America’s entry to the Rocky Mountain fur trade closely followed a rapid succession of events: President Thomas Jefferson’s fervent advocacy for territorial expansion, the Louisiana Purchase (1803), and the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804–6), the latter of which reported extraordinary populations of beaver, buffalo, and...
Growing up in Bozeman, Montana, cross-country skier Logan Diekmann learned to slide on snow at an early age. By the time he turned 8, he was racing with the Bridger Ski Foundation’s (BSF) Youth Ski League, having started with the program at the ripe age...
Montana had no official eastern boundary in 1805, because the state as we know it did not exist. The confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers served the purpose well enough then, as it nearly does today. The Lewis and Clark expedition reached that landmark...
On a downtown street outside the O’Haire Motor Inn in Great Falls, Montana, it smells like french fries. The sidewalks are empty except for one older gentleman polishing the chrome door handles of the motel. When he finishes with the handles, he wipes the glass...
Remember, raise your hoods at night so packrats don’t build nests in your engines!” The campground host’s admonition seemed slightly odd, but she walked on, continuing her evening rounds. My partner Mary and I looked at each other, baffled. My bemused, stubborn, initial reaction: “No...
This morning, the prairie is treating us to a Homeric sunrise as dawn begins to spread her saffron robes across the eastern sky. The time is late March, the place a remote corner of central Montana’s sagebrush steppe, and Lori and I are here to...
Dyna found the ring-necked pheasant and pointed. She froze. Even her tail stopped moving. Brillo stopped in her tracks, too, honoring Dyna’s point. As both dogs held point, Anita Andrus walked forward and flushed the bird. Brillo and Dyna watched it rocket up from the...
For connoisseurs of rugged, alpine landscapes, the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho are unquestionably the crown jewel of the Gem State. Michael Lanza, a regular contributor to Backpacker, astutely observes that the region’s numerous “10,000-foot peaks, [which] form a Sierra-quality skyline, [and] an eastern escarpment...
The first time I heard an elk bugle, I was a greenhorn teenager sitting on a mountainside in southern British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains, miles from the nearest road. My father had kindly brought me along on a wilderness horseback hunt, with elk as the primary...
In the rural 1.5-million-acre Blackfoot watershed, Montana’s characteristic working lands are on full display. Generational ranches are replete with grazing cattle and haystacks; rolling grass and strings of timber are seldom interrupted by the intermittent farmhouse or cabin; deer and elk graze, while waterfowl and...