Buffalo Hunt Armoire by skyhorse saddles + hughes woodworks This joint venture between Durango, Colorado-based master saddle makers and leather artists Lisa and Loren Skyhorse, and Huson, Montana-based master woodworker Shane Hughes, is the epitome of one-of-a-kind. The collaboration, which took place over the course of...
Early on a summer morning, while the rest of the family sleeps, a small boy makes his way alone to the overgrown banks of a nearby mountain stream in California’s Eastern Sierra. He tosses a worm-baited line just right. Soon, he’s using all his might...
The delicate, white-feather legs of a thistle seed run upstream with the wind. The fragile physics of a miniature tumbleweed ballet make it magically spin against the weight of mountains while standing still until this exquisite balance fails and must wait to find its moment again downstream from where you brace your feet against the...
Ernest Hemingway in the Yellowstone High Country by Chris Warren (Riverbend, $19.95) paints a portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist that may surprise and enlighten Hemingway enthusiasts. Shining a light on the small ranch outside of Cooke City, Montana, where the writer spent five summers,...
When he’s not in the kitchen, Chris DiMaio, the executive chef of Three Forks Grille in Columbia Falls, Montana, is often out on the trail foraging for wild food: morels, boletes, chanterelles. When the mushrooms fade, he then looks for arnica, elderberry, and fiddlehead ferns....
To almost everyone who enters Yellowstone National Park, or even those who just look at a map of it, it must seem puzzling that the park laps over into only a few miles of Montana and Idaho. Why is 1 percent of Yellowstone in Idaho,...
There are many reasons why fly anglers are drawn to the sport, some more obsessively than others. Maybe it’s time spent outdoors, the peaceful spell of rushing waters, the game of trying to emulate nature and fool a fish. There’s a beautiful simplicity about angling,...
On the night before my son Jaren’s 18th birthday, I went online to buy him a fishing license. But I wondered if I would regret it. How annoyed would I be if he only used it once? Or more honestly, how disappointed? Worst case, I’d be...
With a laid-back vibe and the outdoor recreation that abounds in this Western Montana mountain town, Whitefish is a sure bet for families. “It’s a great community with a small-town feel,” says architect Robert Gilbert of the Boulder, Colorado-based Stillwater Architecture. “Everyone knows everyone; on...
Last night, snow swathed the meadow. This morning we scroll the window shades and trace nature’s busy history of trails, hooves and clawed footfalls crisscrossing acres blanketed white. Such complicated comings and goings, traversing so nearby while we slumbered unsuspectingly. Deer, elk, rabbit, squirrel, raccoon, milling about the moonless overcast midnight. Even now, invisible birds...