Calm air, clear azure skies, and a uniform blanket of white covering the entire landscape, save for the lower branches of the pines; I didn’t need a thermometer to tell me it was a sub-zero day and, because of that, I was pretty sure there...
One fall day when I was 9 years old, my father came home with a brand new snowmobile: a 1979 Yamaha Enticer 340. It was bright red with white stripes and gold lettering on the cowl, and to me, the engine sounded just like a...
Everyone on the Tundra Buggy moved to one side to look out into the boreal forest near Churchill, on the western shore of the Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada. I was part of a group of 12 from Polar Bears International (PBI), a nonprofit organization...
In the oldest reaches of downtown Missoula, Montana, there’s a haunt where the walls have eyes. Inside a storied brick building, where no signs announce its presence, is a place that some might call a dive. But Charlie B’s is no ordinary bar; step inside,...
On big powder days at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, no matter the day of the week, you can count on the fact that skiers and snowboarders will be in line for the tram even before the sun rises. Some hooting and hollering may be heard,...
“The nights were cold, and, if you woke up… you would hear the coyotes. … You could sit in the front of the cabin, lazy in the sun, and look across the valley. … You remembered the elk bugling. … You remembered how this country...
Located on the eastern flanks of the Highwood Mountains of Central Montana is the sprawling Strand Ranch, home to one of the last big working cattle operations in the state. Set on 30,000 contiguous acres — half of which are protected in a conservation easement...
It was called the Great American Cattle Drive, and as Sharon Moore remembers it, 300 head of longhorn out of Fort Worth, Texas, traversed more than 1,400 miles across six states to arrive six months later to her hometown of Miles City, Montana. It was...
I have always loved the open prairie grasslands and coulees that form typical habitat for sharptails, Huns, and pheasants — Big Sky Country defined. An enormous swath of it lay spread out before me one cloudless September morning, running all the way north from the...
A chorus of crickets hums in the background as farmer Jody Manuel describes his latest experiment. The organic Petite Crimson lentil plants that he’s standing among reach his knees and are as thick and green as the top of the Amazon rainforest. He crouches to...