Category

  • Lightning in the Wild

    By Bruce Smith
    During my years among mountain goats, studying their lives and capturing their images on film beginning in the 1970s in Montana, lightning seemed to follow me like a faithful companion. Several times I shed my camera and lenses, spotting scope and tripod, and sprinted for cover.
  • A Day In The Life of a Smokejumper

    By Greg Anderson
    Two jumpers are in the air – they make sure they stay a safe distance apart on their descent to the jump spot. The first jumpers land in the spot. The J-13 is now over the exit point, and the second two jumpers exit the plane.
  • Get To Know Powder River County

    By Bryan Spellman
    With the exception of 1970, Powder River County has lost population every decade since 1930, when 3,909 folk lived in the county. That count placed it at number 46 in the state, but somehow the county ended up with 9 on its license plates. 
  • Alara's Wedding Ring Extravaganza, April 6 - 14th

    When shopping for an engagement ring or wedding band, "Shop by putting rings on your finger, dont' look with your eyes," says Changell Cazell at Alara Jewelry. "You can quickly find out that you look best in a metal clor or diamond shape that is different than what attracted you while scrolling."
  • Anaconda, Prettiest Little Town in Southwest Montana

    By Sherman Cahill
    It feels like the sort of place where scenes from Norman Rockwell play out behind every closed door. There’s street after street of adorable homes nested in beautifully maintained yards, watched over by lovely old neighborhood churches.
  • Montana American Legion’s Highway Fatality Markers Program

    By Holly Matkin, with Photos by the Author
    They stand solemnly alongside the state’s highways and interstates, flashing by with no particular cadence—one cross here, another six miles down the road, a cluster of five attached to a single post 50 miles later.
  • Montana Media: "All the Young Men" and the Power of Poitier

    By Kari Bowles
    The crew arrived at St. Mary’s, Montana, one of the Eastern gateways to Glacier National Park, for location shooting. Alas, the weather interfered, as the weather in Montana will do. Heavy fog, blizzard conditions, and a massive windstorm that trashed the farmhouse set resulted in delays.
  • Against the World: the Secret Life of Butte's Pigeons

    By Sherman Cahill
    Like the city they call home, Butte pigeons thrive in adversity. There they manage to propogate in astonishing numbers despite living in an environment that is, more often than not, entirely hostile to them. 
  • Paving Montana

    By Ednor Therriault, with photos by Tom Rath
    The Good Roads advocates wanted better, smoother roads for the popular new craze sweeping the nation: the bicycle. At the forefront of this effort was the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), which had been lobbying for better roads since 1880.
  • Buffalo Bill's Last Tour of Montana, 1914

    By Joseph Shelton
    He was still handsome in a way that even time and illness couldn’t diminish. His looks, which had inspired a poem by an anonymous English woman who, apparently speaking for much of the female population of Victoria’s kingdom, had called him “[n]ature’s perfected touch in form and grace.”
  • A Brief History of Passenger Rail Service in Montana

    By Shawn Vicklund
    Let's go back in time to understand the future. The year is 1883, and American railroads were transporting moving passengers over thousands of miles of rail lines that covered North America. Since the first railway 56 years earlier in 1827, railroads were now shrinking travel time between cities from days down to hours.
  • Get To Know Blaine County

    By Bryan Spellman
    Roughly 15 miles south of Chinook, you will find one unit of the Nez Perce National Historic Park. The park, also known as the Nee-Me-Poo Trail, commemorates the 1877 trek made by 750 Non-Treaty Nez Perce Indians from Joseph, Oregon to the Bears Paw Mountains.
  • The Flathead Lake Monster, Still At Large

    By Ednor Therriault
    A few imaginative paleontologists have suggested that what people are seeing could be a plesiosaurus, an aquatic reptile from the Early Jurassic period. Some eyewitness reports are uncanny in their description of this carnivorous dinosaur, from its 40-foot length to its large flippers and snake-like neck, tiny head and long tail.
  • Montana's Grain Elevators

    By Teresa Otto
    Across the Great Plains in both the U.S. and Canada, up to 30,000 prairie skyscrapers dotted the landscape during their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. Today only about a third of the old wooden grain elevators are left. 
  • Through the eyes of Native American Women Warriors

    By Maria Munro-Schuster
    All around were reminders of her Crow Reservation upbringing: sheep and wells, tall dry grasses, houses not that different from her own. “It helped me identify with the place,” she recalled, “...even on the Rez you have to be careful.”
  • Montana’s Vintage Neon Signs—an Endangered Species

    By Teresa Otto
    It started with a random photo of the Top Notch Lunch sign in Great Falls. Originally an ice cream parlor, the sign was added in 1938 when the place became a diner. As I sat in a booth near the back of the cafe, enjoying a sloppy joe that was too big to pick up, I knew this sign was just the beginning.