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Our Outdoors.

That’s what we’re calling this special issue of North Dakota OUTDOORS, which is uncharacteristically heavy on the photo side of things.

I like the title for a handful of reasons, but mostly because you could easily exchange Our Outdoors with Our State and the message remains much the same.

Thirty-plus years ago when I moved to North Dakota, it would have helped to thumb through these same pages to muzzle an uneasiness that came with leaving what I knew – a vastly different landscape and lifestyle – 1,200 miles behind in the U-Haul’s side view mirror.

I knew little, maybe less, about what would become my new home. When I traced my route on store-bought maps that ran through parts of five states, my familiarity ended somewhere in western Montana. Beyond that, I had no clue.

Before moving to North Dakota, I received a neatly folded newspaper clipping in the mail from a friend that showed a guy holding, with both hands and some effort, a seemingly otherworldly creature he’d landed near Williston.

“Good luck catching one of these in North Dakota!” my friend wrote in ink on the black and white newspaper photo.

I wrote back: “Never heard of a paddlefish. And where is Williston?”

It’s in North Dakota in the late 1980s that I shot my first white-tailed deer, an animal so familiar to so many, but new to me at the time. Growing up in a part of the world where things didn’t stay frozen for long, it was here, on a lake in McLean County, where I sunk a minnow through a 8-inch hole in the ice for the first time, unconvinced anything would swim by and eat it.

While driving on a frozen lake in winter was unfamiliar and unsettling, it was North Dakota’s landscape, or at least much of it, that was difficult to get used to at first.

There was plenty of it, I remember thinking, as you could seemingly walk for days – as far as the eye could see – look back and see where you started. Yet, what would you see?

More than enough, it turns out. Certainly, more than I anticipated.

These pages of Our Outdoors provide more than a glimpse of what makes North Dakota matchless in many regards, including the sometimes countless migrant birds of many species, to the native animals that hunker in for the rugged long haul here on the Northern Plains.

Many of the photographs, if you are more than a casual reader of NDO, are likely familiar. There is a good reason for that because the majority, aside from the cover photo and a few others, were published in these pages at one time or another in the last 15 years.

To say that I anticipated decades ago that I’d be in a position to help serve readers with these images of North Dakota’s outdoors 10 times a year would be a lie.

To come completely clean, I didn’t anticipate a place so once unfamiliar, so alien from where my roots were initially planted, to completely become what it has.

Home.