The last few weeks have been busy ones here at TPL central. While a few long-suffering staffers have been pushing our new website out the door, others of us have been putting the finishing touches on the spring/summer issue of Land&People magazine, which includes not one, not two, but three images of seven-year-old Alex Love of Bozeman, Montana. You have to wonder: how will the lad ever go back to the humdrum routine of grade school after his brush with fame?
That Alex is so present in the magazine mostly has to do with the frequent occurrence of snow in Montana. The lead article in this issue is about the Montana Legacy Project, a TPL partnership with The Nature Conservancy that secured the protection of 310,000 acres in the Swan Valley and elsewhere in the northwestern part of that state. For a spring/summer issue, I envisioned photos of flower-carpeted mountainsides and hikers exploring tunnels of green. But in most of our Swan Valley photos, white, not green, was the predominant color: people harvesting timber in the snow or tossing hay to horses in snowy fields. And while I expected photos of shorts-clad hikers, instead I found bundled-up people traveling by snowshoe, snowmobile, dogsled, or cross-country skis.
So we put out a call to our folks in Montana: what else have you got? And in return we received . . . Alex. Well, not only Alex, of course, but somehow he seemed to show up in the photos we needed most.
Alex is the son of TPL’s Northern Rockies director, Deb Love, and it is probably natural that she would point the camera in his direction. Here he was wading along the shore of Holland Lake, where in 2006, conservationists, community members, and donors met to consider launching what would become the largest conservation project of its type in U.S. history. We chose this image for the two-page opening spread of the story. And for the table of contents page, we chose another photo Deb took the same day, also featuring you-know-who.
I’m not going to tell you much about the third photo (we have to save some surprises for the magazine) except that it is has nothing to do with the Montana Legacy Project and appears as our Parting Shot image on the last page. Typically, we try to find an eye-catching image for this spot—a photo with a high fun quotient that is among the best TPL images to have come to us over the previous six months. As we winnowed down the choices for this issue, we were gradually overwhelmed with a sense of inevitability, concluding, almost reluctantly, that it had to be Alex.
I do have one additional photo of Alex to show you in a future post—one that we didn’t have room for in the magazine. That photo comes with a story about the Loves and two other families who were so deeply involved in the Montana Legacy Project that, when it was finally complete, they held a picnic to celebrate what Deb calls “the project orphans–all of our kids who were missing one or both parents during this effort.” Look for that post later this week.
Land&People will be in mailboxes the first week in June. To see our story on the Montana Legacy Project, Alex’s Parting Shot, and all our fine content, sign up for a free copy of the magazine on TPL’s new website. Or if you prefer, you can also read Land&People in its digital version—the same great magazine in bits and bytes.
Tags: Montana, TPL projects
