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Jul 19, 2024 | 
montanafreepress.org | Jacob Baynham
After the death of her mother in 2019, Nicole Rieker sold the family home in Billings and was left with a modest inheritance. Rieker and her husband, Drew, both accountants in Missoula, wanted to invest some of that money in rental houses. They looked at several places before settling on a parcel of three adjacent properties: two duplexes and a small, century-old house on a large corner lot on Cooley and Milton, in Missoula’s Northside neighborhood.
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Jul 16, 2024 | 
thepulp.org | Jacob Baynham
Missoula City Council finally took action on the messy matter of urban camping. A few days later, the U.S. Supreme Court did, too. The court’s… Read More »
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Jun 27, 2024 | 
noemamag.com | Jacob Baynham
Credits Jacob Baynham is a National Magazine Award-winning writer and a former T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor at the University of Montana School of Journalism. The universe was born small, unimaginably dense and furiously hot. At first, it was all energy contained in a volume of space that exploded in size by a factor of 100 septillion in a fraction of a second. Imagine it as a single cell ballooning to the size of the Milky Way almost instantaneously.
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Mar 27, 2024 | 
thepulp.org | Jacob Baynham
A neighbor of mine is a man of many names. Years ago, when I first encountered him on Missoula’s Mount Jumbo, I called him the Vigilante. To others, he is known as the Poop Guy. He calls himself, more charitably, the Bag Man. As for his real name, well, he asked me not to use it. “I don’t want to become a target,” he confided to me recently on the phone.
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Mar 26, 2024 | 
npca.org | Jacob Baynham
Spring 2024 By Jacob Baynham During World War II, Japanese Americans held at Manzanar found joy and normalcy in baseball. More than 80 years later, their field is back. Sometimes history needs to be unearthed, and other times it just has to be weeded. That’s what 27 volunteers gathered to do last November at the Manzanar National Historic Site in California’s Mojave Desert. The volunteers arrived to find 3 acres of tumbleweed that the National Park Service had marked for clearing.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
npca.org | Jacob Baynham
Laura Roberts has always loved reptiles, so she didn’t need much convincing when her 10-year-old daughter said she wanted a pet tegu lizard. It was 2006, and Roberts and her family were breeding and selling bearded dragons from their home in Central Florida. One tegu led to another, and eventually to 35 breeding adults and half a dozen pets. The Roberts family was smitten by the lizards’ beauty and uncanny intelligence. “One figured out how to use the cat door,” Roberts said. “Then the other one did.
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Feb 25, 2024 | 
npca.org | Jacob Baynham
Summer 2021 By Jacob Baynham Why while away retirement on the golf course when you could become a moss expert and hunt down some of the least studied plants in New Mexico’s national parks? When Russ Kleinman retired from a 27-year career as a general surgeon, he didn’t imagine he’d start rappelling into ice caves.
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Feb 20, 2024 | 
npca.org | Jacob Baynham
In 2009, Mark Kozubal was a doctoral student at Montana State University, six years into his research of extremophiles — microorganisms that thrive in environments of unusual temperature, pH level or chemistry — in Yellowstone National Park. The research entailed annual excursions in which Kozubal, his fellow graduate students and their professors would lead a team of horses 20 miles to a backcountry base camp.
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Feb 17, 2024 | 
npca.org | Jacob Baynham
After the Civil War, more than 26,000 African Americans left the South to homestead the Great Plains, carving out farms, free lives and community on the prairie. In September 1877, several hundred formerly enslaved people packed their belongings and left Kentucky by rail for Kansas. When the train could take them no farther, they disembarked and continued for two days on foot.
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Dec 7, 2023 | 
npca.org | Jacob Baynham
When it came to promoting its hotels and chalets in Glacier National Park, the Great Northern Railway found the Blackfeet enormously useful. After the park opened in 1910, Great Northern hired photographers and artists to capture portraits of the Blackfeet and their scenic camps. They urged tourists to come see “Glacier’s vanishing Indians.” They hired Blackfeet families to erect tipis outside Glacier Park Lodge and paid them to dress in ceremonial regalia and greet arriving trains.
