills operated by Weyerhaeuser, F.H. Stoltze, RBM Lumber and Smartlam all important employers.

It’s been a fun ride, really, particularly from a local sports perspective. The Columbia Falls state titles in basketball, football, track, soccer, softball, cross country, volleyball, wrestling and speech and debate have all been fun to cover.

We’ve celebrated a Harvard medical school graduate in All-American runner Dr. Derrick Williams as well as a slew of other athletes, many of which have returned to become community leaders and coaches in their own right.

Nowadays I’m just as likely to photograph the kids and even a few grandkids of athletes I covered when they were in high school.

I’ve also been able to cover about 1,000 miles of trails in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and have hiked every trail in Glacier National Park but three (Porcupine Lookout, North Boundary and the Waterton Lakes Trail to the Canada border.)

This job is indeed a lot of work, but like the dairy farm days, I’ve always made time to sneak into the woods, even made a documentary while doing it. I’ve been lucky to photograph all the major critters, including wolverine, lynx and plenty of bears. The only thing I haven’t seen in the wild is porcupine and woodland caribou.

(I have seen a dead porcupine in the road).

At that brings us to the future. The overarching concern for me is the climate. Winters are weak and summers unbearably hot for the most part. As I write this, I have done no long hikes in the past four weeks. It’s just been too hot and smoky from wildfires. Last winter I cross country skied all of three days, as there was little to no low elevation snow. I know there’s concerns about artificial intelligence and social media and a host of other issues, but none of those will matter if we don’t have a healthy planet.

This is what worries me.

As far as newspaper is concerned, we are evolving. The print product may go away someday, or at least be an expensive novelty, but we’re seeing steady growth on the digital side. Readers still enjoy our stories and photos and now, videos. It’s gratifying.

Meanwhile, I need to get to the woods. The dog wants to take a swim in her favorite forest pond and it’s a blistering hot summer day out there.