The Sawtooth National Recreation Area of central Idaho is widely considered the Gem State’s crown jewel. On Friday, May 18, the Idaho Press Club honored the story, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants,  as Idaho’s top magazine feature of 2012. The story chronicles the men and women who created the SNRA.

To date, Greg Stahl has been honored 53 times by state, regional and national journalism organizations, and this recent accolade constitutes his fourth such recognition for magazine writing. Meanwhile, the same issue of Sun Valley Guide helped the magazine achieve top honors for the state’s best magazine.

By way of further background, the Sawtooth National Recreation Area is widely considered the Gem State’s crown jewel, and the story is told on the management area’s 40th birthday. It is a unique composite of more than 40 peaks over 10,000 feet in elevation, picturesque valleys, high alpine lakes, forests and free-flowing rivers. It is home to 327 fish and mammal species, including reintroduced gray wolves, endangered salmon, mountain goats, lynx, mountain lions and wolverines.

• To read a summary of all of the Idaho Press Club’s 2012 winners, follow this link.
• To read a summary of Stahl’s journalism accolades, follow this link.
• The story, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, can be accessed here.

Every fall for 45 years, Rich Bingham has looked to the skies over Sun Valley in anticipation. As days grow short and trees turn gold, his excitement mounts.

There’s a palpable and understated inevitability to the arrival of winter in the mountains. The cycle of the seasons dictates life here, and no single season is as synonymous with Sun Valley as winter. Snowflakes have been changing lives in Sun Valley since the resort was founded 76 years ago. “I started getting excited a month ago,” Bingham said in early October. “I’ve been doing it so long I’ve learned to be patient, but I’m definitely thinking about another winter on Baldy.”

Bingham has worked on the Sun Valley Ski Patrol since fall 1967. As snow safety department director, his responsibilities include weather and avalanche forecasting, and avalanche control on Bald Mountain, so he’s always got an eye trained on the sky. He’s learned not to get uptight about Mother Nature’s fickle sensibilities. Sometimes it snows, sometimes it doesn’t. But when the jet stream drops out of Canada and begins pumping swirling masses of Pacific-born moisture into the Rocky Mountains, his demeanor changes as he prepares for another winter on what he describes as “a special mountain.”

Plentiful snow equals excellent skiing and snowboarding, but it also means improved spring runoff, and green, healthy forests in the summer. And each falling snowflake translates directly into improved financial vitality for the communities nestled at Bald Mountain’s base.

From its celebrated founding to present day, Sun Valley Resort has been dependent on snowy winter seasons. In a world in which climate patterns are increasingly erratic—exemplified by super storms like October’s Hurricane Sandy, heightened Western wildfire seasons and the historic April 2011 outbreak of tornadoes in the Southeast—most climate scientists agree that change is afoot. What it means for weather-dependent communities and resorts, however, is a plot yet to be completely written. “Long-term trends are kind of all over the place,” Bingham said. “With the influences changing so much, with the arctic oscillation and sea ice and temperatures—the weather is less predictable, with stronger and more erratic storms when they do happen.”

• Click here to read more of this 2,500-word feature about the tradition of snow in central Idaho–and what climate change could mean for the future of skiing.

The nation’s top official responsible for disaster response visited Boise Tuesday, July 3, and said it’s time for Westerners to brace for a long, hot wildfire season.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano spent Tuesday afternoon at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, where the nation’s leading fire commanders and scientists briefed her and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on the conditions that have led to one of the most destructive wildfire seasons in years. Idaho Gov. Butch Otter joined the briefing.

“We were looking at the extensive amount of interagency cooperation that goes into planning for fire season, making…”

• Click here to read the whole article, written for the Idaho Mountain Express newspaper.

Ed Cannady walks on the shoulders of giants.

Sculpted lean by decades of backcountry travel, he’s a man with a passion for Idaho’s celebrated Sawtooth National Recreation Area that weaves through the fabric of who he is.

As the SNRA’s backcountry recreation manager, Cannady has what he calls “an intense 40-year relationship” with the SNRA’s craggy mountains and swift-running streams. What he won’t say is that he knows the SNRA’s subtleties and struggles as well as anyone. He arrived for a backpacking trip in 1973, a year after the 756,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land were protected, and his heart has been struck through with the place ever since.

“I wasn’t born in this place, but I was born for this place,” Cannady said. “There’s never been a doubt. When I go there and find a nice spot with a view or flowers or whatever, I’m able to slow down, breathe and slow my pace a little bit. There’s a magic quality to that. These places make me want to be better than I am.”

“Better than I am.” A humble man and his place. A place that’s an awful lot better than it might have been.

And that has everything to do with the giants on whose shoulders Cannady walks. Forty years ago this August their efforts fell short of creating Idaho’s only national park while succeeding at protecting 756,000 acres of timelessly beautiful mountains, rivers and ranchland as Idaho’s first national recreation area. In the annals of the United States’ well-documented legacy of public land conservation, they’re some of the most monumental unsung heroes of their time.

“They’re the nobility here,” Cannady said. “I’m just trying to be worthy of their efforts.”

For the summer 2012 issue of Sun Valley Guide magazine, on the 40th anniversary of the SNRA’s founding, Cannady and Greg Stahl joined forces to retell the story of how Idaho’s most prized landscape was preserved.

• Click here to see Cannady’s photographs and read the story, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.
• Click here to read the sidebar, How a Photographer Saved a Mountain.

The Tendoy Store on the banks of eastern Idaho’s Lemhi River is a place arrested in time and frozen in the annals of the Pacific Northwest’s rich salmon fishing heritage. Among the small general store’s charming clutter are groceries, t-shirts, tube socks, post office boxes and a small assortment of dry flies mounted to a white sheet of cardboard.

For more than sixty of her ninety-two years, Viola Anglin has owned and operated the Tendoy Store, but those decades have come with unexpected and unwelcome change. Anglin misses the long-ago mornings when salmon fishermen swarmed her wares, buying salmon eggs and filling up on enough calories to sustain them during days casting lines on the Lemhi.

“I was an angry old lady when the salmon fishing was no more,” she said. “I had loved it and made a terrific living in those days. But when it was gone…”

• Click here to read more of this 5,000-word feature, written for Izilwane, an anthropological e-zine that works on “connecting the human animal to the global ecosystem.”