Clips

Name: Bob Harmon
Hometown: Bozeman, Montana
Vocation: Chief preparator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and crew chief
Known For: Finding the first dinosaur bones with soft tissue

Bob Harmon is not an excitable man. His face isn’t animated as he points out the sauropod leg he is building out of fossils and plaster for a Museum of the Rockies exhibit that will open this summer. He doesn’t jump up and down describing the Tyrannosaurus rex fossil he found in the Montana badlands, which — when sawed open and put under a microscope — revealed the first soft tissue found in dinosaur bones.

But the slight grin on his weathered face and the way his brown eyes laugh as he shares his stories make it clear that wandering around in the hot sun looking for dinosaurs electrifies this 50-something Montana native. As he puts it: “Prospecting and finding bone is a kick for me.”

Harmon is the right-hand man of Jack Horner, who is perhaps the world’s most famous paleontologist, the man who discovered that dinosaurs care for their young and also served as technical advisor to the Jurassic Park movies. Harmon is the chief preparator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and crew chief for a three-to-four-month field season each summer. Harmon is also something of an anomaly: Though his colleagues mostly have master’s or doctoral degrees, he never graduated high school.

“In a way, I don’t have any right to be here,” he says. “I quit school at 16 and never went back; I’ve just bluffed my way through it.”

Harmon grew up fishing and hunting around Cut Bank, Mont. As a kid on family outings, he collected fossilized snails. Then one day, 26 years ago, he stubbed his toe on a dinosaur bone. He didn’t know it was a dinosaur bone at the time, but the fossil intrigued him enough to prompt him to do a little research at the Cut Bank library. Unfortunately, he chuckles, “all they had were little kids’ dinosaur books.”

Not long after the failed library expedition, Harmon met the people who could satisfy his growing curiosity. One day, as he was out roaming the riverbank looking for fossils, Harmon spotted a paleontology field camp. Knowing the crew would be curious about someone wandering through their prospecting territory — and hoping they could identify the bones he had found — Harmon made sure to get noticed. “I kind of set myself up on a hill with my big Samoyed dog, and they came running,” he recalls.

This encounter led to dinner and Rainier beers with Jack Horner and his field crew. By the end of the evening, Harmon had been hired, giving up his career as an oil rig roughneck to become a professional bone collector.

Every summer, the hunt for fossils takes Harmon and his crew to some of the most inhospitable parts of Montana and Wyoming. With the sun blazing down, the crew spends all day prospecting for bones.

And sometimes the bones almost fall right out of the hillsides. Harmon was eating lunch one day in 2000, near the Fort Peck Reservoir in eastern Montana, when he turned around and noticed a T-Rex bone jutting out of the anticline above him. There was still soft tissue in the cracked femur of this 68 million-year-old dinosaur. It had been previously thought that organic material couldn’t exist in fossil material over 100,000 years old.

The dinosaur was named “B-Rex” for (Bob) Harmon, and today it sits in the museum upstairs from his lab. Harmon enjoys working in the lab, preparing fossils for researchers or museum exhibits. Still, it’s the fieldwork he loves. “It’s really something to see an animal come out of the earth,” he says, a grin spreading across his face. “You see a T-Rex skull come out of the ground, and it jacks you up.

“The prospect of discovery is the coolest thing. You never know what’s in the dirt until you start digging. Ninety percent of the time it’s nothing good; the good ones are so rare, but that’s what keeps it exciting.”

High Country News
April 30, 2007

Janelle Holden is in the business of changing minds — including her own. Holden, the coexistence director for the nonprofit Predator Conservation Alliance, grew up on a cattle ranch on the Great Plains, just east of the Rocky Mountain Front. When grizzly bears began moving into the area in the 1980s, her father was far from delighted.

Holden, the daughter of two Republican legislators, followed her parents’ political path. During college, she interned with Montana Sen. Conrad Burns, and later served as assistant communications director for Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, both Republicans and longtime opponents of predator recovery. After a year in Washington, D.C., Holden made her way back West, eventually moving to Colorado to work for two small-town newspapers.

Holden soon realized that the West was no longer the place she remembered or imagined. Oil and gas drilling and mining were changing the public lands, and while she still agreed with Republicans’ fiscal values, she began to question the party’s recent resistance to environmental laws and regulations.

In 2000, while she was working as the agriculture and public-lands reporter for the Cortez Journal and the Durango Herald, her political convictions received a serious jolt. Holden’s managing editor invited her to see then-presidential candidate Ralph Nader speak in Durango.

Holden found that several of Nader’s positions, such as legalizing the production of hemp for paper and clothing, made sense to her. "I’m a Republican, and I agree with this guy," she thought. "How can this be?" After the speech, she concluded, "I’m probably not in sync with Republicans on conservation anymore."

A few years later, Holden came upon an advertisement for a position with the nonprofit Predator Conservation Alliance in Montana. She thought it might be a way for her to work on the environmental issues she cared about. "I grew up on a ranch with grizzly bears," she thought. "Maybe they’ll hire me." She was right.

The alliance had noticed that, although conservationists were winning a lot of battles on behalf of predators in the courtroom, they weren’t gaining many new allies on the ground. The Range Riders Project, one of several that Holden manages, aims to do just that, working in partnership with the Madison Valley Ranchlands Group, an association of ranchers in southwest Montana.

The project has hired riders to patrol the sagebrush and stay near the livestock 24 hours a day, in hopes that the presence of humans and horses will deter wolves.

After only two field seasons, it’s too early to claim success, but no Madison Valley cows were killed by wolves this summer or the last. The project has been duplicated in the Boulder Valley south of Big Timber, Mont., with similarly encouraging results.

And Holden can take part of the credit for local ranchers’ enthusiasm. "She works for an environmental group with a big, scary name," says Todd Graham, ranch manager for the Sun Ranch in the Madison Valley, "but she plays her cards really well in front of a group of ranchers. Those are her ranch smarts coming into play."

High Country News
November 14, 2005

NAME
Cathy Whitlock

VOCATION
Montana State University paleoecologist

AGE
51

HOME BASE
Bozeman, Montana

NOTED FOR
Discerning ecosystem changes over the last 20,000 years

SHE SAYS
"It’s a great puzzle trying to figure out how an ecosystem works."

"For me, it’s about solving a big mystery," says Cathy Whitlock, describing her work as a paleoecologist at Montana State University. Whitlock studies the environments of the past, using pollen and charcoal remains from deeply buried lake sediments to understand how plant communities and climates have changed through time. Information about how ecosystems looked and operated thousands of years ago, she hopes, will also help society prepare for the future.

Whitlock has long been intrigued by the recent geological past. An avid hiker, she often uses her time on the trails to ask herself, "How did the ecosystem get to be like this? What explains the mosaic of trees?" She studied geology as an undergraduate at Colorado College and as a graduate student at the University of Washington, where she focused on "the younger side of geology" — the 20,000 years following the last ice age. After 14 years as a professor and researcher at the University of Oregon, Whitlock moved to Montana State University last July.

To understand the past, Whitlock and her graduate students wade into present-day wetlands, bogs and lakes, located throughout the coastal rainforest of Oregon, the Northern Rockies and the northern Great Plains.

They take samples at these longtime study sites by maneuvering a long sediment-coring "barrel," which looks like a metal pipe, into the muck and mud. Then, they muscle the barrel out of the sucking lake sediment, securing a sediment core just a meter long and 5 inches wide.

The cores are taken into the lab, sliced into sections about as thick as Oreo cookies, and examined under a high-resolution microscope. Each section represents approximately a decade of deposition, and contains a mixture of lake sediments, including charcoal and pollen from a variety of plant species. Whitlock’s practiced eye readily picks out pine pollen, which is shaped like miniature Mickey Mouse heads, and she can also distinguish the pollen of white pines from that of two- and three-needle pines.

By identifying pollen and dating charcoal deposits, Whitlock pieces together vegetation and fire patterns. For example, her research indicates an abrupt and widespread arrival of lodgepole pine in the Northern Rockies 11,000 years ago. "It suggests a rapid warming, and a shift towards more fires," she says. At the same time, Douglas-fir was appearing across the Pacific Northwest, spreading throughout the region in a matter of a few centuries. "When the climate warmed, it was suddenly everywhere," she says. "It is remarkable to think that our most common trees were once so sparse that we can’t locate their whereabouts during the glacial period."

High Country News
May 30, 2005

Al Giddings was in his 40s when he almost had a total meltdown. And out of that near meltdown, came the rediscovery of mountains. Pushing off into Weber Lake in the Sierra Nevada of California in 1980—where he hadn’t been in twenty years—Giddings threw a fly into the lake, toward a big sunset. His two-day vacation turned into three weeks, and from there, into a move to Montana.

Reunited with his love of fishing and hunting, he called a friend in Livingston to ask where the best fishing in the country was. “This is Mecca,” she said of the Yellowstone River. That was all it took for Giddings to fly to Bozeman, rent a car, and eventually make the Paradise Valley his home.

“I drove into the Valley,” he recalls in a gravelly voice, “And I thought ‘this is Heaven’”. He bought almost 3,000 acres nestled below the Absaroka Mountains and built a two-level, log and cedar home with a wrap around deck and a hot tub facing the imposing 11,000-foot Emigrant Peak. He added three ponds and 2000 trees to create an idyllic site in the middle of an Angus grazed ranch.

What’s odd about this story is not that a four-time Emmy winning director bought a big spread in Montana, but that an Emmy winning underwater director and cinematographer bought a big spread in Montana—hundreds of miles from any ocean.

The ocean, until recently, is where Giddings worked and played. From directing and filming natural history documentaries, to shooting underwater scenes for Hollywood blockbusters, to designing underwater cameras, lighting and optical systems, Giddings goes full throttle into any project he gets involved in.

Giddings is best known for his undersea camera work and direction, seen in Hollywood blockbusters such as The Deep, the James bond flick—For Your Eyes Only, The Abyss and Titanic, of which he was a co-producer.

Additionally he swims in the world of natural history documentaries, listing Galapagos: Beyond Darwin, The Living Edens: Palau and Mysteries of the Sea, as just a few of the films that fill out his lengthy resume.

What is a man, so dependent on the ocean for his livelihood doing in land-locked Montana? He’s getting back to his roots. Giddings father was a fish and game Captain and raised his son with a fly rod in one hand and a .410 shotgun in the other. He spent his summers in the California High Sierra, hunting and fishing beneath granite peaks and domes.

Around the age of twenty, Giddings—a competitive swimmer in high school—got involved in a SCUBA business. It was that transition that took him out of the mountains and into the sea.

Giddings got excited about diving while spear fishing in the 50s and decided to figure out a way to make diving a career. A couple years later he traded his spear gun for a camera and started selling photos to magazines.

Emboldened by his quick success in selling underwater photographs, Giddings—along with a friend, Leroy French, opened a dive shop near his hometown in Marin County, California. Like most new businesses, the dive shop didn’t make a lot of money right away, so to subsidize his income Giddings began selling underwater camera gear that he had designed for his personal use.

From there, Giddings worked for National Geographic and his career really began to grow. Still photos led to natural history films and soon to theatrical features.

“I maintained a foot in two very different camps,” he explains. “I’d be working with scientists—discovering the Titanic, looking at life in the deep ocean—and then every few years cross the double yellow line into the theatrical world.”

Giddings was the first to film humpback whales underwater, the first to film great white sharks in slow motion, was one of the first divers to explore the shipwrecked Andrea Doria, filmed 240-foot deep breath-hold dives, fought off sharks, and the list goes on and on.

Besides being driven and talented, Giddings was lucky. He entered the underwater filming world at just the right time to pioneer equipment and techniques. It was a time when the world beneath the water was ripe for a momentous jump in technology and equipment.

While his first love is natural history films, “there was the financial reward of doing a Hollywood pot boiler every few years,” Giddings laughs. Beyond the money, he appreciated another difference between shooting documentaries and theatrical flicks: “Nothing had to be checked or rechecked; the sky’s the limit, nothing has to be real.”

One gets the feeling that there are no rules in Giddings’ life. He walks briskly and talks briskly, staring the listener right in the eyes. He madly pursues and achieves his dreams and visions. He’s charismatic and forceful. In his 60s now, Giddings is still a broad-shouldered force to be reckoned with.

It’s these traits that allowed an underwater cinematographer to operate out of the Paradise Valley. After building his sportsmans’ retreat-like home, Giddings built a state-of-the-art studio so that the “National Geographic, Discovery people etc., wouldn’t think I hung up my snorkel.”

The 20,000-square foot studio compound is home to movie posters and memorabilia from his vast career—hand carved wooden statues flank either side of Giddings’ desk. Purchased from the artist while paddling a small boat through Truck Lagoon in Micronesia, the life-sized figures, along with floats, nets and other ocean art, lend a nautical air to his mountain office.

Down the wide, blue-carpeted staircase is the film editing studio. There, Giddings and his assistant Donna Pace sorted through countless hours of film and video and distilled the “finest, most exciting material” into sixty categories (each an hour or two) of color-corrected, digitized masters.

Giddings credits himself for anticipating the move to HD (high definition) format. In a 1997 interview in Fathoms, he said, “My friends are saying this revolution is going to be something like the change from black and white to color. I disagree. I think the change is really going to be more like the change we realized going from radio to television!”

He was right. Currently, HD is all the rage and Giddings owns what is likely the largest library of underwater HD footage in the world. And it’s stored amongst a couple hundred Black Angus on a 3,000-acre ranch.

What Giddings didn’t anticipate when he first bought the ranch was that the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem would become a Mecca for the wildlife film industry. With the arrival of the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in 1991 came many of the movers and shakers in the industry. “All of the sudden the biggest gathering of wildlife film producers, buyers and sellers were meeting in Jackson,” Giddings recalls.

It wasn’t just wildlife film folks that were flocking to Giddings’ new home, it was his old friends, too. With an uncanny knack for keeping in touch with people, Giddings has had a steady stream of visitors since he first arrived. The man, who attended an elementary school reunion in his 60s, seems to always have a visitor or two around the house.

“I started seeing more people here than when I wasn’t in Montana,” Giddings laughs, his blue eyes catching the light. It turns out that Montana is a great place to be an underwater cinematographer and director.

In addition to the other souvenirs of his illustrious career, Giddings’ studio walls are adorned with pictures of the filmmaker with some of the eclectic collection of people he’s worked with throughout the years, Robert Shaw, Sean Connery, John Kennedy, Jr., Kim Bassinger, the list goes on.

Of course, there are pictures with Jim Cameron—Director of The Abyss and Titanic, both of which Giddings worked on. But, there is also a photo with Cuban President, Fidel Castro.

During his five expeditions to the waters around Cuba, Giddings and Castro became good friends. “Our common interest wasn’t political, but the underwater world,” says Giddings. Castro’s personal passion in life is diving, according to Giddings. Castro supplied his Navy personnel to help Giddings’ crew navigate the local waters for a month when he was filming Cuba’s Forbidden Depths. Castro even spent an evening on the ship.

These days Giddings is spending less time chumming around with Castro and more time restoring classic 1930's cars. He’s sold his HD editing system, and cameras are being pushed out the door by cars in his camera shop-turned-garage.

He beams when he explains, “I’ve turned my energies full force into vintage restoration and the car collecting world.” Giddings is working longer hours now than he did while filming, which equals a lot of hours for this non-stop worker.

“I’m enchanted with the engineering of the 30s, the art and the symmetry…there is a beautiful grace in these cars and their stunning history.” Specifically, he is enamored with Willys Knight cars. Currently, Giddings is restoring a1930 Willys Knight 66-B Plaidside Phaeton—the only one known to exist. It will be a candidate in the 2007 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, an automotive charitable event held each year in Pebble Beach, California, considered the most prestigious event of its kind.

From mountains to oceans and back again, Giddings has spanned the globe following his passions. “I’ve had a fabulous career; the whole of my career has been pretty charming.” He adds with characteristic enthusiasm, “I’m totally excited about the next frontier”.

Distinctly Montana
July 09, 2007

Smack in the middle of the best steelhead fishing in the world, at least according to one man, sits an old 15 X 20 hayloft converted into a flyfishing shop. If you open the door of the red, wood-sided building you’ll likely find a man who looks a whole lot like Jerry Garcia leaning on the counter ready to talk steelhead and two-handed casting. He wouldn’t mind selling you a rod, either.

The Red Shed seems an unlikely Mecca and Mike “Poppy” Cummins an even more unlikely prophet, but anglers from around the country—make that around the globe—flock to this humble shop (both in person and via cyber space) on the Clearwater River in Idaho to pick up two-handed spey rods and chat Poppy up. Thanks in part to a recent video on You Tube, the Red Shed is garnering even more fame and popularity. In 2007, Poppy sold over 150 two-handed rods and a dozen single-handed trout poles. Not bad for someone working out of a shed in the middle of nowhere.

Before opening the Red Shed in July 2002, Poppy owned a small trucking company. He drove a diesel big rig and his wife Linda ran dispatch. Their shed was put to good use storing truck parts, assorted junk and bad hay from the days when their land hosted a dairy. Then, someone ran into his truck and ripped the front end off. That incident (along with some health issues) convinced Poppy that it was time to retire.

Around this time, his right hand kept falling asleep and Poppy was having a hard time holding a single-handed rod. So when he heard about two-handed rods, he got interested. Without the funds to purchase a spey rod, Poppy decided he would make his own using two single-handed rods. His “junkyard spey” hangs on the ceiling of the shop “as a reminder that not everyone can afford a spey rod,” he says.

His interest in spey casting was growing and a few visits to a friend on the coast with a successful spey rod shop convinced Poppy to open his own store. But, getting started wasn’t easy. “Basically you’re dealing with tackle reps and most weren’t open to the idea of selling only spey tackle. They thought it was stupid,” Poppy recalls.

The fishing industry—based primarily around trout, according to Poppy—has come around since the early Red Shed days. “I have about ten trout rods, but I’d rather have my resources dedicated to spey casting.” With rod prices ranging from $270-$980 or more, Poppy carries something for just about everyone with a longing to cast a line toward an unsuspecting steelhead.

August through Thanksgiving is the busy season for walk-in customers at the Red Shed because that’s when the B-run Steelhead are making the arduous journey from the Pacific Ocean, up the Columbia River, to the Snake and finally into the Clearwater. After two years of eating and growing in the Pacific, Steelhead (actually rainbow trout according to Idaho Fish and Game) average 10-13 pounds and 31- 34 inches long. The occasional fish that spends three years in ocean can grow larger than 37 inches and often weigh more than 20 pounds.

(The other group of anadromous rainbow trout trekking to Idaho are the A-run steelhead. These fish spend only one year in the ocean and are lither—4 to 6 pounds and 23- 26 inches. These guys return from the ocean earlier in the year (June-August) and are found primarily in the Snake and Salmon rivers.)

Even when the store isn’t full of wader-clad, vest wearing, tale-spewing anglers, Poppy does a hearty business over the internet and through the mail (75% of sales are made this way). “I’ve sent rods to Russia, Sweden, the U.K., Canada and to servicemen in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he lists. Poppy figures he’s sent rods, lines, leaders, reels and other fishing sundries to every continent. Sometimes he sends them just for people to try out. Through his “Test Drive Program”, Poppy will send tackle to anyone who wants to give it a try. There’s never been any charge, except for return postage.

When you try to press him to reveal his favorite rod, it’s like trying to get a fisherman to revel his favorite hole. Poppy insists, “I’ve never met a spey rod I didn’t like.” Whether it’s a Burkheimer, Echo, Loomis, Sage or other brand found within the walls of the Red Shed, Poppy fishes with every rod he sells. And if the Shed burns down tomorrow and there is only one rod left, Poppy wouldn’t care which one it was—as long as he can fish with both hands in the river he adores.

While fishing—and all things steelhead—is one of the major loves of his life, it isn’t the only one. Poppy is pretty enamored with his grandchildren, diesel trucks and handguns as well. His grandkids all live within eight miles of their granddad. “They’re all close to the bank of Poppy,” he jokes. His nickname was bestowed upon him by his grandson Josh. (One of his other grandsons called him Poopy, but fortunately that didn’t stick!). And if you are surfing around his website, you’ll find pictures of all the little ones—staffing the store, showing off Red Shed hats; “They make cheap models,” laughs Poppy.

Like any good Idahoan, Poppy also loves his guns; handguns in particular. He’s started a little side business selling copper-plated bullets and reloading components, and he likes to head out behind the house for a bit of target shooting. By selling bullets, he’s able to get them for himself at a wholesale price. “I can kind of feed my addiction,” he explains.

Poppy doesn’t miss his days on the road, “I’m pretty content to stay right here and fish,” he muses. So, if you want to meet Poppy, talk steelhead and cast with a big rod, you better head down two-laned Highway 12 about 8 miles west of Orofino. Along the way, don’t forget to stop and fish.

“The Clearwater has over 75 miles of primo water between Potlatch mill and Clear Creek above Kooskia, ID. Whichever direction you come from, if you visit me you will have passed around 35 miles of river with a lot of good spots to fish. As you travel along the river you will see some spots that will just look fishy. Those are the places I would try first,” Poppy advises.

Big Sky Journal
March 04, 2008