Author

Fred Haefele

Fred Haefele

Fred Haefele lives in Missoula and his work has appeared in Salon, Outside and Wired magazines as well as the New York Times magazine.

COMMENTARY

Heirlooms West

By: - January 29, 2023

Late last summer, following a tedious series of squabbles, my wife and her siblings  proceeded to divide up the material goods of her mother’s estate. Among the items we inherited were a rare three-legged buffalo nickel, a pristine Morris chair, a Civil War era Starr percussion carbine and an oil painting by Caroline’s  grandfather, a […]

COMMENTARY

I was anti-vaxx before anti-vaxx was cool.

By: - July 31, 2022

In April, 1955, I  sat in the back row of fifth-grade homeroom in Flint, Michigan and watched my classmates march to the front, roll up their sleeves and get ready for their shot. The Salk vaccine had been a long time coming. The year before, polio reached epidemic proportions in the US when case counts […]

COMMENTARY

The log cabin syndrome

By: - July 3, 2022

We thought we’d start our Labor Day getaway with a trip to Lewistown and a visit to the Bear Gulch pictographic site. Montana COVID numbers were low in August, so it took a while to process the discovery that site would nevertheless be closed; that viewing centuries-old Native American art at an outdoor site, 20 […]

COMMENTARY

Can $949K buy a piece of the true Montana?

By: - May 8, 2022

On June 12, 2021, excavation for the 48-unit condominium complex next door is going full tilt. On a site the size of a city block, a 345 John Deere excavator feeds the hungry line of  side dump trailers, queued up the block below us on Fourth Street, just down the hill in Missoula. The loader […]