Restoring the Pitchfork Ranch tells the story of a decades-long habitat restoration project in southwestern New Mexico. Rancher-owner A. Thomas Cole explains what inspired him and his wife, Lucinda, to turn their retirement into years dedicated to hard work and renewal on 11,300 acres of grass- and wetlands. The Pitchfork Ranch is an inspiring promise for the future in the face of crippling climate change.
This book provides a rare look at the day-to-day details of running the Pitchfork Ranch during the late 1930s. Letters of brothers Eugene F. Williams and J. Gates Williams and of Virgil V. Parr illuminate the great challenges faced by the ranch owners and manager at a time when the rest of the country was trying to recover from the Great Depression and severe drought.
Successful attorney Leslie Montgomery is leaving behind her marriage and career in Washington, DC and moving to Legacy Springs, Montana for the slower pace and beautiful scenery. It's something she's always wanted, but she never intended to do it alone. Local rancher Peg Hamilton resents outsiders and is heartbroken when she has to sell forty acres of her family's ranch to Leslie to keep the bank at bay. She can't stand the idea of having a neighbor, especially a rich lawyer from the East Coast. While Leslie tries to adjust to her new life and make friends, Peg is desperate to hold onto her old life--and to keep Leslie out of it. When an unknown company quietly buys up natural gas rights in the valley, the idyllic landscape both women love is threatened by the specter of drill rigs and boomtown sprawl. It seems everyone is hiding something as Leslie finds herself in the middle of a dangerous secret involving two powerful men. Saving Legacy Springs is the compelling tale of two women and a community torn between preserving the past and surviving in the future.
Wrenched from the Land features sixteen interviews with some of the most iconic eco-warriors to put themselves on the line for their beliefs. The activists featured in this book are inspired by the late Edward Abbey, one of America’s uncompromising and irascible defenders of wilderness. The book includes interviews with Terry Tempest Williams, the late Charles Bowden, Sea Shepherd Society founder Paul Watson, Jack Loeffler, Doug Peacock, Ingrid Eisenstadter, John De Puy, Bob Lippman, Derrick Jensen, Shonto Begay, Ken Sanders, Ken Sleight, the late Katie Lee, Executive Director of the Center for Biological Diversity Kieran Suckling, Earth First! cofounder Dave Foreman, and climate activist Tim DeChristopher. Some were among Abbey’s closest friends and were the inspiration for his irreverent comedic masterpiece, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Here are mesmerizing stories about how they adapted Abbey’s monkeywrenching ideas into a radical blueprint for direct action. Their achievements—as ingenious and fierce as the individuals in this book—will encourage readers to discover their own pathways toward positive change.
Judith Sandoval brings an eye for striking detail and a feeling for the effects of time and habitation to her photographic tour of 450 ranches in sixteen counties in Wyoming. She discovered a dazzling variety of architectural styles in old ranchhouses, bunkhouses, barns, and even chicken coops. Taking in the whole ranching scene, she photographed corrals, machinery, irrigation works, and structures of stone built by German and Scottish immigrants and of logs by Scandinavians. She interviewed hundreds of people who have made their mark on the land, including many descendants of the builders. Some families have operated the same spread for five generations. Historic Ranches of Wyoming takes in such famous working ranches as the Wyoming Hereford Ranch, Careyhurst, the Palette Ranch, the Pitchfork Ranch, and John Kendrick's LX Bar. Among the dude ranches featured are the Seven-D, Eaton's in the Bar BC, and Valley Dude Ranch. In 1986 the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyoming, is mounting a major touring exhibit of Sandoval's photographs. Historic Ranches of Wyoming contains most of the photographs in the exhibition. The book includes an essay by T. A. Larson on the history of ranching in Wyoming and one by Robert Roripaugh about growing up on a ranch near Lander, Wyoming.
