I grew up exploring the Bighorn Mountains and surrounding basins in northern Wyoming where I learned to backpack, backcountry ski, and birdwatch. I attended college at the University of Wyoming at 7,200 feet of elevation in the southeast corner of the state. After graduating with degrees in environment and natural resources, Spanish, and humanities/fine arts, I moved to Washington, DC. I worked for a year as a photographic coordinator at National Geographic magazine, assisting the photo editor for natural history and meeting the photographers as they presented work from their assignments around world. I joined photographer Steve Winter as an assistant for two months setting camera traps for snow leopards in northern India.
I returned to Wyoming for graduate school where I teamed up with photojournalist Joe Riis to document in words and images the annual migration of a few hundred pronghorn antelope from their winter range in the Green River Basin to summer range in Grand Teton National Park, a journey of about 100 miles. I earned a master’s of fine arts in creative nonfiction writing with environment and natural resources and accepted a year-long editorial fellowship at High Country News, where I completed and published a cover story on the pronghorn migration featuring Joe’s photos. The article, “Perilous Passages: The struggle to understand – and protect – the long-distance journeys of Western wildlife,” won a Knight-Risser prize for environmental journalism in the West and a Science in Society award from the National Association of Science Writers.
After working as a freelance journalist, I took a job working on science communications and outreach for the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. There, I became founding editor of Western Confluence magazine, an annual publication covering complex natural resource science and management challenges across the West for a public audience. I led the magazine for a decade, identifying issue themes, hiring contributors, editing articles, coordinating digital and print publication, and distributing over a dozen issues.
While at the University of Wyoming I worked on several public-facing storytelling projects around environment and natural resource issues. I teamed up with filmmaker Morgan Heim to produce a series of short films, in collaboration with the nearby Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, on the bark beetle outbreak. I joined the Wyoming Migration Initiative as text editor for the large-format book Wild Migrations: Atlas of Wyoming’s Ungulates. I co-produced, along with the Monteith Shop, the feature documentary film Deer 139, which followed a biologist and two friends as they hiked, skied, and packrafted the migratory path of a female mule deer for 85 miles into the Wyoming Range. The film was supported by a National Geographic Storytelling Grant, as well as other partners and donors, and was accepted into nine national and international film festivals including the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour. It is airing on PBS stations across the US.
I currently live in Laramie, Wyoming, with my family where I serve as board chair for WyoFile and continue to write about human connections to the diverse landscapes of the American West.
Emilene Ostlind 