At ninety-one and ninety, Jim and Iris Willadsen are still teaching their family how to care for the Wyoming mountain that helped raise them.
I’m Bennett Blackwood.
Their story reaches back one hundred forty-eight years, when Jim’s grandparents came from Denmark and settled near Pole Mountain in southeastern Wyoming. His family was among the first grazing-permit families there. On June fifteenth, the Forest Service recorded the couple with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in the fifty-five-thousand-acre landscape.
The pair have been married seventy-two years. They watched the country change, kept ranching, and returned with four generations to a place shaped by work and memory. Jim’s advice is wonderfully simple.
Jim Willadsen, original recorded interview: Learn how to love it and take care of it and pass it on to somebody else. Leave it the way you found it. Maybe make an improvement. That’s key. Yeah, I think that’s key.
That is stewardship in everyday language: enjoy the land, improve it when you can, and pass the responsibility forward. The Forest Service says Pole Mountain remains a multiple-use landscape for grazing, recreation, and wildlife habitat. For this family, it is also a living lesson that each generation can choose to carry on.
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