It’s midafternoon in October, and a bonfire is burning behind our house. With me is David James Duncan, revered Montana author, storied activist, and one of the deepest spiritual and ecological minds of our time. He’s just finished a forthcoming novel, Sun House, a sweeping...
Ghost Town Guitars might be the most aptly named guitar shop in Montana. To get there, you have to drive about 30 minutes west of Helena to the little town of Rimini, at the base of Red Mountain. It’s a charming collection of old log...
The possessive apostrophe in Parks’ Fly Shop is intentional, differentiating the Yellowstone gateway business from the national park that’s a long cast to the south. But the punctuation also serves to express ownership, of both the idea of fly fishing as a necessary human experience...
Jessica Kay Ruhle, the new executive director of the Yellowstone Art Museum (YAM) in Billings, Montana, cherishes memories of childhood visits to the Polk Museum of Art, a Smithsonian affiliate in her central Florida hometown of Lakeland. Her regular companion on those meanders was her...
America has long had a conflicted relationship with its rural spaces. “It’s the rural idyll versus the rural illicit,” says Megan Torgerson, founder of the podcast “Reframing Rural,” referencing the dualistic beliefs that arrived with European colonizers. “Today, people either view rural as this kind...
Many anglers have likely discovered that even though we’re the ones casting a fly, it’s the trout that hooks us. When this happens, the sport becomes not just a game, but a passion. For angler David Stuver, it also turned into a lifetime of education. Stuver...
Robbie Magnan sweeps his tattooed arm over the landscape in front of us, where miles of shortgrass prairie rolls out toward a flat horizon obscured by smoke from a distant wildfire. There’s a pumpjack of a working oil well and a herd of about 200...
Fish Fisher is a man of the West; one whose drive, authenticity, and passion are clearly visible in his craft, and also in his personality. When he talks, Fisher’s voice is clear and cadenced. He has an air of confidence, but also of humility, and...
Jimmy and SnickerDoodle attract smiles whenever they clip-clop into Red’s Classical Barbershop, and the arrival of these two friendly goats is all in a day’s work for owner Al Sandvold. The setting of this Belgrade, Montana-based shop — inside a barn and rodeo arena —...
At 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning in September 2019, Scott Sanchez’s phone rang. The caller on the other end sounded stressed, asking if Sanchez could fill in on a team for the Jackson Hole One Fly that was to happen that day… in just...