THUNDER BOOMED AND LIGHTNING STRUCK the valley below. Rain strafed the exposed granite ridge in windy gyres, but only briefly. Remnant water drops glinted on the chalet windows — fool’s gold in the setting sun — and a deceptive rainbow appeared to the west over...
ANYONE WHO HAS FLOATED Montana’s Smith River surely has heard of Tenderfoot Creek, one of the main tributaries flowing into the legendary trout stream. Many anglers have waded up the Tenderfoot from the Smith, in hopes of landing a native westslope cutthroat or a big...
BACK IN MY EARLY 20s, when I was living in Big Sky, Montana, I dabbled in fly fishing. I knew enough to tie on flies (albeit slowly) and catch small (tiny) trout on the West Fork of the Gallatin River. Every time I did, I’d...
I was 14 or 15 years old when my father, Burl Jones, created a wildlife museum. This was a couple of miles south of Livingston, Montana, off Highway 89. Dad was on his way to an applauded career as a bronze artist, and had just...
It’s been nearly a week of frigid, blustery weather — shoveling and re-shoveling, plowing and re-plowing, snow scuttling away and then coming back around, swirling up the benches on both sides of town and then down again, pushed by giant snorts of wind. It’s wrestling...
The story of dude ranching in the Rocky Mountain West is, in a way, the history of the contemporary West itself. Through the lens of ranching and recreation, you can see, in microcosm, aspects of what’s made the West such an iconic part of the...
When Alan Kallio was in high school, he was transfixed by an image of an ice boat he saw in National Geographic. Not long after, he was working in a lumber yard and able to gather enough pieces to build his own craft, basing it...
If you don’t believe Montana was once a land of skyscrapers, ask the wind. Decades ago, the infinite huff of the mountains and the high plains was raked by more skyscrapers than soar today in any major city. Everywhere across Montana they stood: tall, slope-shouldered, wooden...
Usually it goes like this. I’m skiing in the backcountry, up Bear Canyon east of Bozeman or along one of the Yellowstone Park trails off U.S. Route 191 south of Big Sky. Much of the time I have the trail to myself, but occasionally I’ll run...
The images float before the viewer’s eyes, strange and otherworldly — like photos of the Crab Nebula from Hubble, or mixings from a hippie light show. They might be satellite shots of the Mojave, cell-section studies from an electron microscope, or hallucinatory paintings from a...