At work, and at home, outdoors

Bill Dawson is in his truck. It’s where he is most work days — either driving Jefferson County’s roads and track or, better, walking its trails and rivers. The more he’s outdoors, the more he enjoys his outing.

The truck, a Dodge Ram 2500, is his mobile office, filled to the brim with equipment to meet most any situation: a map for every land feature in the county; a bottle of NARCAN for opioid overdoses; and a prisoner partition for a rare arrest.

Dawson is the game warden for southern Jefferson County. He patrols nearly 1,000 square miles for his employer, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, driving an average of several hundred miles daily from the top of Boulder Hill to the Jefferson River south of Whitehall.