National Geographic, Douglas H. Chadwick in Montana, 09/01/2013
After the better part of a mile, I heard the scrape and ping of tempered steel on stone. A trail crew from the Montana Conservation Corps was digging into the steep slope to widen a series of switchbacks. Small plumes of dust drifted from their shovels and pickaxes. I met young recruits from places like Ohio and Brooklyn. I also met a 71-year-old guy in a hard hat, jeans, and sweaty, dirt-smudged T-shirt, who was whacking away at the slope with a pickax.
That was the man I'd come for: Montana Senator Max Baucus, current chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee. Today was one of his periodic "work days" back home, when he joins fellow Montanans at their jobs, and he had invited a few reporters to join him on the crew's lunch break. He wanted to talk about something close to his heart: the North Fork Watershed Protection Act.
After a decade-long drought, Aboriginal elders travel the length of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin performing the Ringbalin — a pilgrimage designed to "dance" the spirit back into the land and heal the rivers. And it appears to work.
