The first songbird to arrive on the thawing Northern Plains each spring isn’t the meadowlark. It’s the northern pintail, a graceful duck that whistles like your favorite uncle. That is, badly. Still, it’s the sound of spring across Montana’s Hi-Line and Canada’s prairie provinces. This high-pitched,...
In response to severe droughts across the western U.S., an interagency collaboration has produced a new interactive web-based tool called TroutCast, which can be used to support fisheries and water management in Montana. With short-term and long-term forecasts, TroutCast helps inform proactive decision-making for conservation...
In every corner of Montana, ranching and farming families are caring for their land in ways that improve yields and quality while also benefiting the larger ecosystem. In many ways, conservation isn’t an act for these people. It’s a way of life, which, in some...
“I just baked some snickerdoodles. Eat ’em while they’re hot!” It was an unsuspecting proclamation while camping on southwest Wyoming’s Green River. And yet, to my astonishment, my friendly campground neighbor strolled over from her site and presented a plate full of delicious cookies as I...
No one comes to Montana’s Paradise Valley just for the birds. There are greater things that draw people to this spectacular corridor, which is the northern gateway to Yellowstone National Park and stretches 52 miles from Livingston south to Gardiner. Stunning Absaroka and Gallatin mountains rise above...
As military officers established frontier outposts in the American West, they brought with them favorite sporting traditions from back East. If an officer’s pursuit was hunting, he had to have dogs. Greyhounds accompanied General Eugene A. Carr during his 1869 Republican River Expedition in Colorado Territory....
Charles Punchard arrived at the headquarters of Yellowstone National Park on July 19, 1918, with a letter in his hand. Signed by Stephen T. Mather, director of the newly formed National Park Service, the letter declared that Punchard had been hired as the agency’s first-ever...
Let us begin with a flight of imagination purely of my own making. Around the time of first European contact, a band of Indigenous hunters has camped out of the wind in a sheltered canyon in what is now southern Montana. Perhaps they are Crow...
“When you take a close look at history, not all women who came West brought their grandmother’s iris bulbs and settled into a little house on the prairie,” says artist Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey. “A lot of them were broke, alone, and out of options. Some...
Big Sky Journal is fortunate to work with many students of the West. These writers and photographers study the land and people of the region, seeking to understand their subjects intimately. As fall promenades gracefully through the trees, they notice the subtleties of the sun’s...