Women Shaping the West: Stories from Wyoming

The following is an excerpt from Women Shaping the West by Lindsay Linton Buk

When I was a child, in the corner of our family room beside the dinner table, stood a narrow bookshelf stacked with row upon row of National Geographic magazines. The iconic yellow spines, small worlds of their own, became impossible to ignore as the bright blocks multiplied. Instead of one world, they became many. An entire universe lived on those shelves.

Some evenings, the stacks would glow amber against the light of the fireplace. During meals, my gaze inevitably wandered to that captivating corner of our home. This was when I first longed to explore faraway lands—my earliest memory of being fascinated with people, how they live their lives, and their connection to place. That imprint was so strong that when I went back to school years later to study photography, my original goal was to become a National Geographic photographer.

I was born in Powell, a vast desert basin in northwestern Wyoming that was once an ocean millions of years ago. Pale-washed earth meets pastel peaks. The glacial silhouettes of the Beartooth and Bighorn mountain ranges frame the horizon, extending a hundred miles in each direction. Heart Mountain and rocky benches soften into endless sagebrush and fields of sugar beets, beans, barley, hay, and alfalfa.

Eyes fixed on the long horizon, I’d wonder:

Who will I become? What does life have in store for me?

My visions and aspirations were nurtured in the great expanse of the Bighorn Basin, where I felt small and boundless all at once.

My Linton ancestors came to the region in 1878 from the Scottish Highlands and Ontario, Canada. They settled in the ranch town of Meeteetse and helped build its civic and business foundations. My grandfather opened Linton’s Big R, a farm and ranch store, in nearby Powell in 1960. My dad became an employee at eleven years old and moved home the day after graduating from the University of Wyoming. The duty of family called, and he recognized the opportunity to expand the Linton legacy. He is a man with deep love for his family and community.

My mom, from Connecticut, was drawn to Wyoming’s wildness. She craved the expansion and openness the West offers. When she moved to Powell as a high school chemistry teacher, she brought exposure and perspective that opened a new world for my dad. Together, they gave me an appreciation for both community and discovery—a dichotomy that has never left me.

Despite my fifth-generation ties, I never imagined a future for myself in Wyoming. While it gave me freedom to roam, part of my spirit felt contained. It seemed too small for the scale of my dreams. The pages of those magazines—striking portraits, biodiverse rainforests, foreign wildlife—only deepened my curiosity about the wider world.

After high school, I retraced my mom’s footsteps and headed east. I majored in history, drawn to understanding diverse human experiences. After college, I enrolled in an introductory photography class at a community college, harking back to those yellow spines that had once felt larger than life. Eventually, I became a professional photographer, specializing in portraiture. History teaches that the stories we prioritize reflect our values. Photography became my way of telling those stories and sharing them with the broader world.

In my mid-twenties, I moved to New York City. It was one of the most exciting and transformative experiences of my life. The energy was invigorating and exhausting. I loved existing in a microcosm of the world, where every race, religion, attire, and profession hustled to its place. Everyone dreamed big. No dream felt too large or insignificant.

Living in New York allowed me to confidently identify as an artist. But the pace was relentless. Packed subway commutes, long hours, constant striving—it was survival in its own right. There were many times I wanted to retreat to familiarity and fresher air.

I worked for acclaimed portrait photographer Peter Hurley as his studio manager and later as an associate photographer. The pace was intense, the learning curve steep. I photographed actors’ headshots and yogis’ portraits, absorbing best practices and witnessing firsthand the power of bringing a dream to life. Long-term, I set my sights on becoming a renowned editorial photographer.

Between 2010 and early 2013, I gathered as much as I could, as fast as I could. It was as if my spirit had been catapulted into a sprint.

Somewhere deep down, I knew Wyoming was the finish line—that when I returned, I would plant my feet firmly into the ground and forge my own legacy.

When I stepped off the plane in January 2013, the wind whipped my hair and nipped at my face. I pulled my winter jacket tighter around my chest. It was a literal contraction.

The tension of my childhood returned, but differently. In the state that champions freedom, I wanted to find my own freedom to create. Having learned so much, I was ready to live on my own terms and push against the boundaries of what I believed possible.

For me, it has always come down to story—the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we share, and the stories forgotten by history. This project became my vessel to expand, widen, stretch, and ultimately shatter the tensions that once held me back.

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Trained in New York City and now rooted back home, Lindsay Linton Buk spent years crisscrossing the Cowboy State—logging more than 15,000 miles, shooting 600 rolls of film, and recording over 3,000 minutes of interviews—to document the women redefining the region today. The book grows out of her acclaimed Women of Wyoming podcast and museum exhibition and pairs striking portraits with intimate stories of resilience, identity, and purpose. Lindsay’s work has appeared in Outside and Southwest magazines, and Women of Wyoming has been featured by Forbes, the Travel Channel, and others.