Most people want to protect the forest by leaving it alone, but the shortleaf pines in our Ozark hills burned to stay alive — and they’re still waiting for fire.

Late April is when the birds are moving through the Ozarks — I’ll show you how to spot red-tails, broad-wings, and Cooper’s hawks from your own backyard.

In 1861, Rolla’s courthouse became a hospital overnight, and local women used wild ginger and spicebush to keep Union soldiers alive.

The last week of April in the Ozarks taught me why old-timers planted corn when oak leaves reached the size of a squirrel’s ear—it’s a thermometer that doesn’t need batteries.

Most snakes you screamed at are harmless neighbors doing free pest control—here’s how to tell the five venomous species from the forty-five helping your land.

The spring ephemerals know something about timing that most of us have forgotten — how to find the gap and fill it before the canopy closes.

When the war came to Rolla, the brand-new courthouse became a surgery ward, and women whose names we’ve lost kept soldiers alive with skills no journal recorded.

When Congress decided to save the Current and Jacks Fork rivers in 1964, they preserved something I think about every time I walk to the creek.

The Phelps County Courthouse was barely a year old when the war came to its steps—I found the letters that tell us what happened next.

The CCC boys who built Lake of the Ozarks State Park worked in stone and timber meant to outlast them — and eighty years later, it has.