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...
On an autumn day in 1968, near the town of Wilsall in Montana’s Shields River Valley, two construction workers were using a backhoe when they dug up what appeared to be a grave. It was later identified as an ancient burial site that contained the...
Bows and arrows represent one of mankind’s earliest inventions. Archery artifacts from southern Africa date back as far as 60,000 years, and 10,000 years ago, Neolithic cultures were hunting and waging war with bows in every corner of the world except Australia, a remarkable example...