The old man couldn’t name his favorite place in the world, but the upper canyon of Moose Creek would be close to the top of the list. It is sort of a canyon within a canyon, and hardly anybody ever goes there. The sheer to...
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...
Since its original facility opened in 1927, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming has become a 300,000-square-foot historical center consisting of five separate museums. Its flagship, the Buffalo Bill Museum, chronicles the life of William F. Cody [1846–1917], a Western icon...
A horse runs across a snowy field — a rider at the reins — as a skier clings to a rope tethered behind the saddle. The skier leaps off jumps, dodges obstacles, and carves turns while spectators cheer. Skijoring is a sport with rich history...
It was raining,” began Howard Zahniser’s account of a horsepacking trip in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains in August of 1947. The horses were saddled, packed, and tied to trees outside a rustic log cabin. But Zahniser — a 41-year-old city gent, a preacher’s kid, and a...
Tatiana Lawson is the newly appointed director of the Sun Valley Resort Ski Patrol in Sun Valley, Idaho, and the first female ever to hold that position. And, while women have been involved in Sun Valley’s male-dominated professional patrol for several decades, it’s clear there’s...
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...