Steven Higgs Steven HiggsProjects 2025 Back to the Charles C. Deam Wilderness: A Half Century Later After a week buried under a foot of snow and a meeting with friends at the Limestone Post, it seems I am still taking to heart the most profound quote I’ve elicited from anyone in my 50-year career as a journalist, photographer, and author: “Every Projects

Back to the Charles C. Deam Wilderness: A Half Century Later

Deam Wilderness, Hoosier National Forest

After a week buried under a foot of snow and a meeting with friends at the Limestone Post, it seems I am still taking to heart the most profound quote I’ve elicited from anyone in my 50-year career as a journalist, photographer, and author:

“Every second is an opportunity for extraordinary depth and fulfillment of purpose.” – Andy Mahler

I will be returning to my roots in 2026, hiking through and photographing the Charles C. Deam Wilderness for a series of Limestone features, as well as an Andy-style coffee table book on Jeff Stant and the largest block of unbroken hardwood forest in the Lower Midwest.

Hence this Project.

Articles

Remembering Bill Thomas: Nature Photographer, Author, and Educator Extraordinaire

In retrospect, it seems obvious that 21 months spent poring over my professional past for two major retrospective projects would end at the beginning, with a story package about nature photographer Bill Thomas.

As detailed in this four-part series, Bill is the one individual most responsible for the half century path that led me to Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National and Indiana University acquiring my professional archive — 50 years of my nature images and my Bill Thomas files among them.

He is also one of the most influential nature photographers of his generation, one who is largely unrecognized and underapreciated.

BLOGS

Photograph the Amazon River – Colombia, Peru, Brazil

My mission to photograph the Amazon River began at the same moment as my exploration of the Hoosier National Forest, exactly one half century ago – though it took that long to actually materialize.

Indeed, I’ve long said the estimated 10,000 photographs I have of my home state’s only national forest were mere practice for the 1,000-plus I captured with my Nikon D600 during a week on the world’s most biodiverse river environment in June 2024.

PHOTO ALBUMS

BLOGS

Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National

Released Oct. 1, 2025, this 8.5×11, full color coffee table book chronicles the remarkable life and career of Southern Indiana forest activist Andy Mahler and one leg of his family’s two-generation journey from Nazi Vienna in the 1930s to a life surrounded by the Hoosier National Forest in the 2020s.

Along the way, Andy helped organize concerned citizens in Indiana and the Central Hardwood region and ultimately got off-road vehicles banned on the Hoosier National and commercial timber harvesting shut down on millions of acres of national forest land, from Missouri to Pennsylvania to Alabama.

The 120-page book also profiles the 204,000-acre Hoosier National’s 350-million year tectonic migration, from the Amazon Basin to today’s Southern Indiana hill country, and its 15,000-year human history, from the Ice Age to the early 21st century.

PHOTO ALBUMS

BLOGS

Photograph Europe: Austria, Italy, Slovenia, Spain

Exploring Europe was never pert of what became my Retirement Travel Trifecta until my Colombian friend Luz found me on Facebook in the spring of 2023. I hadn’t seen her or sisters Estella and Patricia, who now live in Europe, since they were teenagers in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1976.

Nearly 40 years later, after retiring from 27 years teaching journalism at Indiana University in 2022, I followed my Nikon for a magical three weeks that took me from Villach in the Austrian Alps to the Alicante Spain on the Mediterranean Sea.