Hardcore cutthroat bums roaming Western backroads with their fly rods, waders, and extra gas tanks know the marquee water, like teenagers with nose rings and spiky hair eagerly touting their favorite punk bands. Vagabonds chasing westslope cutts often head for Montana’s upper Flathead, Clark Fork,...
I wound across western Wyoming’s isolated Bighorn Basin in my indefatigable 1977 Chinook micro-camper, 260,000 happy miles under the Toyota’s hood. Summer heat waves shimmered and danced like Sahara mirages over the arid landscape. Miles away, a truck pulling a horse trailer into the backcountry...
My first backcountry ski lodge experience was back in the late 1990s when some friends and I rented an old yurt two blocks off Main Street in Cooke City, Montana. We paid $5 for a snowmobile ride from town up to Daisy Pass in the...
Moisture rising from the little spring-fed pond overnight had condensed, frozen, and crystallized on the willows lining the bank. The December sun didn’t offer much warmth, but it made the hoarfrost sparkle brilliantly in the clear morning air. The temperature was so cold that I’d...
The trout-filled limestone canyon of Montana’s Smith River — twisting through the Big and Little Belt mountains — would have made a magnificent subject for America’s best Western landscape painters and photographers, visionaries like Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, William Henry Jackson, and Ansel Adams. And...
I put down my walnut pipe and inky zinfandel, rose from our blazing sage campfire, and scanned the horizon for emerging bats. As the western sky melted into a psychedelic watercolor of pink, purple, and orange, last light washed over the highest limestone towers above...
The temperature gauge in my truck reads 1 degree Fahrenheit as we pass through Roosevelt’s Arch at the northwest entrance to Yellowstone National Park. A full moon hangs low to the west over Electric Peak, opposite the trajectory of the rising sun. The reflected sunlight...
The Seeley-Swan Valley, located in northwest Montana, is nestled between — and populated by — giants, both topographically and botanically. No peak in the region eclipses 10,000 feet in elevation, but the Seeley-Swan is bordered by the Mission Mountains and Swan Range, which collectively encompass...
We gaped from our cabin deck as thunder roared and lightning stung the high peaks of southwest Montana’s Gravelly and Madison ranges, 10,000-foot monoliths like Sphinx and Helmet. Rain strafed our roof — a deluge unseen in months — dousing intense July heat and wildfire...
Gnarled, rugged expanses of black and gray lava rock, dotted with muted green sagebrush, define Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in eastern Idaho during snow-free seasons. Miles before reaching the visitor center, a field of hardened lava appears south of the highway,...