After picking up the rental car, we were jumpy about the bitter weather — an emptiness I could feel in the pit of my stomach. The 115-mile drive from Billings, Montana skirted the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Then it bisected the Crow Reservation, which...
Since its original facility opened in 1927, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming has become a 300,000-square-foot historical center consisting of five separate museums. Its flagship, the Buffalo Bill Museum, chronicles the life of William F. Cody [1846–1917], a Western icon...
The winter day is often at its coldest as dawn breaks. With crystalline snowflakes gathered on the ground, shrouding the landscape in a soft layer of white, the air is a thin, heady brilliance as it fills the lungs. The cold surrounds, stings, seeps into...
A horse runs across a snowy field — a rider at the reins — as a skier clings to a rope tethered behind the saddle. The skier leaps off jumps, dodges obstacles, and carves turns while spectators cheer. Skijoring is a sport with rich history...
It was raining,” began Howard Zahniser’s account of a horsepacking trip in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains in August of 1947. The horses were saddled, packed, and tied to trees outside a rustic log cabin. But Zahniser — a 41-year-old city gent, a preacher’s kid, and a...
Tatiana Lawson is the newly appointed director of the Sun Valley Resort Ski Patrol in Sun Valley, Idaho, and the first female ever to hold that position. And, while women have been involved in Sun Valley’s male-dominated professional patrol for several decades, it’s clear there’s...
You can be forgiven for thinking of Montana’s Class C state basketball tournament, which begins March 12 at the Butte Civic Center, as the culmination of spectacular seasons for eight of Montana’s smallest high schools. A more accurate description of the state tourney is that...
My first backcountry ski lodge experience was back in the late 1990s when some friends and I rented an old yurt two blocks off Main Street in Cooke City, Montana. We paid $5 for a snowmobile ride from town up to Daisy Pass in the...
Winter Palette A silver palette Of subtle hues Softly tinted grays And Prussian blues A finely honed dawn Blush silver and peach An infinity of polished sky Mountains within reach Evening chills strike a Cold metallic horizon Purple clouds on a sea of ice Dashed with a splash of alizarin Jan Elpel is the author of five historical...
Sheriff Jules Clement of the fictional town Blue Deer, Montana has returned, at long last, and fans of Jamie Harrison’s mystery series will be delighted with the latest installment, The River View: A Jules Clement Novel (Counterpoint, $28). As with earlier books in this series,...