Don Dodge
Marge wasn’t the only artist in the family. Her son, Don, wildly embraced his new home in Missoula. With Mt. Jumbo literally outside his front door, Don quickly took to exploring the mountains. As he got older, the mountains got bigger and further away. To facilitate and prolong the journeys, he got some horses. Before long, his quick jaunts up the mountain turned into week-long expeditions into Montana’s famed outdoors, including Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
Photographer
Concurrently to exploring the outdoors, Don explored inside as well, specifically a small device that captured images. Passing interest turned into curiosity turned into an obsession, as Don spent his free time taking photos while also working at the University as a photographer for the archeology department. As soon as his younger sister, Carole, moved out of the house to go to college, Don turned her room into a darkroom. Now he was taking photos during the day and processing and printing them out at night. He has thousands of negatives and prints waiting to be sorted and new photos to be discovered.
Outdoor Photographer
Turns out, those horses Don got to pack into the great Montana outdoors weren’t just to carry tack and tents, but also large and medium format cameras. For nearly twenty years, from the mid-1960s until the mid-1980s, Don roamed around the hidden jewels of the state (and sometimes Idaho and British Columbia) camera in hand, Ansel Adams as his guide.
Documentarian
Unbeknownst to him at the time, Don wasn’t just taking amazing photographs of Montana’s natural beauty, but also documenting these areas and monuments as how they used to be, before human activity -both small scale increased foot traffic, and large scale via climate change- altered them forever. The glaciers in Glacier are nearly completely gone, many of the forests Don trekked through have been ravaged by fire, or the animals not as plentiful.
Don Dodge today
Don lived with and cared for his mother her entire life. He still lives in the same house the family landed in upon their arrival to Missoula. He still has horses, Ginger and Amos, that he visits twice a day on his pasture outside of town. And in May 2023, after nearly 40 years in the making, Don finally had his first showing of his photographs, as part of Missoula’s First Friday Art Night.