Jake Mosher is a multi-award-winning photographer from Montana, USA. He grew up in Northern Vermont, on the edge of a tiny village near the Canadian border, in the heart of some of New England’s wildest country. From a very young age, he found himself drawn to remote places, at home in the deep woods, falling in love with the natural world around him. Some of Mosher’s earliest memories involve seasonal change in the North Country – the calls of high-flying flocks of geese, the rattle of loose window panes during a winter snow storm, the heady aroma of fallen leaves, and the joyous transformation into spring marked by curls of steam billowing from neighboring sugar houses where maple sap was boiled into syrup.
Growing up in an era before virtual reality, social media, and high-definition video games, Mosher’s cure for childhood boredom involved taking a hatchet, some wooden matches, a thermos of hot chocolate in the winter or lemonade in the summer, and disappearing for hours into the wilderness that lay literally out his back door. He became a keen observer of nature, learning the names of plants and trees, the habits of wild animals, and studying the smallest details of the world around him.
By the mid-1990s, Mosher found his beloved Vermont changing. The small dairy farms that had defined its landscape for four generations were going under by the hundreds, land was being developed for new homes at an alarming rate, so, like pioneers one hundred years before him, Mosher headed west seeking bigger country. As his name was read at his college graduation, he was approaching the Mississippi River, going as fast as his beat-up car would carry him, determined to settle in the Rocky Mountains of Montana where he planned to become an author.
On the outskirts of Butte, Montana, renting a 50-year-old trailer where his bed sheets would routinely freeze to the wall on winter nights, Mosher found the frontier existence he was seeking. He worked as a logger, miner, substitute elementary school teacher, prize fighter, and big-game guide to support his fiction writing, eventually seeing two novels published. In a moment of weakness, he once applied and was accepted to law school, later burning his acceptance letter in his small, wood stove, determined to succeed as an artist. For more than a decade, Mosher lived a hand-to-mouth existence, immersed in the wilds of Montana, at home among its high mountain lakes, semi-arid prairies, and vast, unbroken tracts of wilderness.
As early middle-life set in, with the pressures to assimilate into a more “normal” lifestyle, Mosher became an explosives engineer, eventually running a large job, enjoying some of the financial freedom that a stable career afforded him, but at the same time straying further from what his heart truly wanted. As many of the same changes that had pushed him out of Vermont twenty years earlier began occurring in Montana, Mosher turned to photography to document the dwindling wild places he loves most. Through a camera’s lens, he found the perfect medium to present his unique view of the natural world, drawing on a lifetime’s love of the outdoors. What began as a hobby, turned to a passion and then an obsession. By photographing the Milky Way above abandoned homesteads, taking macro pictures of butterflies and flowers, and hiking miles through snow to capture a frozen lake at sunset, Mosher realized that his true calling in life was behind his camera.
On an early fall day, as strings of geese passed over Montana, their calls transporting him back to his boyhood home in Northern Vermont and the infant beginnings of his fascination with Nature, Mosher walked away from his job to pursue his photography full-time.
His work has since won national and international awards, been published in many magazines, and has provided him with what he has always sought – the perfect excuse to spend his life in the parts of the Earth he loves most. He believes that in Nature there is no such thing as the ordinary and that the world, particularly off the beaten path, is a wonderful thing to see.
