Auction for the Arts The Arts Council of Big Sky hosts its sixth annual fundraising art auction Thursday, March 22 at Moonlight Lodge. The evening begins at 6 p.m. with a quick-finish session with well-known artists including Kevin Red Star, Carol Hagan, Gary Lynn Roberts, John...
Yellowstone National Park is a destination for many anglers, but when you’re coming into the park from Montana, Wyoming, or Idaho, the federally-designated fishing regulations can take you by surprise. Here’s a bare-essentials start at what you need to know: When to fish: Fishing in the...
IN LIVINGSTON, MONTANA, barely a stone’s throw from the Yellowstone River, a handful of fly-fishing craftspeople are at the forefront of a burgeoning movement, creating handmade, utilitarian works of art. Boats. Rods. Flies. Not unlike the pioneering farmers of the farm-to-table movement, these men and...
THE BIG HOLE RIVER has its start east of the Continental Divide in the Beaverheads, bubbling up from a complex of high-altitude rivulets and runs, snowmelt ponds and puddles, before flowing 150-some miles toward its confluence with the Jefferson River. Along the way, the Big...
[caption id="attachment_11328" align="alignright" width="210"] brown drake, Silver Creek, Idaho[/caption] SO HERE'S A THOUGHT: If you’ve taken up fly fishing, the trajectory of your progress — the map of your success — runs large to small. You start out on the riverbank, checking in sort of nonspecifically...
SOUTH OF THREE FORKS where the graveled Madison Road winds past cattle ranches, horse farms, and residences, there’s a unique, unmarked fishery at the Cobblestone Fishing Access site. Commonly known as Darlington Spring Creek Ditch (its original name was Darlinton, after the family that once owned the...
WHEN MY WIFE AND I CRESTED THE FINAL mound of trail approaching Gneiss Lake in Montana’s Tobacco Root Mountains, the beauty of the jagged granite walls briefly halted us. Below, concentric circles of slow-rising cutthroat trout pocked Gneiss’ surface, and the click-clack of bounding mountain...
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...