On a downtown street outside the O’Haire Motor Inn in Great Falls, Montana, it smells like french fries. The sidewalks are empty except for one older gentleman polishing the chrome door handles of the motel. When he finishes with the handles, he wipes the glass...
Ghost Town Guitars might be the most aptly named guitar shop in Montana. To get there, you have to drive about 30 minutes west of Helena to the little town of Rimini, at the base of Red Mountain. It’s a charming collection of old log...
Heavy wet snowflakes drop from the sky, making their wayward descent to the ground. Some catch on the needles of the ocher larch and evergreen spruce and pines. They accumulate where they land, fluffy blankets cloaking all that lies beneath — all season long if...
Architecture Locati Architects Interior Design Locati Interiors Construction Schlauch Bottcher Construction For a longtime Big Sky family, a new build from the ground up wasn’t so much about having a fresh experience as it was about preserving and expanding on what they loved about their old home. The East Coast-based family...
The possessive apostrophe in Parks’ Fly Shop is intentional, differentiating the Yellowstone gateway business from the national park that’s a long cast to the south. But the punctuation also serves to express ownership, of both the idea of fly fishing as a necessary human experience...
I grew up watching my mother in the kitchen. She was a passionate cook who innovated beyond recipes, filling our table with all kinds of original dishes. She left behind some of her recipes, but not all. And one that I have been curious about...
At 2 a.m. on June 7, 1896, a Great Northern train pulled into the station at Blackfoot, Montana, bringing three Yale graduates to some of the last great stretches of the fabled American West. The privileged leader of the group was Gifford Pinchot, age 31....
Each time I’ve looked at this tree from the road, I’ve thought there might be an elk standing next to it. It’s an illusion of course. A smaller tree that was once bent by snow looks like an elk standing there. I walked up to...
for Peacock In the mud of the origin of Hopeful Creek, we find a paw print, wolf track, big as my fist, size of the male they found on Deer Creek this spring — a hundred seventy-nine pounds. Plenty lions there, too. A few years back some hunter shot a grizzly up Kelly Creek, said he thought...
The first time I dined at Maison, my partner and I couldn’t stop laughing. It was April and the gunmetal sky promised rain. Maybe snow. We’d been trudging around in the mud all day, weeding, pruning, wrestling with winter-rotten rhubarb, hoping spring might someday come....