Among America’s most renowned luthiers, Montanan Ren Ferguson has made custom guitars for The Beatles, The Stones, Tom Petty, and Emmylou Harris, just to name a few. But recently, he’s used his hands to craft a heralded instrument dedicated to the stars of the trout...
Upon walking through the front doors of the Simms headquarters in Bozeman, Montana, a passion for angling is immediately apparent: It permeates the very building. There’s the latest merchandise on display, an entire wall filled with best-in-the-business awards, and a brief history of the company...
The trout-filled limestone canyon of Montana’s Smith River — twisting through the Big and Little Belt mountains — would have made a magnificent subject for America’s best Western landscape painters and photographers, visionaries like Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, William Henry Jackson, and Ansel Adams. And...
Some might find it strange that one of my favorite trout streams flows through a burned-over canyon. I first visited Roaring Lion Creek in mid-July 2019, almost three years after a wildfire engulfed much of its basin. It was a cool and cloudy day, with drizzling...
I am featherlight, tossed like confetti into a brilliant blue sky, jostled about on the velvet wings of thousands of birds — tundra swans, herons, snow geese, northern pintails, marbled godwits. I roll from one downy back to another as we soar in harmony toward...
We’re a couple dozen miles down a rolling, dusty, backcountry road that shadows the Greys River in western Wyoming, and I can’t find the dream pool I want to fish. This uncertainty has my 15-year-old daughter stressed out. “Dad? Are we lost?” she asks for the...
I put down my walnut pipe and inky zinfandel, rose from our blazing sage campfire, and scanned the horizon for emerging bats. As the western sky melted into a psychedelic watercolor of pink, purple, and orange, last light washed over the highest limestone towers above...
The sun is starting to set behind Wyoming’s Rendezvous Mountain as the last and most committed skiers descend to the base area after a beautiful bluebird day at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. As ski patrol sweeps the mountain to ensure no one is lost or...
Editor’s Note: The Winter 2023 issue closes Big Sky Journal’s 30th anniversary. In recognition of this passage of time, the editors turned back to stories published in the magazine’s first issue, reflecting on historic themes and storytelling in the West. Award-winning author William Kittredge [1932...
The Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation has long been renowned for its spectacular beadwork and horsemanship. On June 25, 1805, two Canadian fur traders, François-Antoine Larocque and Charles McKenzie, witnessed the equestrian parade of more than 2,000 Crow people, including some 645 warriors, who filed through Hidatsa...