The shrill whistle of a steam locomotive pierced the air and a passenger train thundered toward the station. The sheep dog looked on as several men removed a long, rough-cut wooden box from the back of a hearse and rolled it across the platform. As...
By most empirical measures, Doug Peacock is an undisputed winner. America’s most visible and vocal defender of grizzly bears, he has won battles over land management and prevailed in skirmishes over the fate of individual bears. His guerilla tactics have inspired environmental activists around the...
April 2015, PPL Montana shut down its Corette Power Plant, an eyesore that was one of the first sites to greet people driving into the city of Billings from the east. A few months later, a local organization I’m involved with — the Yellowstone Valley...
Landscape photographer Craig W. Hergert and award-winning poet and novelist Shann Ray have released Montana Panoramic: Transparent in the Backlight, a sweeping collection that marries Hergert’s panoramic images with Ray’s poetry and prose. The book’s literary and visual vignettes — a 15-year retrospective of Hergert’s...
Celebrated architect Diébédo Francis Kéré has been recognized with architecture’s highest honor as the 2022 laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The man behind Xylem, a 2,100-square-foot pavilion located on the Tippet Rise Art Center’s central campus in Fishtail, Montana, is both the first African...
Yellowstone National Park celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. Designated as the country’s first national park on March 1, 1872, the landscape it encompasses has a rich ecological and human history, with archaeological evidence and oral traditions dating the presence of various tribes and bands...
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...
A collective calm descends each spring in the Northern Rockies. The ski resorts have closed, tourists have retreated, trails are muddy, and warm sunny days are sprinkled in between rainy or snowy ones. It’s a simmering of sorts, an in-between that allows us just enough...
More than 20 years ago, rancher Vance Brash approached his friend Dick Sapa with an idea to put on a rodeo behind the Blue Moon Nite Club in Columbia Falls, Montana. Since that time, the Brash Rodeo has grown into a summer staple with a...
The Mountain West in the 2020s has been characterized by increasing crowds. In 2021, Montana’s Flathead County grew by 3.5 percent and Billings was briefly ranked as the top emerging market in the entire nation. By February 2022, the median value of a single-family home...