You can be forgiven for thinking of Montana’s Class C state basketball tournament, which begins March 12 at the Butte Civic Center, as the culmination of spectacular seasons for eight of Montana’s smallest high schools. A more accurate description of the state tourney is that...
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...
When Laura Orvidas took the reins of onX in 2018, the Missoula, Montana-based company had about 70 employees and did most of its business shipping state-specific digital maps stored on physical chips that users plugged into their handheld GPS units. If that description of the...
What do moths have to do with owls? Just ask Mat Seidensticker. After nearly a decade spent studying owls across Montana and Alaska, Seidensticker focused his research on the flammulated owl, one of Montana’s smallest and most cryptic species. Soon, it became impossible for him...
On a sunny afternoon in late May, Dillon Kouf stands at the heart of Double K, his family’s ranch outside Darby, Montana, surrounded by barns and outbuildings and the vibrant green of spring. Around him, the endless bustle of chores continues: a couple of men...
It was lightly raining the morning I visited Mountain Meadow Wool in Buffalo, Wyoming, wetting the gravel roads just off I-90 in an area that might be called a “light industrial district” if it were anywhere else in the world. Buffalo is not known as...
When my feet sunk deep into the wet ground far away from the hills where I was born, I knew my husband and I had found the right spot. Our horses had steadily climbed the steep mountain trail for 12 miles, weaving through sheer cliffs....
Born and raised in Whitefish, Montana, painter Nate Closson has always been enthralled with the state’s beauty. His art is a tribute, a way to reignite appreciation for the region’s landscapes and lifestyles. “This whole world is beautiful, but nowhere more so than Montana,” Closson says....
I’ve been making assemblage work for 50 years,” says Stephen Glueckert, an artist and educator based in Missoula, Montana. “But I draw, and I paint, and I play music, and, to me, the older I’ve gotten, the less I see lines between these things. I...