More than sixty years after humans annihilated Oregon’s gray wolves, and fifteen years after the federal government reintroduced them in Idaho, wolves have crossed the border and settled in northeast Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. Now about twenty wolves live in the high country around Enterprise and Joseph and they’ve been eating local livestock, calling federal and state management practices into question and fueling controversy in the otherwise quiet towns of northeast Oregon.

Since 1888, there have been twenty-two U.S. presidents, ten Supreme Court chief justices, but just nine editors in chief of the venerable National Geographic. In 2005, Chris Johns, a small-town boy who grew up in Central Point, Oregon, became the ninth editor of the magazine and the first to rise to that title fromits photography ranks.