A summer evening spent meandering downtown hot spots can serve as a relaxing night out on the town as well as a way to explore and celebrate the thriving art and culture that exists in the West. Peruse the works of local and national artists...
Big Sky Journal has been around for nearly 30 years. That’s a lot of issues, a lot of stories documented, people profiled, communities highlighted, hidden treasures exposed, at least to some extent. But what blows me away is that there’s still so much that remains...
The Montana Conservation Corps takes a new direction, impacting the land, communities, and a generation of young leaders Even with all the eroded gullies and stumps, the Mount Haggin area south of Anaconda, Montana, is staggeringly beautiful. In the fall of 2018, I joined a Montana...
On the lower Yellowstone River, the precious eggs of a living dinosaur are converted into an international delicacy that helps pay for playgrounds and museums Barbara Garrison lifts her shirt to reveal a squall of angry red welts on her abdomen. She blushes, but also beams with pride...
The legacy of an obsessive and brilliant mountaineer In 1972, the summer after doug McCarty graduated from high school in Bozeman, Montana, he and a friend hopped a freight train to Seattle. Another friend was something of a climber there and knew Fred Beckey: a Seattle-based...
Championing Shelby, Montana’s world heavyweight fight As the final bell rang out, a crowd of thousands erupted in cheers for the two great heavyweight boxers who had battled for 15 rounds in the scorching sun. The referee quickly passed his judgement, raising the hand of the...
The allure of life and death in the wild It was early morning and I was traveling through Yellowstone National Park with graduate students who were taking my course on writing about the West, when our host, a representative of the Yellowstone Association, got a call. “Wolves,”...
Sweeney on the Rocks, the latest novel by Allen Morris Jones (Ig Publishing, $16.95), features the affable Ted Sweeney, a small-town Montana everyman. The owner of a small business, Sweeney is barely getting by — his tailgate is hanging on with the help of bailing...
His brother grew smaller and smaller as the train pulled away. Finally, there was nothing left. He remembered the scene while standing in the modest darkness of a summer dusk on a hillside north of Deer Lodge, Montana, silent like his nearby friends as they listened to, and even slightly felt, nighthawks diving and swooping past like half-glimpsed truths....