Let’s face it, camping is not for everyone. But have no fear, glamping season is here. Trade in the sleeping bags, those pads that don’t quite cover the rocks, the time spent setting up the tent, and try one of these more luxurious options: The Ranch...
In 2016, the Montana Wilderness Society (MWS) debuted its volunteer-aggregated website, hikewildmontana.org, and it’s been growing ever since. Spearheaded by hiking fanatic and MWS grant and marketing coordinator Kassia Randzio, the effort started in 2014 when 70 volunteers hit the ground, cameras and notebooks in...
As summer approaches, there’s more than a little appeal in turning to books that celebrate the natural world and the people who protect it. These new books offer glimpses of the best that the West has to offer. They take us on trips into the...
Halfway between the tiny, Central Montana agricultural towns of Hobson and Windham, along a lonely stretch of rural highway, sits the Oxen Yoke Inn, which isn’t an inn at all. More aptly, it’s a watering hole, an oasis in the prairie. It is, in fact,...
When the old Royce Applegate Ranch, southeast of the small community of Square Butte in Central Montana, changed hands in November 2013, the new owner had his ranch manager build some new barbed wire fence. At the entrance to the ranch, a laser-cut sheet metal...
In 1907 an Irish boy traveled alone from Europe to Canada by sea, then from Canada to Montana by train. Exactly why he made the journey is a mystery. But he wore a big brass immigration I.D. badge suspended from a chain around his neck...
Of all the ways we can imagine meeting our doom, few of them strike as much terror into the heart as the horror of being buried alive. That prospect haunted the hard rock miners of Butte, Montana, every time they climbed into the small cages,...
“Isn’t this just the best place in the world?” Peter Rosten waved a hand across the landscape around us, a rich green pasture in the Bitterroot Valley, thick with grass. Two hundred yards from where we walked along the gravel road, a huge log cabin...
The ambulance howls at the window, the third one today. I tell myself to keep writing, but my focus is like an oiled piglet. I contemplate lunch again. Umami brine pho? Confit turkey club sandwich? Lengua tacos with sharp, raw onions and flame-ass chiles? Meal...
It’s late September and I’m on the road, a hell of a place to be. I’m in my 20-year-old, 4-cylinder, Ford Ranger pickup, driving coast to coast for what I hope will be a string of uneventful days. Since I have nowhere I really need...