Tag archives for Montana trip
Posted by Bruce is a real cowboy. He has a ranch with horses and a big American flag flying out front, and he has a guitar and he knows how to play it. I met Bruce Anfinson on a sleigh ride up at Lone Mountain Ranch near Big Sky, Montana. A full moon shone through the forest…
Don’t tell me what a place is like—just show me the food. Good food reveals a lot about any destination and nowhere is that more true than good ol’ Montana. Driving from the top of the state down to its southernmost corner, I discovered Montana’s wintertime cuisine has as much heart as the sky is…
It began snowing sideways after midnight, and by dawn, the world was even whiter than the day before. Two inches of new snow lay on the ground, slopped upon the roofs and trees and mailboxes—even the dogs in the street shook their snowy dreadlocked fur and then playfully tumbled back into the drifts. My own…
Sixty-six below zero. That’s the coldest temperature ever recorded in Yellowstone: -66ºF at Madison, near the park’s west entrance at West Yellowstone, Montana. How cold is that? Cold enough to break the thermometer that made the measurement back in 1933. It was fitting then, that we should stop at this momentous site for a break…
Never judge a town by its exit ramp . . . . . . because at night, every exit looks the same: fast food beacons and glowing gas stations with trucks steaming in the cold. I spin away from the dark rush of the interstate and down the town’s widest avenue—to the snow-crusted parking lot…
Like people or the movies, snow can be good—or it can be bad.
Bad snow is deceiving: hard and crusty on top yet soft and air-pocked underneath. Bad snow doesn’t hold up under pressure—it breaks apart and shifts and slides. Bad snow causes avalanches.
It’s like riding a bike! This is what everyone says about skiing—that once you learn, you can just jump back on the slopes and swoop down like a champ. I’m not so sure—and I don’t love the comparison. When you learn to ride a bike, you get to have training wheels, and should you fall,…
The Canadians are coming. They’ve invaded America and are taking over our towns and cities one by one. The tiny town of Whitefish, Montana is simply crawling with Canucks. They zip across the 49th parallel to buy up our cheap(er) gas and groceries, and to subvert our peaceful American way of life through seemingly-innocuous cross-border…
I love toponyms (place names), because they reveal so much—and yet so little—about the places they are meant to typify. It was snowing in Minneapolis (Sioux Mni = “water”; Greek polis = “city”) when I boarded a flight for Kalispell, and briefly imagined that Kalispell was the name of some flaxen-haired, rose-lipped pioneer beauty in…
