Local books

“A Year in the Life of a Grizzly in Glacier National Park”

Vernon Anderson of Columbia Falls has self-published a children’s book titled “A Year in the Life of a Grizzly in Glacier National Park.” The story tells the wonders and perils encountered as two grizzly bear cubs learn to survive in the wilds of Glacier National Park.

The book, published by Scott Company Publishing in Kalispell, also features illustrations and paintings by Anderson.

“As a boy the hills and mountains of Montana were an important part of my youth,” Anderson said. “My respect and love of nature grew from those early years roaming the countryside around Lewistown.”

After graduating from high school, a tour with the U.S. Navy and photography school allowed him to pay for his college education working as a photographer. He earned a degree in business, and he and his wife Sue moved to Bainbridge Island, Washington, where they raised three sons. The couple retired to Columbia Falls, and Anderson has tapped into oil painting, focusing on landscapes of Montana and more specifically, Glacier National Park.

Anderson’s book is for sale in various local outlets. For more information go to www.meadowlakebookandart.us or contact Anderson at 406-892-0282.

“A Brush With a Wild Thing or Two in Montana”

This book, published by Stoneydale Press of Stevensville, recounts the author’s many encounters or “brushes” with wild things — wildlife, the landscape, trout, wild land, wild rivers and, sometimes wild people — and how they all shaped his work as a writer.

“A Brush With a Wild Thing or Two in Montana,” written by Dale Burk of Stevensville, a third-generation Montanan and former reporter for the Daily Inter lake, recounts a number of episodes from Burk’s youth in Northwest Montana, including the opening chapter in which he writes about a boating accident in which his uncle, Frank Graves of Eureka, who, just home from the horrors of combat in Europe in World War II, saved Dale’s life and thereby enabled all the other “encounters” in the book to take place.

During his high school years in Eureka, Burk was editor of his school newspaper, and at the same time worked as a correspondent in that area for the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell. Later he was a journalist in the U.S. Navy, where he served overseas including a three-year stint as Navy press representative at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Tokyo, Japan. Then upon his return to civilian life he worked as a reporter for the Daily Inter Lake; several years following that in public relations jobs in Columbia Falls and Butte; and then a 10-year run as a reporter, columnist and editor on the staff of the Missoulian. He became the first Montana writer to win a prestigious Nieman Fellowship for Professional Journalists to Harvard University in 1975-76. He has continued to work as a writer-photographer, write books, free lance articles for various national publications and run, with his wife, Patricia, a regional book publishing firm out of Stevensville.

His book also contains many photographs illustrating the stories. Sample chapters include his “brushes” with potentially dangerous things like wolverines, grizzly bears, lightning and mountain blizzards, colorful back country packers and camp cooks, hunters and fishermen, Burk’s beloved Big Hole River, and the efforts by many people to establish the Great Bear Wilderness in Northwest Montana. He also writes of his involvement in the early days of the effort to establish the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

“A Brush With a Wild Thing or Two in Montana” is available in many book stores, sporting goods stores and gift shops as well as direct from Stoneydale Press, 523 Main St., Stevensville, MT 59870, or on its website, www.stoneydale.com.