About

Don Snow is a professor emeritus, editor, and writer with more than forty years’ teaching, research, and publishing experience.  For eighteen of those years, he directed the Northern Lights Research & Education Institute in Missoula, Montana, where he founded and co-edited both Northern Lights Magazine and the Chronicle of Community. He is the author-editor of six books. 

Life & Background

Don Snow was born in 1951 in the coal mining “camp” of Hiawatha, Utah. His father worked as an underground miner at the U.S. Fuel Company's King Mine. His mother was a homemaker who had a stint working at the Hiawatha coal-cleaning plant when the men were called away during World War II. When Don was four years old, his family moved to the steel-making city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where his father received training to become a mine safety inspector for the U.S. Department of Interior. Don grew up hiking, hunting and fishing in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania, and later among the mountains, canyons and sagebrush steppes of Colorado and Wyoming. These experiences, coupled with his young life around coal mines, power plants, steel mills, and streams and rivers ruined by acid mine drainage, contributed to his views on the natural environment.

College years took him to Brigham Young University and then to Colorado State. He spent the next six years of his life working and living on a farm north of Fort Collins – the place from which his first published works appeared.  A move to Montana landed him in the middle of the West’s raging environmental battles in the early 1980s, the dawning of the Reagan era, and for the next twenty years Don worked mostly as an environmental activist for a variety of green non-profits. From that point forward, his writing, teaching, and thinking were all deeply influenced by his life on the front lines of Western politics.

Teaching & Writing

In 2001, Don began teaching full-time at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where, over a twenty-year career, he developed a unique program in the Environmental Humanities, a means of exploring contemporary environmental issues through the lenses of literature, philosophy, art, and religion.  Upon his retirement from Whitman in 2022, the College created a new tenure-track position in the Environmental Humanities and named the professorship in his honor.

In addition to his books, Don has published more than sixty literary essays, stories and poems in publications ranging from High Country News to Gray’s Sporting Journal, Sierra, High Desert Journal, Orion and others.  His six-part series “Writing the Real Montana,” which appeared in Montana Magazine, won the International Regional Magazine Award in 2011.  In addition, his many years working as an on-the-ground conservation activist led to the publication of numerous essays, papers, lectures, and commentaries in law reviews, policy journals, and anthologies collected from the annals of recent Western environmental politics. 

Tours

One of his primary interests lies in the literature of contact between indigenous people and Euro-Americans.  Thus, in 2004 he began leading historical tours on portions of the Lewis and Clark Trail from Great Falls, Montana, to Fort Clatsop at Astoria, Oregon.  Over the years he has led week-long trips for alumni associations at Texas A&M, the University of Wisconsin, Whitman College, and for the general public. His tours are now available each summer under the auspices of Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours (stephenambrosetours.com).