by Steven Higgs | Dec 28, 2025
Following Bill Thomas, from Brown County to the Amazon and Back
To say I followed Bill Thomas’s footsteps is, on some occasions, simply a statement of fact.
I of course walked by his side at the first nature photography seminar he ever held on his Deer Trails property in Brown County in 1979.
Three months before I joined the Bloomington Herald-Telephone as a staff writer in June 1985, my future City Editor Bill Strother wrote a story titled Naked City to Punkin Center: Thomases Roam Indiana, about Bill and Phyllis’s new book Indiana: Off the Beaten Track. Fewer than 100 days before I arrived, Bill Thomas walked the same halls I would for the next 11 years.
The first entry in Bill’s 1982 resume under the Photographic Exhibits heading was the Minnetrista Art Center in Muncie just off the Ball State Campus. Following release of my 2019 IU Press book A Guide to Natural Areas of Northern Indiana, I gave a multimedia slideshow and talk at the Red-tail Land Conservancy’s annual meeting, held at the Minnetrista.
There is no doubt we drove and hiked some of the same back roads and trails featured in my Northern Indiana guidebook and its 2016 precursor A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana, as well as my self-published, 2025 coffee table book Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves.
And make no mistake about it, when a Chinese student in 2013 inspired Natural Bloomington Ecotours & More, Bill’s 1979 Brown County Photojournalism Workshop and ensuing career path was top of mind.
The idea of leading nature photo tours had lurked in my subconscious since that weekend at Deer Trails. And a few weeks after the last of 30 student conferences ended with a girl saying her favorite childhood memories were trips to the mountains with her photographer grandpa, Grandpa Steve here led Jingy and her friend Mengwei on the first of a dozen or so ecotours I would lead through 2015.
Like Bill’s, two of the Natural Bloomington Ecotours were photographic in nature, featuring photographers John Blair and Gary R. Morrison. All were amazing, but one of my great life experiences, bar none, was leading an ecotour for a local chapter of the American Council of the Blind.
I could have had fun and found a way to offer Thomas-style tours, but another of Bill’s pathways beckoned.
IU Press had published my first book Eternal Vigilance: Nine Tales of Environmental Heroism in Indiana in 1996. And as I chronicled my travels on the Natural Bloomington blog, a Press editor proposed a series of guidebooks, which led to five years traveling Indiana backroads, exploring the state’s rich natural heritage, and two nature guidebooks, a la Bill Thomas.
Altogether I published six books between 1996 and 2025 – one a textbook, the other five environmentally themed. And as with Bill’s trajectory, my book writing led to public talks and/or slideshows about environmental Indiana from Evansville to Fort Wayne and South Bend to New Albany.
I also spent four years writing and publishing a bimonthly newspaper as a Senior Environmental Writer at the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, where I traveled, wrote about, and photographed the entire state to document its perennial Bottom 1% state ranking on environmental health and quality of life.
In addition to the Red-Tail presentation in Muncie, over the past 29 years I’ve spoken to groups like the Sierra Club, Oak Heritage Conservancy, Hoosier Environmental Council, Indiana Environmental Health Association, and Indiana Environmental Institute. In 2001, I gave a talk in South Bend called World Scientists Warning to Notre Dame Students.
The director at the Indiana Environmental Institute would tell me years later that someone had remembered my keynote as “having an edge,” a critique I welcomed; the subject was the health impacts from toxic chemicals on childhood development and decreasing sperm counts worldwide.
My favorite public speaking recollection is joking to my daughters that the mom and kids getting out of a car at the Little Professor Bookstore in Fort Wayne in 1996 were there for my talk about the newly released Eternal Vigilance. Damned if they weren’t.
In October and November 2025, discussing my new Andy Mahler coffee table book, I have been a guest on a community radio show and a public radio podcast, the opening speaker at the annual meeting of the forest preservation group Heartwood, and a guest author at the Juniper Gift Shop and Gallery in Bloomington. I gave a slideshow talk at Morgenstern Books, Indiana’s largest independent bookstore.
I didn’t have the opportunities to travel the world like Bill Thomas did, so I lived as vicariously as I could through his life, happy that I had blazed a parallel path via words and photographs.
But when I finally had the time, money, and inspiration to follow Bill to the Upper Amazon River in 2024, I felt personally and professionally obligated and, in the end, complete.
I had dreamed of photographing the world’s greatest river long before Bill told me of his Amazonian Headwaters safari idea in 1990. I had plans to go to Leticia, Colombia, after I had purchased 250 Amazon Indian baskets in Bogotá in 1976. Suffice it to say I surrendered to international forces beyond my control and never made it.
So, when I visited old Colombian friends who now live in Austria and Spain and told me their mother was still alive in Barranquilla, I decided to go see Teresa. And if I was going to Colombia, dammit, I was going to the Amazon.
My daughters, grandkids, and I flew into Leticia in June 2024 for a week spent exploring the Amazon in Colombia, Brazil, and Peru. We stayed on the Amacayacu River in a Tikuna Indian village of 600 called San Martín, with neither roads nor vehicles — nor Wi-Fi.
I considered traveling upriver with my granddaughter to Bill’s Amazon Headwaters Safari outpost, Iquitos, Peru, after the rest of the family left. But logistics got in the way.
Almost a half century after the Brown County workshop, a Nikon still in hand, I found myself surrounded by the planet’s most magnificent Natural Area, still drafting Bill Thomas 15 years after he passed, grateful for the footsteps he left for me to spend 47 years breathlessly following.
Up next in the Thomas spirit: the Scandinavian Midnight Sun.
