Visit outlaw.partners to meet the entire Outlaw team.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS | Jen Clancey, Stephen Collector, Stella Fong, Fischer Genau, Carli Johnson, Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan, James Mckew
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS/ARTISTS | Stephen Collector, Bret DeYoung, Jacob W. Frank, Fischer Genau, Graham Goff, Neal Herbert, Eric Johnston, Derek Lennon, James McKew, Tom Murphy, Holly Pippel, Diane Renkin
Explore Yellowstone magazine is distributed to subscribers in all 50 states, including contracted placement in resorts and hotels across the West. Core distribution in the Northern Rockies includes Big Sky and Bozeman, Montana, as well as Jackson, Wyoming, the gateway communities around, as well as inside Yellowstone National Park.
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Grand Prismatic Spring and Excelsior Geyser Crater by Tom Murphy. When it was active, Excelsior Geyser was the largest ever recorded in Yellowstone National Park. Today, it continues to produce about 3,000 gallons of hot water per minute. Tom Murphy’s photographic passion and specialty is Yellowstone, one he began pursuing since he moved to Livingston, Montana. Since 1975, Murphy has traveled extensively within the park’s 3,400 square miles, hiking and skiing thousands of miles on extended overnight trips in the backcountry.
THE RHYTHM OF THE WEST
There’s a rhythm to life in the Yellowstone region that you come to know when you’ve spent over a decade here. It starts in early spring, when the roads begin to melt out, opening a brief window where only bicycles can glide past steaming geyser basins and grazing bison before the summer crowds arrive.
I’ve felt that rhythm in Jackson Hole, where elk bugles echoed through the valley at dusk. In Teton Valley, Idaho, where summer nights were filled with the scent of campfire smoke and sagebrush. In Bozeman, where the Bridgers glow electric blue in the long light of summer days. And, of course, in Yellowstone National Park itself.
Some of my favorite memories are of sharing this place with my parents and sister—watching their faces light up at seeing Old Faithful for the first time; going on a walk to see the paint pots; or exploring the waterfall section of Yellowstone. The waterfalls of Yellowstone have always held a certain magic for me—Cave, Tower, Fairy, Mystic—each one a testament to nature’s power, etching its legacy into the landscape over time.
The gateway towns hold their own stories, too. The summer rodeos in Livingston, the quiet beauty of
Gardiner in the off-season, Cody’s Wild West history, the way the Tetons rise impossibly high above Victor and Driggs. Each place, each moment, another thread in the fabric of a life lived here.
In this issue of Explore Yellowstone, we celebrate the landscapes and the people who call this place home. We bring you stories of adventure, history, and the ever-changing wildness that makes Yellowstone and its surroundings so unforgettable. Whether you’ve spent a lifetime exploring these lands or are just beginning to find your way, we hope these pages bring you closer to the rhythm of the West. See you out there.
- TAYLOR OWENS MANAGING EDITOR
Photo
READ & LISTEN BOOKS & PODCASTS FROM THE REGION
Read
Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone
by George Black
A comprehensive account of the creation of Yellowstone National Park, exploring its cultural and political history.
American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West
by Nate Blakeslee
A gripping narrative about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, focusing on one famous wolf named O-Six and the broader cultural conflicts over wildlife management.
Yellowstone Has Teeth
by Marjane Ambler
A memoir detailing the experiences of living year-round in Yellowstone National Park, offering a unique perspective on life in this remote wilderness.
The Winterkeeper
by Jo Horne
Set in Montana during the harsh winter of 1933, this historical novel takes place just outside of Yellowstone National Park in Gardiner, Montana. The story revolves around three main characters: Millie Chase, a 14-year-old orphan; Nate Baker, a winterkeeper responsible for maintaining the park’s buildings; and his wife, Ginny Baker.
Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park
by Tim Cahill
A humorous and insightful exploration of Yellowstone National Park, blending adventure with sharp storytelling. Cahill, a veteran travel writer, shares his personal experiences hiking through the park’s vast wilderness, encountering its natural wonders and quirky characters along the way. With wit and reverence, he captures both the awe-inspiring beauty and the unpredictable challenges of America’s first national park.
Listen
What We Do: The Yellowstone Podcast
This official podcast from Yellowstone National Park features National Park Service employees discussing their roles and experiences within the park. Listeners can learn about various aspects of park management, wildlife conservation, and visitor engagement through firsthand accounts from rangers and biologists.
Tied to Nature’s Yellowstone
This podcast explores various aspects of Yellowstone National Park, including wildlife, park history, and the experiences of visitors. It also discusses the gateway communities and what they offer to travelers.
Open Spaces
Produced by Wyoming Public Media, this podcast covers a range of topics related to the Cody area and other Yellowstone gateway towns. It includes discussions on tourism strategies and local community stories.
Yonder Lies: Unpacking the Myths of Jackson Hole
This podcast, produced by KHOL 89.1, delves into the complexities of life in Jackson Hole. Hosted by Hannah Habermann and Jesse Bryant, it shares intimate stories about the people and conflicts that define the area. The podcast aims to challenge myths and provide a nuanced understanding of the region’s changing dynamics.
Explore Big Sky with Hoary Marmot
Explore Big Sky with Hoary Marmot is a podcast that mixes important news and characters from across Big Sky, Bozeman, and the southwest Montana region as reported on by Big Sky’s local news source, alongside a dash of humor from comedian hosts Joe and Michelle Borden. It’s a light, refreshing take on hot topics covering history, culture and local news bites, that leaves you laughing, as well as having learned something new.
Photo Courtesy of YNP
TO SPOT IN YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK LESSER-KNOWN WILDLIFE
BY CARLI JOHNSON
Yellowstone National Park offers incredible geological features and beautiful views, but oftentimes the most memorable part of a trip to Yellowstone is the incredible wildlife you see along the way. Being able to see bison, elk, or bears in their natural habitat interacting with each other as nature intended, is an incredible sight.
Bison, elk, bears, wolves, and bald eagles are more of the well-known animals visitors are looking for. However, there is a whole range of wildlife many folks may unexpectedly see. For example, the ever-sprightly river otter, the solitary trumpeter swan, the quick-moving American dipper, or even the elusive Canada lynx.
The park is filled with natural wonders, expected and unexpected, all to be appreciated and spark curiosity in those who visit. Here is a list of some lesser-known animals you may find in the park.
Ermine MUSTELA ERMINEA
River Otter LONTRA CANADENSIS
Part of the weasel family, the pine marten boasts an average of 22 inches and weighs no more than three pounds. With short limbs, a long bushy tail, and a dark chestnut coat, the pine marten can be found high in the trees of conifer forests. Solitary creatures, the pine marten is a rare sight—anyone who comes across one ought to feel very fortunate. They do most of their hunting at night and on the forest floor but are also well-equipped in the forest canopy. They can survive falls from trees of up to 60 feet!
Another member of the weasel family, the ermine is a small but fierce predator known for its seasonal camouflage. In summer, it has a brown coat with a white belly, but in winter, it turns completely white except for the black tip of its tail. This adaptation allows it to blend seamlessly into its surroundings, whether it’s hunting in the dense underbrush or navigating the snowy landscape.
Easily overlooked due to their small size, ermines are agile hunters, preying on rodents, birds, and insects. If you’re lucky enough to spot one darting through the undergrowth, take a moment to appreciate its speed and cunning.
According to the National Park Service, river otters have been spotted in most of Yellowstone’s major rivers, lakes, and streams. Although active year-round, they are a rare sight due to their crepuscular nature, meaning they spend most of the daylight nestled in their dens and often come out at dawn or dusk. Their long, sleek, cylindrical bodies are designed for speed in the water, traveling up to 6 miles per hour and staying underwater for two to three minutes at a time. If you do get a chance to see a river otter, their playful nature is a sight to behold, often diving in and out of the water chasing each other.
PHOTO BY NPS / Diane Renkin
Trumpeter Swan
CYGNUS BUCCINATOR
Named for its resonant call, the trumpeter swan is North America’s largest wild waterfowl, with wingspans reaching up to eight feet. These birds require open water, primarily feed on aquatic plants, and nest in wetlands. Despite their size, trumpeter swans are sensitive to human disturbance, and park managers often restrict human activity in known swan territories and nesting areas to protect their natural habitat. Historically, trumpeter swans were nearly extirpated in the lower 48 states due to habitat loss and hunting. However, a small population
American White Pelican
PELECANUS ERYTHRORHYNCHOS
While pelicans are more commonly associated with coastal regions, Yellowstone’s American white pelicans are a striking sight in the park’s freshwater lakes and slow-moving rivers. With a wingspan of up to nine feet, these large birds are masterful fishers, often working in groups to herd fish into shallow waters before scooping them up in their oversized bills.
Canada Lynx
LYNX CANADENSIS
A rare and elusive resident of Yellowstone, the Canada lynx is a medium-sized wild cat adapted to life in the snow-covered wilderness. With large, furry paws that act like snowshoes, tufted ears, and a thick coat, the lynx is perfectly suited for navigating deep snow in pursuit of its primary prey—the snowshoe hare.
American Dipper
CINCLUS MEXICANUS
The plump, dark gray American dipper is North America’s only aquatic songbird. Often seen flying low over the water, they follow the winding course of a creek and perch themselves on rocks on the riverbanks. Aptly named, the dipper will dive into the water and use its wings to negotiate the current, swimming in search of aquatic insects. Their thick down feathers are made
managed to survive in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. As a result of concerted conservation efforts, the birds have made a population recovery across the United States. Over a 10year period, park biologists released 56 young trumpeter swans, called cygnets, into the park in the hope that they would bond to their release location and return the following spring. Research is ongoing to understand how many of these cygnets have returned for breeding purposes, providing valuable insights into the success of these efforts.
White pelicans migrate to Yellowstone in the warmer months, particularly favoring Yellowstone Lake and the Madison River. Unlike their brown pelican relatives, they do not dive for fish but instead use cooperative feeding techniques to capture their prey. Their graceful presence on the water is a reminder of the park’s rich and varied ecosystem.
Lynx populations in the park are difficult to track due to their secretive nature and low densities. They are most commonly found in dense forests at higher elevations, where they silently stalk their prey. If you are lucky enough to catch a glimpse of one, consider it an extraordinary sighting—few visitors ever do!
waterproof with an oil they produce that allows them to thrive in cold waters.
Also known as the water ouzel, their song is loud and audible above the roar of the water. These birds are often permanent residents. As you are driving close to rivers and streams in the park, keep your eyes peeled for a small, bobbing bird diving in and out of the water!
Tallest
OF THEM ALL THE
Seeing Steamboat Geyser erupt is a life-list experience
BY ELISABETH KWAK-HEFFERAN
rian Emfinger had been waiting all day. His wife, Jennifer, finally gave up and headed back to the car, but he decided to hang out in the hot June sun just a little while longer. Minutes passed, steam from the geyser basin drifting across the chalk-colored landscape, as the geyser in front of him burbled with minor activity. And then, suddenly, jets of water began to blast skyward from two small vents in the ground, kicking off the minor eruption into a new gear. Emfinger knew something extraordinary was about to happen when he saw the excitement coursing through the dedicated geyser watchers in the small crowd.
After about 30 seconds, “It was like a switch was flipped,” Emfinger remembers. “Basically, a jet engine is in the ground, shooting stuff out.” He watched in amazement as the tallest active geyser in the world sent water screaming 300 feet into the air amidst a deafening rumble. Rocks went streaking toward the sky, carried by the explosive torrent—including one the size of a dinner plate that rocketed straight at Emfinger. He dodged, and the rock fell on top of the wooden sign marked “Steamboat Geyser” instead, splitting it neatly in half. The water phase of the eruption lasted about 25 minutes, followed by at least another hour of steam.
Steamboat Geyser and surrounding area NPS / JACOB W. FRANK
“We’d seen Old Faithful,” says Emfinger, a Fayetteville, Arkansasbased storm chaser and photojournalist who’d spent that day in Norris Geyser Basin specifically hoping to catch Steamboat in action. “We’d seen Grand, Fountain, and Riverside. We thought, those are all pretty cool. But then Steamboat goes off and you realize those geysers are nothing.” (Jennifer did get to witness most of Steamboat’s eruption, too; she heard the commotion from the parking lot and hurried back down the boardwalk.) In fact, Emfinger ranks it as one of the most incredible sights he’s ever witnessed. “I’ve been in tornadoes and major hurricanes,” he says. “I’ve been next to lava from an erupting volcano. I always count Steamboat in the top 10 of all those things.”
Emfinger caught that eruption—on June 12, 2019—during one of Steamboat’s most active periods in decades. Most of the rest of us will never get so lucky. Steamboat Geyser is as famous for its unpredictability as it is for its astonishing height, going off busily for a few years, then sinking into dormant periods that see years pass between single eruptions. And though its watery fireworks get all
the glory, what lies underneath is just as fascinating. Steamboat’s sporadic eruptions provide tantalizing clues about the complex hydrothermal system underlying much of Yellowstone—and expose just how much we don’t know about this place.
What Makes a Geyser?
Steamboat is just one of more than 500 geysers and more than 10,000 total hydrothermal features in Yellowstone National Park, all powered by the underground heat of the Yellowstone volcano. The park is riddled with steam vents (fumaroles), hot springs, and mudpots, too, but geysers are the most dramatic of the bunch.
Yellowstone’s geology supplies the three key ingredients of a geyser: heat, water, and an underground system of cracks and passages (often called the park’s “plumbing system”). When rain and snow seep into the ground, they travel deeper through these underground channels until they meet heat from the volcano’s magma chamber. The water heats to well above the boiling point, but immense pressure from the water above keeps it liquid. The superheated water begins to rise back up through the same cracks, and depending on what the plumbing looks like near the surface, forms one of Yellowstone’s signature hydrothermal features.
To make a geyser, you need two main characteristics: one, an underground chamber where water collects, and two, some kind of bottleneck or pinch point in the system. When enough water and pressure build up near the surface, the geyser reaches a tipping point and steam forces the water up and out in a violent spout. The geyser erupts, spraying water until its water chamber is empty or the system cools down.
The Extremes of Steamboat Geyser
Old Faithful shoots water between 106 and 184 feet. Great Fountain Geyser blasts 100 to 200 feet. But Steamboat Geyser towers over the rest, reaching 300 to 380 feet in height. Why so high? Scientists think it has to do with the location of the geyser’s underground chamber, also called a bubble trap. Steamboat’s chamber is fairly deep, which builds up extra energy to lift the water ever higher.
Steamboat stands out from many other geysers in the park for another reason: its highly variable eruption schedule. Park records dating back to 1878 note just a handful of major eruptions in those early days, with years passing in between them. Then the geyser went dormant for 50 years, with no major action between 1911 and 1961. Then came a comparative hydrothermal frenzy, with 84 eruptions tallied from 1962 to 1965. Steamboat quieted down until a brief burst of activity in the early 1980s. Things stayed low-key for the next few decades, with just a few sporadic major blasts, until 2018. The geyser woke back up on March 15 of that year and didn’t stop, hitting new records of 48 eruptions in both 2019 and 2020.
Steam phase of Steamboat Geyser and Park Ranger NPS / NEAL HERBERT
What made Steamboat roar back to life so spectacularly in 2018? In short, we don’t know, says Michael Poland, scientist-in-charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. “We know what it’s not,” he says. “There’s no correlation with seismicity, or with any type of thermal changes. There’s no correlation with weather phenomena. This just seems to be Steamboat’s pattern.”
The geyser’s sporadic schedule hints at the complicated forces at work underground. “The hydrothermal plumbing systems are complex and pretty fragile,” Poland says. “It doesn’t take much to monkey with things. These plumbing systems are always changing, and that can certainly affect geysers.”
Some geysers—like Old Faithful, naturally—are fairly predictable. Scientists think that’s because these features tend to be isolated from others, with their own branches of the plumbing system. If the water and heat in these areas are constant, then the eruptions will be stable, too. But in other spots, hydrothermal features share some structures. “In areas where there’s groups of geysers, we know that they talk to each other,” Poland notes.
“Water will move from one to the other. Activity can change easily.”
That doesn’t mean geyser gazers are flying completely blind. Steamboat does give off some signs that a major eruption is building in the form of increasingly active minor eruptions. And temperature sensors in the geyser’s runoff channel provide a clue, too: When the temps stop jumping up and down and remain at a higher plateau, a major eruption becomes more likely. The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory publishes Steamboat’s water temperature data on its website, as well as releases monthly updates with geyser “forecasts.”
Still, there are no sure things when it comes to Steamboat. Activity has taken a huge dip over the past few years, with only nine major eruptions in 2023 and six in 2024. The world’s tallest active geyser appears to be taking a rest once again, though for how long is anyone’s guess. That unpredictability is frustrating to anyone yearning to catch this natural wonder in action, but it also makes witnessing Steamboat Geyser a truly special—maybe once-ina-lifetime—experience.
Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan is a Missoula, Montana-based writer and editor who specializes in climate, public lands, environment, and outdoor recreation. She is still hoping to catch Steamboat Geyser erupt in one of her frequent visits to Norris Geyser Basin.
Luckily, visitors can bank on seeing geyser activity somewhere during a trip to Yellowstone. The park predicts eruption times for six of its most reliable spouters:
UPPER GEYSER BASIN
Old Faithful:
Castle Geyser:
Grand Geyser:
Daisy Geyser:
LOWER GEYSER BASIN
Riverside Geyser: every ~90 minutes every 14 hours every ~6.5 hours every ~3 hours every ~6.5 hours Great Fountain Geyser every ~12 hours
Get the day’s predicted eruptions in Old Faithful Visitor Center, Old Faithful Inn, on the park’s website (nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/geyser-activity.htm), on the free NPS App, or at geysertimes.org.
Steam phase of Steamboat Geyser and visitors. NPS / NEAL HERBERT Left: Steamboat Geyser eruption seen through the trees. NPS / JACOB W. FRANK
Schedule Your Appointment Now!
FREEDOM
of the prairie EXPERIENCE THE
BY TAYLOR OWENS
merican Prairie isn’t just a conservation project—it’s a vision of what the Great Plains once were and could be again.
Spanning north-central Montana, this nonprofit has spent over two decades restoring prairie ecosystems, creating a landscape where bison roam freely, pronghorn race across open plains, and visitors can experience an untamed wilderness like no other.
“American Prairie is a Montana-based nonprofit that’s been working for over 20 years to restore a prairie ecosystem in north-central Montana,” said Mike Kautz, Vice President of Public Access and Recreation. “We buy land near the Charles M. Russell Wildlife Refuge and the Missouri Breaks Monument, and then we manage it for wildlife habitat and for public access.” Recreation plays a key role at American Prairie as one of the three main pillars of their mission—land, people, and wildlife. “Public access fits under the people part,” Kautz said. Their goal is not only to conserve the land but also to invite people into it, allowing visitors to witness firsthand the beauty and importance of grasslands.
“Grasslands are disappearing faster than any other ecosystem around the world, including rainforests and coral reefs,” Kautz said. “There are only four places left in the world where you have intact grassland as big as we have here in Montana.”
Their goal is simple yet ambitious: to create enough protected habitat to support the full spectrum of native grassland wildlife. For visitors, the opportunity to experience this rare landscape is just as important as preserving it. “A lot of our visitor experience is just trying to give people access to that so they can see why grasslands are so special and so worth protecting,” Kautz said.
Photos courtesy of American Prairie
Unlike national parks with structured trails and visitor centers, American Prairie offers an open-ended adventure. “The visitor experience is very much a choose-your-own-adventure,” Kautz said. “There aren’t a lot of signs or pre-made itineraries. You look at the map, see where you’d like to go, and spend the day getting there.”
The landscape is vast, dynamic, and rarely flat. Whether you’re hiking through rolling plains, taking a scenic drive through the Missouri Breaks, adventuring through island mountain ranges, or biking past a herd of grazing bison, the landscape feels as wild and free as it did centuries ago.
“As Yellowstone and Glacier get more crowded, American Prairie remains vast, open, and uncrowded,” Kautz said. “It still offers that sense of exploration and solitude.”
For those seeking an overnight experience, American Prairie offers a range of accommodations that immerse visitors in the landscape. “We have three backcountry huts near Judith Landing, two campgrounds—including one near the Missouri River and another on a property with one of our conservation bison herds—plus a vast amount of dispersed camping on BLM land,” Kautz said.
The huts function like Forest Service rental cabins, offering bunk rooms, a propane-powered kitchen, and solar lights. “They’re designed to be base camps for exploring the Missouri Breaks and the prairie,” he added.
Every season brings its own magic to the prairie.
“Spring and fall are the best times to visit,” Kautz said. “Late May through June is spectacular—everything is green, migratory birds are arriving, and there are newborn calves among the ungulates.” In September, the cottonwoods along the river explode in golden hues, while elk bugle and spar for dominance on the Charles M. Russell Wildlife Refuge.
And when night falls, the prairie reveals one of its greatest treasures: its skies. “We have some of the darkest skies anywhere in the lower 48—comparable to Mongolia,” Kautz said. “Night sky viewing is a popular activity.”
From wildlife watching to bikepacking, American Prairie offers countless ways to explore. Guided experiences are also available through partnerships
with local guides, including Aaniiih Nakoda Tours who offer cultural and nature-based trips.
“One of my favorite ways to experience American Prairie was a bikepacking trip across several of our properties,” he said. “We started before sunrise, rested in the shade during the heat of the day, and finished our rides in the evening. It was an incredible way to experience the vastness of the plains.”
“Traveling by bike, you get to see so much wildlife up close—riding through a herd of bison at sunrise or having pronghorn racing alongside you,” he added.
“As Montana’s cities grow, it’s exciting to see a project like this protecting open space. American Prairie offers a rare opportunity to experience the Great Plains as they once were.”
Wild about the outdoors.
Wild about public access.
Wild about adventure.
There are so many reasons to be wild about the prairie. What’s yours?
To learn what you can do to support protected lands and public access in Montana go to VisitAmericanPrairie.org.
TRAIL RUN & BIKE RACE ROUND UP
BOZEMAN, MT
MAY 17
JUN 14
JUN 28
JUL 5
JUL 19 Baldy Blitz – 8M Old Gabe 30K and 50K Cross Cut 20K Bangtail Divide 38K Jim Bridger Trail Run – 10M, 5K
JUN 28–29
JUL 26 Belgian Waffle Ride Montana BIKE The Hoot at Crosscut –20M, 10M, 5M, & kids race
26.2M RATPOD (Ride Around the Pioneers in One Day) – 127M (road), 90M (gravel), 41M (hybrid)
ENNIS, MT
JUL 13 Madison Ultra – 50K
JUL 20 Big Sky Biggie – 50M, 30M, 15M
GARDINER, MT
SEP 9 Big Bear Stampede Trail Run – 5K, 9K
CODY, WY
JACKSON, WY
QUICK GUIDE TO SUMMER PLANNING
WHEN VISITING YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK
BY ELLIE BOESCHENSTEIN
Planning a trip to Yellowstone National Park is very exciting. However, exploring in different seasons can make for different experiences. Here is a checklist with some helpful tips and tricks so you can visit the park in the summer, stress free.
Wildlife watching in Lamar Valley with Yellowstone Forever NPS / JACOB W. FRANK
PLAN AHEAD
Lodging and Camping: Book your accommodations early as hotels, lodges and campgrounds fill up quickly.
Park Entrance: Consider entering the park early or later in the day. The lines at entry stations can be long, especially during peak hours (10am-4pm).
Park Pass: Purchase an America the Beautiful Pass or a Yellowstone Entrance Pass online to save time.
02
WILDLIFE SAFETY
Never get too close to wildlife: Practice “safe selfies.”
Lots of animals look cute but if you get too close they will not be so cute and many times become very dangerous. Keep 100 yards away from bears and wolves and at least 25 yards away from all other animals, especially bison and elk.
Carry Bear Spray : Know how to use it. Bear spray is available at park stores or visit a location with bear spray rentals nearby. Visit heybear.com for more information. Never feed the animals: It is harmful to the animals and extremely dangerous for you.
03
PACK SMART
Layers: Mornings can be chilly and afternoons can be warm.
Rain gear: Afternoon storms are common.
Proper footwear: Boardwalks can be slippery and trails can be rugged.
Water and snacks: There are not many places in the park to eat so be prepared.
04
MUST-SEE ATTRACTIONS
Old Faithful and Geyser Basins: Check predictions for time or eruptions at the visitor centers.
Grand Prismatic Spring: Check out the view from the Fairy Falls Trail Overlook to see all the incredible colors.
Yellowstone Falls and Grand Canyon of Yellowstone: This is the major canyon of the Yellowstone River.
Lamar and Hayden Valleys: This is the best spot for seeing wildlife like bison, bears, and wolves. Remember to keep your distance and carry your bear spray!
Mammoth Hot Springs: Check out these rocky ridges formed by thermal activity. Warning: Swimming is NOT permitted.
05
PLACES TO EAT & STAY IN GATEWAY TOWNS
EAT:
Yellowstone Beer Company - West Yellowstone, MT
Wildflour Bakery - Emigrant, MT
Gallatin Riverhouse Grill - Big Sky, MT
Little Star Diner - Bozeman, MT
Madison Crossing Lounge - West Yellowstone, MT
STAY :
Chico Hot Springs Resort - Pray, MT
The Kimpton Armory - Bozeman, MT
Montage Big Sky - Big Sky, MT
Yellowstone Gateway Inn - Gardiner, MT
Bar N Ranch - West Yellowstone, MT
Early summer crowd at Old Faithful NPS / NEAL HERBERT
Summer hiking in Lamar Valley NPS / JACOB W. FRANK
HIKES TO FIRE TOWERS & LOOKOUTS
IN GREATER YELLOWSTONE REGION
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK
MOUNT WASHBURN FIRE LOOKOUT
TRAIL LENGTH:
TRAILHEAD OPTIONS:
FEATURES:
6.2 miles round trip
Dunraven Pass or Chittenden Road parking area
Panoramic views, interpretive exhibits, and a staffed fire lookout
WYOMING
HORSE BUTTE LOOKOUT TRAIL | WEST YELLOWSTONE
TRAIL LENGTH:
LOCATION:
DIFFICULTY: FEATURES:
4 miles round trip
About 8 miles from West Yellowstone on Rainbow Point Road
Easy to moderate
Historic 40-foot fire lookout, views of Hebgen Lake and Henrys Lake Mountains
Mount Washburn Fire Lookout with communication infrastructure.
NPS / BRET DEYOUNG
HUCKLEBERRY MOUNTAIN FIRE LOOKOUT | JACKSON
TRAIL LENGTH:
LOCATION:
DIFFICULTY:
FEATURES:
Approximately 10 miles round trip
Bridger-Teton National Forest
Moderate to strenuous
Historic fire lookout built in 1938, panoramic views
CLAY BUTTE LOOKOUT | CODY
TRAIL LENGTH:
LOCATION:
DIFFICULTY:
FEATURES:
OPEN SEASON:
5.2-mile out-and-back trail
About 46 miles from Cody on the Beartooth All-American Highway
Moderate
Historic fire lookout built in 1942, scenic vantage point
Tentatively opens July 1, 2025
GARNET MOUNTAIN FIRE LOOKOUT | BOZEMAN
TRAIL LENGTH:
DIFFICULTY:
FEATURES:
4.5 miles one-way
Strenuous
- Panoramic views of surrounding peaks and valleys
- Lookout tower available for overnight stays ($65 per night as of 2025)
- Accessible year-round (winter access requires skiing, snowshoeing, or snowmobiling)
TRAIL LENGTH:
DIFFICULTY:
FEATURES: 4.0 miles one-way
Difficult
Old fire tower at the summit of
View from Cinnamon Mountain Fire Lookout.
Cinnamon Mountain
CINNAMON MOUNTAIN TRAIL | BIG SKY
MONTANA
PHOTO BY GRAHAM GOFF
The Garnet Mountain Fire Lookout is one of many U.S. Forest Service cabins available throughout the state to rent by the general public
PHOTO BY DEREK LENNON
PHOTO COURTESY OF U.S. FOREST SERVICE
n the autumn of 1979, I arranged a fishing trip for my stepfather, Cameron, and his friend Ken, who worked at a bank. As we drifted down the sparkling blue froth of the Yellowstone River, the rugged Absaroka Mountains framing the yellow-leafed cottonwoods were almost hallucinatory. Casting his fly from the front of the dory, Ken, who had never fished such a large river, seemed distracted by the grandeur. I recall us missing strikes with few eats. Cameron abandoned the fly rod for spin gear. Emotionally, the bittersweet experience would resemble a topographical map with a succession of basins and ranges. But, before I revisit the details, I have to travel back in my memory.
My parents divorced when I was 16. It was contentious and remained so until my father’s death. A romance blossomed between my mother and her business partner, no less, while my father moved to a meagerly furnished bungalow, consumed with rancor. It cast my brothers and me in the middle of an ugly feud, deplorably forcing us to choose sides. Her boyfriend, unlike my dad, was a country person by birth and a sportsman. He came from a farming family that worked an extensive property on the Virginia-Carolina border by a bay where his waterfowling forefathers guided rich swells. Later, after he served in the Navy, Cameron became a game warden. A crack shot and a determined angler, he helmed a real estate company. His friends called him C.A.
When Cameron discovered I liked to fish and shoot, he included me. He had four sons from his previous marriage, and I had two brothers.
It so happened that I, a Jewish kid, was the only one in either family with an abiding passion for the outdoors. At first, it was dove shooting, then later, we hunted ducks out of floating blinds on his lease in Back Bay in southern Virginia. Four years later, he became my stepfather.
We fished in the Chesapeake Bay for bluefish and by the Bay Bridge Tunnel for speckled trout. When I was 28, living in Colorado, he asked me to put together a fishing trip in Montana. I settled upon Livingston as our destination and called the noted fly shop, Dan Bailey’s, to arrange our excursion. We rendezvoused at the Bozeman airport and I drove the rental car over Bozeman Pass into Livingston. Ken and Cameron, who both hailed from the south, had never fished the West. Their excitement was palpable when they got their first look at the Big Sky country. After checking in at the Del Mar, we met our veteran guide, Ray Hurley, at the fly shop. He outfitted Cameron and Ken from top to bottom. He asked me about my experience. I was a die-hard angler. Versed in dry and wet fly presentation, I’d come to Montana hoping to expand my skill set. I wanted to learn to fish streamers, and he was the perfect tutor.
Veteran fishing guide, Ray Hurley, releasing a chunky Yellowstone River rainbow trout.
Drifting the Yellowstone River—Cameron Munden (front to back), guide, Ray Hurley, and Ken Farmer enjoy the spectacular watershed.
Words & Photos by Stephen Collector
I drifted over to the east wall of the expansive showroom where plaques were prominently displayed with the trophy trout (4 lbs. and larger) painted as silhouettes, with the names and dates of the anglers. I wanted to catch such a fish — my name immortalized on the ‘Wall.’ Toward the back of the shop, there were rows of local women tying flies. This was the Montana of myth. Scheduled to float the river with Ray the following morning, he invited us to his comfortable and well appointed riverside home in the afternoon. With the shooting head I’d purchased at Bailey’s, he gave me a casting demonstration along the
bank of the river in his backyard. He tugged out all 30 feet of the graycolored, weighted shooting head, and then he stripped off and coiled the red Amnesia line in big loops. Loading my archaic seven-weight bamboo rod on his back cast, he powerfully double-hauled the line. It towered up in loose coils and arced, like a mortar shot, across the wide Yellowstone River. I glanced back at the cane pole and it was vibrating so violently it appeared it would shatter into a thousand pieces. My jaw may have hit the ground when the Spruce fly practically kissed the far opposite bank. That evening, as we ate, the anticipation was palpable, as it often is for newcomers to the area.
Launching from his property, we squeezed into his drift boat and began our float under a hard blue sky. The September weather was inordinately warm. Cottonwoods shimmered like hammered gold. Cameron fished a spinning rod with a Mepps spinner.
Ken and I positioned front and rear, fly-fished. We drifted through town. A romantic by nature, this was what I’d dreamed of. A few whitefish rose to my flies, while the trout had lockjaw. Ray, a former drill sergeant in the military, was powerfully built with a clipped mustache, and was the embodiment of an old-style fishing guide. He wanted me to do well, but he had a curious way of showing it. In his deep, gravelly voice, he barked what sounded like angry commands. When I blew it, he’d reproachfully yell. Cameron became irritated. Accustomed to being the entitled client, he found Ray’s manner offensive. In short order, we had a testosterone-pissing contest. It didn’t help that the fishing wasn’t going well. When we pulled over for a break, Cameron told me he was going to tell Ray off. I knew Ray didn’t mean anything by it and pleaded with him not to. He grudgingly relented.
Hurley, Farmer and Munden rendezvous outside Dan Bailey’s iconic tackle shop before their first float trip.
Because I wanted to learn the streamer technique, Ray went out of his way to comply. When we drifted by islands, he’d anchor up on the lower end and wade over to the junction of the braids. Invariably there would be a deeper trough flowing close to the bank. Stripping off line with my shooting head, a large dark Spruce fly snugged to the short, stout leader, he’d cast across, mend the line, and make short jerky strips. Each time he would hook a fat cutthroat trout and then, smugly hand me the rod. Try as I might, I hooked nothing. With mounting frustration, after the third successful presentation, I suggested we forego further demonstrations.
In the afternoon, Ray anchored at the top of another island and advised me to work quickly down the braid with my Muddler. A logjam created a deep eddy. I put a cast to the bank, mended the line several times so the fly would sink, and got a jolting grab. A big rainbow rocketed out of the eddy — maybe hefty enough to land on Bailey’s wall. After a desperate struggle, I had the fish thrashing ten feet from the net when it pulled off. My curse echoed off the hillsides.
Bailey’s booked our reservations to fish both Armstrong’s and DuPuy’s spring creeks on the following day. When we checked in at Armstrong’s, Cameron discovered he’d forgotten his chest waders. “Go back and get my waders,” he commanded. I drove the twenty minutes
My jaw may have hit the ground when the Spruce fly practically kissed the far opposite bank. That evening, as we ate, the anticipation was palpable, as it often is for newcomers to the area.”
back and did as told. My anger flared when I returned.
The technical fishing required at the spring creek was demanding. Cameron and Ken left for a stocked pond on DuPuy’s where they had some success with another new style fly, a Wooly Bugger. While I fished Wooly Worms back home, this outlandish fly seemed a preposterous novelty (little did I realize the fame this fly would garner). What I didn’t know, because I remained on the creek, was that when he became frustrated, Cameron broke the ranch rules and broke out his spinning gear, where, according to Ken, he crushed them.
Back at Armstrong’s, Cameron found me. “What are you catching then on?” he asked disagreeably. When I replied, “Nymphs,” he commanded, “Give me some nymphs”. Though we had purchased the same flies, I gave him some midge patterns. Cameron was experienced in flycasting for bass, but trout fishing, a vexing novelty, was different.
As I drove back to the motel, I inwardly railed about my place in the pecking order. I mulled over the disparity of fishing with my pals versus my stepfather, whose imperiousness felt discourteous. Maybe I was defending my petty behavior, but at 28, I had far more testosterone than decorum. Even more vexing was that I lacked all perspective to the reality that I was in a storied place, in its heyday, and I was the beneficiary of a rare gift — after all, he was picking up the tab. But the underlying factor was one of edges; I could not discern where he stopped and where I started. Therefore, I mistakenly took everything personally, when in fact — it wasn’t.
After our supper at a steakhouse, Ken wandered back to the poolroom and began shooting the balls around. Not only I but also the bar patrons must have noticed Ken was hammered. A seedy-looking patron suggested they put up a friendly wager on a game of pool. I’d never seen either play, so I tucked myself nervously in a corner, bearing witness. Ken handily won the friendly wager of a sawbuck. I assumed the hustler was setting him up. But as the hustler raised the stakes, Ken, sodden from drink, with uncanny ability, continued to win. Before my eyes, it was as if Ken morphed into the character Fast Eddy Felson from the classic film The Hustler. Finally, in desperation, the shark peered into his wallet and doubled down to his last dollar.
I pulled Ken over before they broke and cautioned him it was a ruse. He just looked into my eyes and winked. When the game was over, the hustler wandered away, fuming. “How did you do that?” I asked in astonishment. “Steve, I put myself through college hustling pool,” he drawled. We stumbled out of the bar, laughing uproariously.
A couple of fishylooking guides met us at Bailey’s the following morning. George Kelly, who guided out of a shop in Bozeman, was to fish me, and a stocky redhead, named George Anderson, was to fish Cameron and Ken. We put in below Emigrant under another bald sky. The scenery was even more sublime further up in the Paradise Valley. Kelly asked me if I knew about short-line nymphing? Keeping his rod tip high, he primarily drifted only the leader, fishing a Stone Fly, poised for the strike. He caught several whitefish. His technique was excellent and occasionally he’d tag a modest rainbow. Meanwhile, I, the so-called client, impatiently watched Kelly take a busman’s holiday. During lunch, I suggested to the guys we swap guides.
George Anderson, like me, had attended college in Boulder and, upon graduation, had moved to Montana to guide. In the afternoon, when we both felt a sense of torpor from the harsh sun and the effects of the relentless upstream wind, he rowed over to the bank. I invited him to fish. He stripped off a great deal of line to which he’d tied a small dry fly. He loaded the rod and then he double-
hauled the line and shot out the entire fly line — all 90 feet of it. The leader straightened out, depositing the fly like a feather. The fly bounced along in the foam and disappeared in a take. Anderson deftly set the hook and played a scrappy cutthroat to net. I was astonished — little wonder Anderson would go on to an iconic career in fishing.
The guides fessed up. For the past three weeks, the weather had been inordinately warm and bright. The fish were hunkered down, wary of ospreys and eagles, and in the too-warm water, they weren’t moving to the fly. Cameron had modest success casting his hardware, but Ken and I, fishing flies, struggled. I could understand Ken, an angler from the mountains of Virginia, scuffling on his first trip West. The epitome of a Virginia gentleman — he accepted it all with an equanimity I envied. I had no such excuse.
The last evening at dinner, we celebrated and reassessed. The consensus was that the catching had been underwhelming. I wasn’t the only one disappointed. That big, lost rainbow on the first day haunted me. Cameron looked across the table, drinking his ubiquitous ‘Vodka and Coke Cola’, and asked me to tell my mother that the fishing had been wonderful. Looking back from my current perspective, it would have been effortless to have replied, “Whatever you say, Cameron.” Instead, I became contrary.
I flew home to Boulder with nagging doubts that resumed their refrain of what should have been, and what I could have said or not said, all of which cast a shroud of regret over a brilliant experience. These petty dustups overshadowed the big picture.
Ken reminded me a little of the character in Jim Harrison’s novella, The Man Who Gave Up His Name. Right off the bat, he ‘got’ Montana with its wild and free rivers. We shared a deep respect for such a celebrated fishery in such a world-class setting. While he didn’t abandon his banking position, he’d take
many annual trips to Livingston over the next 30 years, doing what he loved best— fishing and hunting. He eventually built a cabin in the Shields River Valley in 2008.
During our adventure up in the Last Best Place, there were subcurrents that had little to do with fishing, but upon reflection, had more to do with Cameron feeling uncomfortably out of place. Before our departure, I apologized and we brokered an uneasy truce. I was fortunate he had a forgiving nature, and we continued our sporting expeditions until his passing in 1999. He understood a mentor could be an old country boy with a heart big enough to share it. Ken passed in 2021.
While the trip had been a tremendous learning experience, that singular excursion pierces me with longing. What I wouldn’t give for a do-over. All that remains are a few faded prints and emotionally charged memories. As the years pass by, I find myself missing him all the time. I recall Cameron in the valley they call Paradise; bellied up to the bar, casting to the rock-bound banks, belting out orders — the master of the universe.
Stephen Collector, a life-long sportsman, began a career as a freelance photographer in 1975 and his feature writing has appeared in many national outdoor publications. He resides in Boulder, Colorado.
Above: The Yellowstone River glimmers south of town, as Livingston Peak pierces the skyline. Below: The Japanese characters on Ray Hurley’s old Lavro drift boat mean Wind and Water, which seemed highly appropriate.
The Absaroka Mountains framed the yellow-leafed cottonwoods, lending a mythic feeling to our autumnal adventure.
Elevated Adventures
THE ULTIMATE SUMMER AT SNOW KING MOUNTAIN RESORT
BY TAYLOR OWENS
erched above Jackson Hole, Snow King Mountain Resort is where adventure meets elevation. Known as “The King,” this iconic mountain offers a blend of highalpine excitement and laid-back summer fun. Whether you’re soaring down the alpine coaster, navigating the treetop adventure course, or catching live music under a golden sunset, Snow King delivers a summer like no other.
And now, with the opening of Aurora, the resort’s mountaintop fine-dining restaurant, the experience reaches new heights—literally.
A meal at Aurora isn’t just dinner—it’s an experience. Suspended at high elevation with panoramic views of the Tetons, the restaurant elevates the meaning of destination dining.
“With Aurora, we can elevate the guest experience all around,” Food & Beverage Director, Nicholas Berti, said. “It’s fine dining on top of a mountain. The location, the view—everything about it is special.”
Aurora opened its doors on January 31, bringing an upscale but inviting atmosphere to the top of Snow King. The menu, shaped by a chef handpicked after an extensive search, features locally sourced ingredients that highlight the flavors of the region.
“I left the chef completely carte blanche,” Berti explained. “He’s an artist, and I wouldn’t tell an artist how to paint. The menu is smart, well-curated, and deeply rooted in his expertise.”
Guests can expect dishes that blend refinement with heartiness—standouts include swordfish, carbonara, and generous lamb chops. “I hate it when I order lamb chops, and they give you two tiny bites. These are big lamb chops,” Berti said with a grin.
Aurora keeps its prices surprisingly fair, despite the logistical challenge of running a restaurant that requires a gondola ride to reach. “Our overhead is high, but we want to make this experience accessible,” Berti said.
Photos courtesy of Snow King Mountain Resort.
Top: Aerial view of the mountain top observatory and planetarium.
Bottom right: The view from inside Aurora.
Bottom left: Inside the new mountain top restaurant, Aurora.
That philosophy translates into Aurora’s atmosphere as well. “It’s fine dining, but not stuffy,” Berti said. “We execute at a high level, but the vibe is fun, vibrant, and dynamic. It’s refined, but it still feels approachable.”
For a more laid-back alternative, a stop at Snow King’s all-new Summit House Coffee Shop offers a cozy, caffeine-fueled escape at 9,000 feet. Serving locally roasted coffee, snacks, and beers, it’s the perfect spot to sip and soak in the view—whether you’re gearing up for a guided hike or winding down after a ride on the alpine coaster.
As the summer season unfolds, Aurora’s rooftop patio opens, offering an even more immersive way to soak in the views. Whether you’re winding down after an adventurefilled day or just taking in the alpenglow over the Tetons, cocktails on the rooftop are an experience in themselves.
And adventure is never far at Snow King. Beyond its mountaintop dining, the resort is packed with thrilling activities and familyfriendly fun, making it one of Jackson’s top summer destinations.
The Alpine Coaster is a must for adrenaline seekers. Spanning 3,295 feet of twisting, turning mountain track, this coaster offers a high-speed, gravity-fueled thrill ride. Riders control their own speed, making it an adventure suitable for both daredevils and those who just want to take in the views.
For those who enjoy a challenge, Snow King’s maze and mini golf course provide the perfect family-friendly adventure. The maze is a test of strategy and patience, offering twists, turns, and dead ends that will keep both kids and adults entertained. Right next to it, the mini golf course is designed to reflect the rugged mountain landscape, blending fun and a bit of competitive spirit into a game that all ages can enjoy.
Snow King’s guided hikes offer a deeper connection to the mountain and its surroundings. Led by expert naturalists, these treks reveal the flora, fauna, and history of the Tetons.
Whether you’re a beginner looking for a scenic stroll or an experienced hiker seeking a more challenging ascent, these guided experiences
showcase the wild beauty of Jackson Hole. One of the most exciting new additions to Snow King this summer is the mountaintop observatory and planetarium, the only one in the United States. Here, visitors can gaze into the depths of the universe through high-powered telescopes, taking in planets, nebulae, and distant galaxies. By day, planetarium shows rotate along with programming at the solar telescope, Science On a Sphere (SOS) exhibit, and in the immersive classroom theater. By night, the observatory transforms into a gateway to the cosmos, providing a look at the night sky.
Live music lovers will find their rhythm at the Summer Concert Series, where top-tier bands and local favorites take the stage at the summit of the mountain. With the Tetons as a backdrop, these concerts bring together locals and visitors for an unforgettable night under the stars. Notable bands such as Modest Mouse, Kaleo, Luke Grimes, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, and many others are set to take the stage this summer.
Snow King stands apart from other ski resorts that cater exclusively to high-end travelers. “We cast a wide net—we want everyone to feel welcome here,” Berti said. “It’s a great place for families, for thrillseekers, and for anyone who just wants to take in the views.”
While Snow King is known for its ski slopes, summer unveils a whole new world of adventure. The resort has packed the season with family-friendly activities, making it one of Jackson’s top summer destinations.
Top Left: View of the stage at the summer concert series.
Left: Riding the mountain coaster at Snow King.
Right: Guests using the telescopes at the observatory and planetarium.
Bottom Right: The observatory at night.
OPEN THIS SPRING
ARTS & CULTURE
Photo Courtesy
FOCUSING ON NATURE
A GUIDE TO FINDING AND PHOTOGRAPHING YELLOWSTONE’S WILDLIFE
WORDS & PHOTOS BY JAMES MCKEW
ast winter’s snow looked like white frosting smeared across the top of the Rocky Mountains.
I drove through the west entrance of Yellowstone National Park, riding on the rumors I had heard of abundant wildlife photo opportunities in early spring. The excitement I felt driving through park gates was like an electrical current that rose out of the paved road, through the steering wheel, and into my arms and chest. Out the side window of my truck was the Madison River, flooded to the banks with spring run-off. A mating pair of trumpeter swans sailed on the river. Their long, white necks and plumbed bodies moved gracefully, reminding me of angelic beings instead of simple swans. I took them as an omen of good things to come.
The Madison Campground was to be my home for the next week. The location is the campsite of the Washburn Expedition. On September 19, 1870, with the days still hot and the nights turning cool, the 189 men of the expedition pitched their tents on the banks of the river. Fires were started, supper was cooked, and horses were grazed in the meadow. Further down the canyon, a bull elk bugled in the twilight. The night turned dark, bed rolls were laid out around the fire, faces glowed, and smoke rose into the star-filled sky. A discussion began, recounting geysers, rivers, deep canyons, lakes, meadows, and abundant wildlife they encountered in the last 30 days. The subject turned to the future and what, if anything, could be done to protect these wonders for the next generation.
After settling into my camp spot, I stood by the river with my camera in hand and photographed buffalo with their newborn calves, grazing peacefully in the meadow. Somewhere in that late afternoon light, the sun seemed to darken. Atmospheric effects played across the backdrop of nearby rhyolite cliffs, and I felt pulled backward in time. I saw bedrolls and campfires. I felt the heat on my face and smelled freshly caught rainbow trout on a spit. In my mind’s eye, men were dressed in wool trousers, patches sewn over worn-through knees. The sleeves of their linen
shirts were rolled up. Their necks were raw with sweat. Their hands coppered from exposure. One of the men rolled tobacco with sootcovered fingers and stuck the tip in his mouth. Then I realized that all of us who enter the park are in some way a spiritual descendant of these men around the fire. Because of that discussion and what became of it, the buffalo are only hunted with cameras along the Madison River, and no condos exist at Old Faithful. Yellowstone’s greatness is not found in its grand attractions. It is found in the simple, untouched wildness of the landscape.
Most of the 5 million visitors that make the pilgrimage each year will never get further off the roadway than 100 feet, which means that nearly 2.2 million acres of land remain relatively untouched by humans.
The following day at 5 am, I was on the road and looking for animals. My coffee mug was steaming, granola bars waited at my elbow, and Jimmy Buffet sang on the radio. Rumors of wolf sightings were everywhere. With frost-covered nights still lingering, the animals were on their feet and eating at first light.
Wolves are the main attraction for most mornings. The latest action was reported at Specimen Ridge in the Lamar Valley. When I arrived, high-powered spotting scopes were arrayed, and goose-down jacketed tourists lined the roadside hoping to glimpse the wolfpack. I pulled over and watched. The wolves were on the other side of the valley, at the base of Specimen Ridge. The tourists had their phones out, taking their best shot at a pixel-sized dot over a mile out. Perhaps five distinct languages were spoken that morning. The clattering of voices would give the Tower of Babel a run for its money.
Two days later, I watched a grizzly bear sow and her cubs create a “bear jam” near Swan Lake. Traffic had come to a complete stop. A park ranger was playing traffic cop, ordering drivers to keep moving. Tourists clamored for a photo of three black dots in the sagebrush a half mile from the road. Spotting scopes were aimed at the bears and acted as a tourist magnet. Conversations between photographers and tourists began about bear habitat, followed by a brief history of this
particular sow and cubs. The tourists were delighted to look through the spotting scopes. Most of them on that day were from Europe and were genuinely grateful for the chance to see a grizzly at that range. After nearly three hours of waiting, the bears finally came within 100 yards of the road. Cameras began to click with a sound like a swarm of cicadas on an elm tree.
#1 #2
Here are my practical tips for wildlife photographers.
DON’T BRING THE FAMILY
If you are going to Yellowstone to photograph wildlife, do not bring the family. This is a working vacation—no sleeping in. You should be on the road forty-five minutes before dawn and plan to stay out until it is too dark to shoot. This is usually followed by a long, slow drive back to camp. You will also find yourself standing in the cold for long periods, sometimes in snow and rain, in wet marshy areas, so bring muck boots or hip waders. If you do bring someone, make sure they have their own camera rig so they can feel like part of the action.
EXPECT CAMERA ENVY
The photographers in Yellowstone are there for the same reasons you are. Most have day jobs just like you; some are the guys and gals you see every weekend on the sidelines at professional football games, and they are just as hungry as you are for high-quality photos. Try to hold back your shock when you see camera lenses the length of an elephant’s trunk. Indeed, nothing labels you as a wildlife photographer better than having a six-foot-long lens with camo tape wrapped around the sun shade. At a minimum, you will need a 400mm f5.6 lens. That’s minimum and considered small and amateurish. Regarding the
affordability of such a camera lens, let’s compare the relative cost of another hobby: mountain biking. The price of a good mountain bike has gotten so out of control that the purchase ratio is four camera lenses to one mountain bike. The standard professional lens for wildlife photography is the 300mm f2.8 lens, which will cost two mountain bikes! If possible, go with the 300mm and purchase a quality 2x teleconverter, turning it into a 600mm f5.6. Additionally, you will need a sturdy tripod and gimbal head. Some companies will rent you some of this equipment, but I haven’t tried that avenue.
#3
PLAN ON CAMPING
Easy, right? In early spring, the campgrounds won’t be too crowded. You might not need a reservation. I recommend the Madison Campground; it is central to the park’s west side, where elk, bison, coyotes, and bears hang out. It also has the luxury of heated bathrooms. Slough Creek Campground in the north is a good
option, if it’s open. This is an excellent location for grizzlies, wolves, and bison. I haven’t slept in a tent in Yellowstone, and I never intend to. I prefer something hard-sided. I once owned a small motorhome. It worked well because the kitchen and work table were right there.
BE A CHATTY KATHY
You’re standing on a sagebrush slope with six other photographers. Your toes are freezing. You would trade your firstborn child for a hot cup of coffee. Waiting below you is the aforementioned dead bison in all its bloated glory. Someone in the group gets a tickle in his stomach and thinks a grizzly bear will smell the dead animal and come around to eat it. Fine. You decide it’s worth sticking around to see what happens, maybe a couple of hours, maybe half a day. Everybody is spread out, tripods and cameras at the ready, backpacks and jackets piled here and there. Snacks and water bottles are out, and you have joined the ranks of a small, weird group of paparazzi waiting for the celebrity to make his appearance. The best part of the waiting game is the people. They haven’t slept in a week. They smell, cuss their bad luck, and dream of margaritas on the beach. Their cynicism is worn like a winter jacket, but they can also be generous to one another. The best intel on animal locations will come from these folks, so make friends. Make a sarcastic joke about what the tourists are wearing and what the rangers are up to; tell everybody where you photographed a sow grizzly yesterday and where they can buy a hot sandwich after dark; and you’ll be in good company. They mostly don’t have secret spots because the equipment is so bulky that they can’t sneak into the woods without being noticed. Remember that it’s best to make friends with the people you will see over and over for the next week.
#5 WHERE TO FIND ANIMALS IN THE SPRING
Photographers and wildlife cross paths only twice each year, in the spring and fall. Yes, you can go in the winter, but it requires special vehicles and operating delicate electronic equipment in frigid conditions. Once you return indoors, humidity can play havoc on camera bodies and lenses. Go for it, if you want, but I never did. During the summer months, it’s even worse. The road traffic and 4 million sweaty tourists are too much for my brain to handle. Enough said.
Here is my top-secret, behind-thevelvet rope, special handshake, and members-only list of where to find the animals.
Spring photography includes bears with cubs, wolf packs, bison with red dogs (bison babies), and elk calving. In a typical year, the lower valleys in the park’s northern half will be snow-free. By late April, the roads will usually be open. Bears emerge from hibernation hungry for new green sprouts in the meadows. They also seek out any available winter kill. Winter kill can occur anywhere in the valleys, so it might be good to do some cautious hikes and see what you can find off and away from the main roads. Elk, bison, and deer are all calving in these lower valleys. Some of these babies will become food for the bears and wolves. This is
#6 TAKE TIME TO IMMERSE YOURSELF
Your first trip to Yellowstone might feel like a disappointment. Turn that disappointment into something more: photograph pawprints in the mud and snow, find an old buffalo skeleton, and shoot it with an artistic eye. Write journal entries for each day’s events. Bring a fly pole and get photos of your buddy fishing with bison in the background—it’s a seller! You traveled a long distance and spent thousands of dollars with the expectation of taking prime photos that will fill the glossy pages of magazines or be used for online
publications. Trust me, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Yellowstone is a vast area where you drive slowly for hours with no guarantee of seeing animals. Once you find an animal, another six cars will stop, and now everyone is getting the same excellent photo opportunity you thought was exclusively yours. Don’t get dismayed. Put some bear spray in your back pocket and walk into the woods. I promise that a quarter mile off the road will feel like you have stepped back two hundred years in time. It’s a good guess that
a basic fact of nature. Predators and prey come together in the valleys in a hunting frenzy that must be seen to be appreciated. I can’t make this sound any prettier than it is: this season is a macabre opportunity for a photographer to get close to the action. You will typically stay busy shuttling from one roadside pullout to the next or possibly walking trails for most of the day. This is a good time to carry binoculars and a spotting scope. The long lenses might help you find moving animals and intersect them for the perfect shot. My favorite Spring locations include Gardner’s Hole, Lamar Valley, Soda Butte, and Hayden Valley.
99.5% of the visitors never get a hundred yards off the road. In your photographic journey, take time to get quality landscape shots. Summon that National Geographic photographer who lives inside your soul and let him explore the park with a poet’s eye. Start with the big sunrise and sunset landscapes before working down to small leaves and finally to patterns of frost on the edge of streams. It is all part of the photographic experience that makes Yellowstone a wonderland for photographers.
James McKew is a Colorado-based outdoorsman, writer, and artist. His work can be found in Sierra Rec Magazine, Utah Stories, and Bird Digest.
THE THEBuffalo
MAN
hen Chris Geremia arrived in Yellowstone National Park in 2002, he didn’t know a thing about buffalo. He drove up in April from the Grand Canyon, where he’d spent a year working as a searchand-rescue ranger, and when he reached Yellowstone’s south gate, he punched in his brand-new employee code and entered the park. But Geremia had only made it a quarter mile up the freshly plowed road when he found a shaggy, 2,000-pound bull blocking his path.
“I thought to myself, ‘This is a once in a lifetime experience. This will never happen again,’” Geremia said. “I just had no idea.”
Geremia came to Yellowstone because he wanted to work with wildlife, but he’s the first to admit that he was far
BY FISCHER GENAU
from an expert. He had a math degree from Colgate University, no direct experience working with animals, and he’d been hired as a law enforcement ranger in Canyon Village, a far cry from biology fieldwork. That first year, however, he planned to volunteer with some of the wildlife teams, and he managed to score an assignment tracking lynx along the east side of Yellowstone Lake and another following pronghorn as they migrated across the park. Then he got a call from Rick Wallen.
Wallen, who was Yellowstone’s bison biologist at the time, said, “I need somebody who knows how to ski in the winter time, isn’t afraid to live in a snow cave, and can pick up buffalo shit.” Geremia didn’t know much about buffalo, but that he could manage.
“I’m your guy,” Geremia told him.
Geremia poses for a portrait in Yellowstone’s Mammoth Headquarters, where he works as the park’s senior bison biologist and manages the biggest herd of wild bison on the planet.
PHOTOS BY FISCHER GENAU
wenty-two years later, Geremia is in charge of the biggest herd of wild bison on the planet. As Yellowstone’s senior bison biologist, he presides over roughly 4,000 of North America’s largest mammals in their last great stronghold, working to conserve the species and their ecology and balancing the interests of those who believe bison should run wild across North America and others who believe bison should never leave the park’s borders.
Buffalo1 used to roam North America in the tens of millions until colonists and eventually the U.S. government and army all but exterminated the species. By 1901, only 25 wild bison remained in the country, and all of them lived in Yellowstone.
The herd that Geremia manages is descended from those survivors, and when visitors pour into Lamar Valley in the summers and gaze down upon a plain filled with buffalo, they’re looking at the last remnants of an ancient species in its ancestral homeland.
“In most people it kindles this feeling, this reconnection to our past that’s been lost,” Geremia said. “That’s why I care so much. Things like the Lamar, things like buffalo on big landscapes moving in tune with snow melt, with grass, and learning how to evade predators… Things like that need to exist in North America.”
Geremia is softspoken, but when he talks about buffalo, his voice grows reverent. Over two decades spent in Yellowstone have left their
mark on him, and a listener can hear echoes of the hundreds, if not thousands of hours he’s spent shadowing the gentle giants in his careful, patient speech. Geremia lives in Jardine, a small village north of Gardiner, with his wife and nine-yearold son, and though he’s now 46, he could pass for 10 years younger. When we met, Geremia joked that he had shaved off all his gray hairs that morning, and despite the wash of stubble splashed across his cheeks, his laugh gave his face the open, guileless expression of a boy’s.
Geremia grew up on Long Island in New York, 2,500 miles and a whole world away from his current home. “I still have no idea how I landed here,” he says. His own son grew up taking trips into the park, visiting hot springs in the wintertime and taking his first backpacking trip at age three, but Geremia’s childhood was much different. In New York, he was surrounded by lots of people and not a lot of open spaces, but he always loved to be outside. “You don’t choose where you’re born, you choose where you live,” Geremia said. “Or you try to.”
1 Geremia uses the words “bison” and “buffalo” interchangeably. He says that different people use different words for different reasons, and he wants to acknowledge both perspectives.
Geremia walks with fellow bison biologist Doug Blanton in Yellowstone National Park’s Stephens Creek bison facility.
PHOTO BY JACOB W. FRANK
hen Geremia began working for Wallen in 2002, nobody knew very much about buffalo migration. “There had only been a couple radio collars ever put on buffalo before Rick started the program in the early 2000s. We didn’t know how they moved.” But he was about to observe these migrations firsthand. He spent his first years in the park skiing out into the wilderness alone, with no roads or trails and only the path of the buffalo to guide him. “The buffalo create this trench in the snow and they rub every tree along the sides of the trail, so it’s like you’re following this blazed superhighway wherever you go in the park,” Geremia said.
On cold, solitary nights on the trail of the buffalo, dwarfed by the landscape and at the mercy of mother nature, a lone traveler could easily get swallowed up. But Geremia was never fully alone. “I think if you just slow down and you open your eyes and try to see what they’re seeing, you never get lost, you don’t get intimidated, and you just move along. The buffalo will show you where to go.”
Geremia says that working with bison is simple, but working with people—not so much. “Everybody has a different opinion,” he said. “Words mean different things to different
people. And everybody values something slightly different, so it’s hard to keep people happy, comfortable, excited.” In his role as senior bison biologist, which he’s held since 2018, he must balance the interests of conservationists, ranchers, indigenous tribes, and everyone else with vested interests in the fate of the buffalo, and he says trying to find common ground is “very stressful.” But he keeps on trying, plodding along slowly and finding the middle ground where he can progress buffalo conservation.
Much of the work he does now is desk work, but Geremia still spends as much time as he can with the buffalo. In the winters, he joins crews to dart and collar them for study, and in the summers, he and his team erect
fences all over the park to see how bison affect their ecosystem. He also runs a quarantine facility where they routinely test bison for brucellosis, a disease they can carry and spread to livestock, before transporting them to tribal grounds across North America. “Those days when we’ve got a truckload of buffalo that we’re taking somewhere new, and we’re opening the backs of those trailers and letting those animals out—I will never forget those days,” he said.
Buffalo can run at 35 miles per hour, and most of them exit the trailer at full tilt, running hard towards the horizon of a land that their ancestors once roamed. This is Geremia’s favorite part of the job—when he gets to bring the buffalo home.
Above: Geremia discusses bison loading operations during a transfer with Robbie Magnan, director of the Fort Peck Fish and Wildlife Department.
PHOTO BY JACOB W. FRANK Top & Bottom: PHOTO BY JACOB W. FRANK
Fischer Genau is a writer and filmmaker living in Bozeman. He enjoys active stretching, reading books outside, rain, Kettle Corn-flavored Popcorners, and time with the people he loves. He works for Explore Big Sky as the Digital Media Lead.
ROAD TO YELLOWSTONE
the Work of Hiram Chittenden
By Fischer Genau
AUGUST 8, 1903
In the light of a full moon, 50 men toil behind hoes, shovels, and wheelbarrows on the banks of the Yellowstone River. They’ve been at it for five hours already, mixing gravel, broken rock, sand and cement into concrete that will soon be wrought into a slender Melan arch bridge stretching 120 feet across the great river. In another three hours, these 50 men will be replaced by the next shift and enjoy 16 hours of rest before they once again take up the hoes, shovels, and wheelbarrows so the work can continue uninterrupted—the bridge will be made in one continuous pour of concrete to prevent any visible seams.
In the bridge’s place is a vast array of lumber. A temporary pier stands in the middle of the river with planks extending from it
to each rocky bank. Resting atop this pier, wooden scaffolding sketches out the shape of the bridge to come—a delicate, improbable curve. Beneath it all the Yellowstone rages, spilling through a chute of rock towards the Upper Falls a short way downstream. One worker nearly made this deadly swim after falling into the churning water while building the pier; but providence carried him to an eddy and he escaped to shore relatively unscathed.
The man in charge of this moonlight operation is Hiram Martin Chittenden. As Yellowstone’s chief engineer, Chittenden oversees all engineering and infrastructure projects in the park, and right now, he has his hands full. This spring he broke ground on a road up to Mount Washburn, a difficult route
PHOTO COURTESY OF NPS
that involved blasting copious amounts of rock from the side of the mountain, and Chittenden and his engineers are nearing completion on a towering entrance gate in Gardiner that will greet visitors at the park’s north end.
When Chittenden first came to Yellowstone, its roads were abysmal, its infrastructure ill-equipped to support visitors. But that wouldn’t last. He would transform it, laying new roads, erecting new monuments, and setting a precedent for how—and why—to build in a national park.
Upon his arrival in the park in spring of 1891, Chittenden was ill. He’d been stricken by typhoid fever while working as an engineer on the Missouri River Commission, and he had yet to fully recover from the burning fever, fatigue, headaches, and stomach pain that had racked his 31-year-old body. But none of that stopped him from getting straight to work. Chittenden’s first assignment was to lay out a road 15 miles from the Firehole River to the west thumb of Yellowstone Lake, and he did so with only two assistants, a hand level, and a five-foot stick.
The Yellowstone that greeted Chittenden was still in its infancy—it was founded just 21 years prior—and its roads were barely developed. Their surfaces were rough and bumpy, dust billowed up when horse-drawn carriages trundled over them, and they were often
in disrepair, making travel much less comfortable for the tourist. Chittenden took note of these conditions and conducted a survey with the traveling public, and most of them cited the conditions of the roads as the “principal drawback to their enjoyment of the park.” But his first tour in Yellowstone would be cut short before he could address the issue.
Chittenden left the park in 1893 for an assignment in Louisville, Kentucky, but those first two years had a profound impression on him. In 1895, he published The Yellowstone National Park, the first book about the United States’ first national park, wherein he describes everything from Yellowstone’s flora and fauna to its history and, naturally, its transportation. In 1899, Chittenden would return to write the next chapter.
This section of the river, immediately above the Upper Falls, presented numerous sites on which an ordinary bridge could be built at no great cost; but the remarkable scenic attractions of the rapids made any ordinary structure seem out of place. Accordingly it was decided to build something worthy of the situation and a single arch of slender profile was selected…
Hiram Chittenden in 1890, a year before he first arrived in Yellowstone.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NPS
During construction, wooden scaffolding outlines the shape of Chittenden’s Melan arch bridge over the Yellowstone River. One worker fell off the structure while building the wooden pier and narrowly avoided being swept over the waterfall downstream.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NPS
Chittenden chose the location for the Melan arch bridge over the Yellowstone River carefully, writing in a later edition of The Yellowstone National Park:
Chittenden generally believed that roads and infrastructure should enhance the traveler’s experience while detracting from the natural environment as little as possible, and he tried to live up to this on every engineering project he undertook in the park.
As work on the Melan arch bridge progressed, Chittenden was also overseeing the completion of the Roosevelt Entrance Gate in Gardiner, Montana.
WPresident Theodore Roosevelt himself had visited Yellowstone that April to place the arch’s cornerstone, and by August 15, the 50-foot-tall structure, made of hexagonal prisms of basalt, would be completed, proclaiming to all who passed through it that Yellowstone was “FOR THE BENEFIT AND ENJOYMENT OF THE PEOPLE.” The arch was Chittenden’s idea. For as much as he didn’t want to detract from existing nature, he thought that the entrance to Yellowstone deserved something grand.
Sometimes, Chittenden’s ambition exceeded the realm of possibility. Past the Roosevelt Arch, Chittenden wanted to line the entrance to the park with sequoias for visitors to marvel at as they passed under them. But after importing them from California, Chittenden watched his dream wither before his eyes as the sequoias succumbed to Yellowstone’s inhospitable landscape.
hen Chittenden left the park for good in the fall of 1905, Yellowstone’s Grand Loop was finally complete. Visitors to Yellowstone could travel from Mammoth Hot Springs to Old Faithful to Yellowstone Lake and back in one unbroken circle, traversing roads that Chittenden had designed to be “as perfect as possible” and built in a way that “would best develop the scenery,” he later wrote.
A comprehensive list of Chittenden’s accomplishments in Yellowstone runs long. In addition to the Melan arch bridge over the Yellowstone, the Roosevelt Arch in Gardiner, and the road over Mount Washburn, Chittenden brought electricity to the Mammoth Park Headquarters, laid down sod for the lawns there that still attract deer and elk each summer, installed a micro hydroelectricity plant and a series of irrigation ditches, and constructed over 400 miles of road, all with rudimentary tools and often insufficient funding. He did this all in six years.
Yellowstone historian Alicia Murphy speculates that his chronically poor health might have contributed to his almost compulsive need to get things done and affect real change.
“I think he was very passionate,” Murphy said. “People in the army and people who worked with him once he was out of the Army acknowledged that he was really a dynamo as far as getting things done.”
During his time in the park, Chittenden worked like a man possessed. He was known to stay at his job for 16 hours straight, day in and day out, and though he accomplished a great deal, the work eventually took a toll on him. Chittenden struggled with his health his entire life, and during the summer of 1903, he suffered multiple paralytic seizures, a sign that he couldn’t keep up the pace his work in Yellowstone demanded for long. Chittenden’s time in the park was drawing to a close.
Reflecting on his career in Yellowstone, Chittenden would later write the following:
This work, which embraced the construction…of about four hundred miles of mountain roads, was of absorbing interest, and it is a matter of no especial credit that the author should have given to it, from beginning to end, the utmost of his time and abilities. It was in the fullest sense a labor of love and to an unusual degree one of direct personal supervision. Disappointment there was…in the neverceasing, but rarely successful, effort to bridge completely the chasm between an ideal result and that which available resources permit. Sacrifice, too, there was, apart from the deep draught upon physical energy, in the relinquishment of opportunities of greater professional importance elsewhere, but the determination to see the work through prevailed over all other considerations. Then there was at the time the irresistible “call of the wild”—grandeur of scenery, cerulean skies, the entrancing lure of the forest trails, and those myriad other inspiring influences which make one content to accept a mountain life as one’s permanent lot. The spell was a real one and the memory of it still lingers like the aroma of a feast that is done, but with the poignant reflection that it can be no more.
- The Yellowstone National Park, Chittenden, p. iii
Left: A map of Yellowstone sketched by Philetus Norris, the park’s first superintendent, in 1879 showing his proposed roads that would eventually form the Grand Loop.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NPS
Chittenden died rather young at the age of 58 while working in Seattle after a long career as a civil engineer. Perhaps no other man left such a mark on travel in Yellowstone National Park.
In 1962, 45 years after Chittenden’s death, perhaps his finest achievement finally met its own end. The Melan arch bridge over the Yellowstone was condemned, deemed no longer fit to support heavy car traffic, and scheduled to be replaced by a more modern bridge. But many didn’t want to see Chittenden’s work demolished. After public outcry,
Yellowstone National Park spent two years investigating alternate locations for the new bridge so they could preserve Chittenden’s. But the park ultimately came to a fitting conclusion: “The site he selected for his bridge is not only the best, but is also the most logical site for a bridge across the Yellowstone River,” wrote then-Yellowstone superintendent Lemuel Garrison. After standing for 59 years, the Melan arch bridge was broken, blasted, and carried out of the park, and its replacement was christened the Chittenden Memorial Bridge in his honor.
I, for one, think Chittenden would have been glad to see his masterwork demolished. In his final revision of The Yellowstone National Park, published two years before his death, Chittenden wrote that “the greatest service which official authority can render to posterity is to maintain and transmit this possession as it came from the hand of Nature.”
A derelict bridge obscuring a view of the mighty Yellowstone River would not have fit his description.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NPS
Fischer Genau is a writer and filmmaker living in Bozeman. He enjoys active stretching, reading books outside, rain, Kettle Corn-flavored Popcorners, and time with the people he loves. He works for Explore Big Sky as the Digital Media Lead.
UNDER
THE BRIM OF THE WEST
MONTANA TERRITORY HAT COMPANY
BY TAYLOR OWENS
he Montana Territory Hat Company isn’t just a hat shop— it’s a tribute to the American West. Rooted in heritage and craftsmanship, this Bozeman-based company creates custom cowboy hats that embody resilience, authenticity, and timeless design. Each hat is made by hand, designed to tell a story, carry a sense of place, and become a legacy passed through generations.
For owner Courtney Green, the journey to hat making was shaped by a lifelong love of the West.
“I have always been a horse girl, and if I’m being honest, I’ve always been a cowboy girl, too,” she said. “I grew up listening to ‘90s country radio while perfecting my braiding skills on my horses’ tails in the barn. I suppose that’s not uncommon for little girls—I just never grew out of it.”
Her passion for style and design led her into the world of fashion merchandising, where she learned the power of branding, the
emotive quality of an extraordinary image, and the subtlety of exceptional craftsmanship. But over time, she grew disillusioned with the industry’s shift toward fast fashion and disposable goods.
“I loved what I was doing, but my ‘why’ began to shift,” she said. “I wanted to build something that aligned with who I am and what I believe in. I wanted to get as far away from disposable fashion as I could. I needed to be back in the American West, surrounded by mountains, horses, and something grounded and real.”
As I say often—live your legacy.”
Each piece that comes out of Montana Territory Hat Company is handmade, from the selection of premium beaver felt to the finishing touches—hand-stitched leather sweatbands, vintage hatbands, and the occasional personal branding iron stamp.
“I make hats the same way they have been made through history. One step at a time.”
That desire for authenticity brought her to hat making, a craft deeply rooted in the traditions of the West.
“I have always been drawn to workwear and cowboy hats. Style that stands for something. Product designed for life,” she said. “I wanted something grounded in purpose and beauty, in functional authenticity and a lasting heritage.
“The process begins with heat and steam, which allows the felt to be blocked around wooden blocks that are chosen based on head measurement and shape. After the felt cools and stiffens around the hat block, the felt is sanded and the brim is cut to the desired measurement. After removing the felt from
Photos courtesy of Montana Territory Hat Company. A model showcasing a Montana Territory Hat.
the block, a sweatband is sewn in, and the hat is ready to be shaped. The hat band and branding or personalization is the final step.”
Clients can choose from ready-to-wear cowboy hats or create a custom order that reflects their individuality. Whether it’s a rugged rancher looking for a hard-wearing everyday hat or a musician seeking a timeless stage presence, Green ensures each creation is built to last a lifetime.
“I love hearing the stories behind why someone wants a custom hat,” she said. “It’s not just about fashion—it’s about identity.”
With its distinctive shapes and creases, the cowboy hat seamlessly blends form with function, offering not only a unique way to express one’s character but also serving as a practical safeguard against the elements.
“I always tell people that these are not just hats,” Green said.
“You can buy a hat anywhere. What you get from me is a piece of a place.”
Beyond the walls of the studio, these hats tell stories of Montana’s wild landscapes. They shade the faces of ranchers mending fences at sunrise, shield travelers exploring Yellowstone’s open roads, and top the heads of those who embrace the independent spirit of the West. Montana Territory Hat Company has become a sought-after destination for hat lovers near and far, drawing in cowboys, adventurers, and artists alike.
“A good hat doesn’t just sit on your head,” Green explained. “It becomes a part of who you are.”
At Montana Territory Hat Company, under every brim is a story waiting to be told. And for those who walk through the doors, they leave not just with a hat— but with a piece of Western history. Each ready-to-wear hat bears the name of a Montana landmark—Granite Peak, Miles City, Bridger, Blackfoot, and Virginia City— connecting each piece to the land that inspired it.
The cowboy hat stands as a powerful symbol of the American West, embodying both tradition and the spirit of individuality. No other item quite captures the same level of pride, purpose, and personal style.
“These hats are meant to hold the overpowering beauty of Montana reverence. I wanted to stand for something real. To represent a place and the preservation of a culture. A way of life. The cowboy life has always been an aspirational one for me. I live and love this life. I wanted to honor it.”
Today, Green lives in Montana with her two young children, close to the family ranch. When she’s not making hats, she’s riding horses, working cattle, and watching her kids compete in rodeos across the state.
“You can rest assured—a Montana Territory hat is made for every bit of this life,” she said.
She believes that a well-made product carries meaning beyond itself, and that each hat she crafts is infused with quality, intention, and nostalgia.
“I’m creating future vintage,” Green said. “These hats represent the preservation of a place, a culture, and a way of life. They are inspired by the past, lived in today, and built to be passed down for generations.”
Find out more at www.montanaterritory.com and follow along on Instagram @montanaterritory.
Above left: Branding a Montana Territory Hat as a final touch. Above top right: A rider with a Montana Territory Hat adjusting their horse’s saddle. Above middle: Cattle on the open range in Montana. Above bottom right: Owner, Courtney Green, working on a few hats in the studio.
EXPERTS CONTINUE TO LOOK FOR
Wildlife SolutionsCrossing Along 191
WORDS BY JEN CLANCEY & PHOTOS BY HOLLY PIPPEL
.S. Highway 191 is the only public road that connects the populous communities of Gallatin Valley to Big Sky and West Yellowstone. Semis, pickup trucks and cars blur by on the strip of pavement at 55-70 miles per hour, bisecting the agricultural fields of Gallatin Gateway, as well as the foothills of the Gallatin and Madison ranges where deer and elk exit higher elevations and forage in colder months.
It’s a route that hosts two hotspots for wildlife-vehicle collisions in Gallatin County, identified by researchers in 2024. Between 2008 and 2022, 2,625 white-tailed deer, 625 mule deer and 312 elk were struck and killed by vehicles in Gallatin County. The mouth of the Gallatin Canyon and the junction of U.S. 191 and Montana Highway 64 are priority sites for conservationists and road experts due to their high number of wildlife vehicle collisions.
It’s a route that hosts two hotspots for wildlifevehicle collisions in Gallatin County, identified by researchers in 2024. Between 2008 and 2022, 2,625 white-tailed deer, 625 mule deer and 312 elk were struck and killed by vehicles in Gallatin County. The mouth of the Gallatin Canyon and the junction of U.S. 191 and Montana Highway 64 are priority sites for conservationists and road experts due to their high number of wildlife vehicle collisions.
Drivers familiar with the route know there’s a problem too—of the forty-six who responded to a reader survey published by Explore Big Sky about U.S. 191, 14 noted that they had personally been in a wildlife-vehicle collision. Most respondents believe there is more that can be done to prevent these accidents.
One of those respondents is Holly Pippel, a wildlife photographer and advocate who lives in Gallatin Gateway. Pippel has lived in Gateway since 1995 and has grown fond of the diverse wildlife in the area.
“Mountain lions, bobcats, ermine, mink, bears … an occasional wolf in Gateway down at this end will come through,” Pippel said. “Everything’s trying to make a living.”
In one recent year, Pippel alone counted 18
dead elk on the roadside, which she reported to the Bozeman-based nonprofit Center for Large Landscape Conservation for their Wildlife and Transportation Assessment. On Feb. 28, 2025, she photographed a struck elk that had been moved off the road, and lit on fire some hours later. She remembered a time when one driver, unfamiliar with the area, struck three elk in Gallatin Gateway at night.
It’s a corridor CLLC, an organization that studies ecological connectivity in landscapes globally, has been focused on for the last few years—in September 2024, they teamed up with the Montana Department of Transportation to apply for funding of a wildlife crossing bridge over U.S. 191. In December, CLLC learned that their project proposal, valued at about $22.8 million, was rejected. In total, states across the U.S. asked for $600 million in funds for projects, five times the amount the grants could pay for.
The problem of wildlife-vehicle collisions remains, and grows. For conservationists, drivers and state agencies, the issue poses a safety threat and concerns about herd health.
“We’re certainly not giving up on this project,” Elizabeth Fairbank, road ecologist with CLLC, told EBS. “It’s not getting better on its own.”
Community contributors pledged $3 million in donations to help match federal funding if the application proved successful. Fairbank hopes pledges will remain as CLLC looks into alternatives outside of the federal Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program, a program included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2022. Fairbank said it’s hard to predict funding sources in the future, especially amid funding freezes enacted by a new administration. There are also structure changes as Sean Duffy steps into his role as U.S. Secretary of Transportation.
Amid the uncertainty, researchers continue to collect data about the significance of ungulate species’ movement around U.S. 191.
Julie Cunningham, a biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, began research on elk movement in the Gallatin Gateway area in 2023.
She said the project is different from typical FWP research because it concerns not only hunters but conservationists, county officials and drivers as well.
“It’s a little outside the box,” Cunningham said. “But it’s been really fun and rewarding because of the amount of community interest.” She said that results indicate elk use the area as habitat, not just a stop along the way on a
longer seasonal migratory journey. Though a work in progress, the results can inform county planners in future land use in the area.
According to Envision Gallatin, a project by the Gallatin County’s Department of Planning and Community Development, 74% of private land in Gallatin County is free of zoning. Unzoned spaces without neighborhood plans tend to be used for agriculture, like acres in Gallatin Gateway.. As a result, “few local review mechanisms” are in place to ensure development happens with the community and environment in mind. The county is holding public meetings to discuss zoning reform, which could result in solutions, such as creating a framework for all unzoned areas. The next meeting is on March 13 at 1:30 p.m. with the Gallatin County Commission.
According to Cunningham, FWP spends about $20,000 to $30,000 responding to wildlife conflicts in the Bozeman area annually. As the area grows, conflicts caused by animals making “small movements” through yards, in subdivisions and properties aren’t going away and while well-intentioned property owners appreciate wildlife, they sometimes wish the animals could go somewhere else, Cunningham said. “But we’re running out of ‘somewhere elses,’” she said.
An Area ‘Worth Saving’
Cunningham said she sees overpasses as just one part of a broader mitigation plan.
“One of the things I think about is, are there other tools too? You know, what about animal detection systems?”
Cunningham asked. “The overpasses may be the right tool in some areas. And I think … they’re one tool, but they’re not the only tool.”
She highlighted the effectiveness of animal detection systems, signs that would detect animal crossings and alert drivers. A 2019 assessment by Marcel Huijser, a road ecologist with the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University, found that costs of detection systems on U.S. Highway 89 in Paradise Valley were similar or lower than the financial burden of allowing crashes to continue. In 2024, Huijser found that the benefits exceed costs of constructing wildlife crossing options at several sections of U.S. 191: between Four Corners and the mouth of the canyon, north and south of Big Sky and between U.S. 191’s junction with U.S. Highway 287 and West Yellowstone.
The first step in a conservation hierarchy is to avoid areas worthy of conservation and protection. If that step isn’t feasible, the next-best step would be mitigation, which Big Sky and Gallatin Gateway community members hope to accomplish with wildlife-friendly infrastructure, and the third would be compensation—making up for risks by providing benefits and refuge elsewhere.
“We typically go immediately to mitigating impact, meaning acceptance of impacts and trying to reduce the severity of those impacts,” Huijser said. “In mountainous regions adjacent to the river, that is the easiest place for people to build a road. It is probably also one of the most damaging places ecologically to build the road.”
An example of avoiding impact would be infrastructure like an elevated monorail through the Gallatin Canyon, Huijser said.
The Gallatin Valley, especially around more undeveloped agriculture like the ones in Gateway, is popular range for ungulate species. Put simply, the habitat is irresistible.
“There’s fantastic food for ungulates on the agricultural fields. We basically created something that deer especially love in that area,” Huijser said. “We have an increasingly busy highway cutting through it.”
To continue the effort to implement wildlife crossing infrastructure,
“You could argue that … along many road sections, we’re losing more money by doing nothing,” Huijser said.
In the 2024 study, Huijser found two significant hotspots for wildlife-vehicle collisions in Gallatin County: the mouth of the canyon in Gallatin Gateway and the junction of U.S. 191 and Montana Highway 64. But even beyond those two hotspots, there are many sites in need of mitigation along the route as a whole.
“To say that improving the two sites would then improve everything, is false,” Huijser said.
CLLC recommends remaining careful behind the wheel and reaching out to representatives at the state and federal levels to encourage wildlife crossing and mitigation efforts.
Pippel believes a structure like an overhead wildlife crossing with enough accessible land on both sides would be an ideal solution. After a winding 40-mile drive through the canyon, the brief expansion to a second, northbound lane for passing and gaining speed is a welcome change for drivers heading away from Big Sky. It’s here that drivers on their journey exit the most of the canyon, and enter Gallatin Valley, with a spectacular view of the Bridger Range on the horizon. It’s also a spot where people regain cell service after 45 minutes or more of radio silence.
“There’s a lot of things that are distractions for drivers when you come out of the canyon,” Pippel said, behind the wheel of her Chevrolet pickup truck, checking both sides of the road carefully while she navigates the corridor in question.
She emphasized her hope that nearby private lands can be placed under conservation easements to aid the elk populations. It’s not just elk, deer and large mammals that face the impacts of furthering development and fast-moving traffic. Other endangered species also reside in the area.
“It is important to pay attention to these other species that are rare and not necessarily large enough to pose a threat to human safety and not part of that safety analysis,” Huijser said of smaller, scarcer creatures like wolverine and lynx.
As the sun set over the foothills that embrace U.S. 191, Pippel describes the movement of an elk herd across the street. It’s a trek of about 30 feet, but can be life or death for animals and drivers. She recalled one elk holding up traffic until each member of the herd had crossed to the other side.
“We’re part of the greater Yellowstone,” Pippel said. “You know, we’re on the gateway to Yellowstone, historically. And I think it’s worth saving.”
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in Explore Yellowstone’s sister publication, Explore Big Sky in March 2025. Jen Clancey is a staff writer on Outlaw Partners’ editorial team.
Photo Courtesy
TreasureA Local
Tumbleweed Bookstore & Café offers gathering place for community, visitors to Yellowstone’s first gateway town
WORDS & PHOTOS BY CARLI JOHNSON
As visitors enter the North Entrance of Yellowstone National Park, they will likely stop in the small town of Gardiner, Montana. With no stoplights, only one grocery store and a span of four square miles, this seemingly one-horse town is the original gateway to the nation’s first national park.
Gardiner was officially founded in 1880, eight years after Yellowstone National Park was established, and served as the only entrance to the park for 30 years. In 1903, the Northern Pacific Railway extended the railroad to access Gardiner for easier transport of visitors, making the area more accessible to much of the U.S.
Today, over 150 years later, the town of Gardiner has expanded across the Yellowstone River with a bridge connecting both sides of town. Many restaurants have come and gone, souvenir shops line the streets, and travel companies help visitors plan their adventure in Yellowstone. While hundreds of thousands of visitors pass through town to refuel, there is one café that stands out as a local treasure: the Tumbleweed Bookstore & Café. The business has taken many shapes over the years and current owner Leslie-Ann Daher maintains it as one of the busiest and best breakfast and lunch spots, according to locals.
The Tumbleweed offers a place of nourishment and refuge for busy seasonal employees. It’s a place where they can stagger in before a day guiding locals down the Yellowstone River or through the national park, and order a breakfast burrito and a warm drink to nourish the soul.
In a town where food options are limited, and expensive, the Tumbleweed offers a satisfying meal, a cozy atmosphere, and walkability from any part of town. It’s a spot where locals and visitors alike enter hungry and leave with excitement to soon return.
In 2023, the café faced the possibility of closing. Local and long-time Gardiner resident Anna Holloway had been running the show for the better part of a decade but was looking to move back to her home state of Indiana at the end of the summer.
At the time, Daher was managing for Holloway and the two were working close to keep the Tumbleweed moving during the busy season. As the summer came to a close, and Holloway was making plans to close up shop, conversations were had and a business deal was struck for Holloway to sell the business to Daher.
“I had no idea what I was doing. I’ve never opened a business before.”
– Leslie-Ann Daher
Working in a kitchen, behind a bar, fundraising, and even raising her three children were all jobs Daher knew how to do: running a business was not one of them.
But with support from Holloway, the landlord and current employees, everything came together for Daher to step into this new adventure. “It really was the right place at the right time,” Daher said. “It truly was meant to be.”
Daher had been working with Holloway long before she became a business owner. The pair met on an unrelated business venture when Daher was working as the fundraising chair for a local preschool and Holloway reached out asking for the preschool to sponsor the annual Gardiner Brewfest.
The Gardiner Brewfest is an annual gathering once put on by the Chamber of Commerce that eventually fell solely into the hands of Holloway. It brings together live music, local art vendors and, of course, local beer for a fun summer evening of dancing and community celebration.
Now, with the change in ownership at the Tumbleweed and no one to organize the Brewfest, Daher has stepped in to fill the role of community leadership that Holloway so effectively built.
Long time employee Izzy Rodman began working at the Tumbleweed when she was 14 years old. Now, at 24, Rodman has seen the Tumbleweed through many phases.
“I’ve seen it slowly get more popular, which has been very interesting,” Rodman said.
The Tumbleweed Café offers space for local artists to sell all forms of art, including greeting cards, earrings, necklaces, and more.
For someone who grew up in Gardiner, Rodman was used to the quiet winters and booming summers. But even for her, when COVID-19 came around, she noticed a difference in her town and at the café. During the pandemic, Rodman noted how sales nearly doubled every day that year. Since then, sales have come out to a steady flow.
Living in a town with a year-round population of less than 1,000 residents, Daher is proud to own a business and organize events that bring people together and encourage community participation.
With a year-and-a-half of ownership under her belt, Daher recently has begun hosting community events after hours at the café. Her plan is to make the Tumbleweed a space for gathering, dining and community engagement.
Currently, Daher partners with the Electric Peak Arts Council to host different art focused events. This winter, local singer and songwriter Jackson Holte has been hosting songwriting workshops on Wednesday evenings. On Valentine’s Day, Daher hosted a ladies night that included building your own flower arrangements.
Daher spoke with enthusiasm for being able to foster a community space where people can gather. “I love that part of a community, where you could have people from all different social groups and work circles gather for different events,” Daher said.
While the café embraces change, it remains a cornerstone of the community. A place where long-time residents and firsttime visitors alike can find comfort, connection and a taste of local flavor.
In a town where the majority of the year is a quiet, winter haven, having community spaces to gather and spend time together is imperative. Likewise, in the summer, when thousands of people pass through town a day, it’s important to share your community with visitors.
Through dedication to excellent food and community participation, the Tumbleweed Café has effortlessly filled this role. It’s a place where stories are shared, friendships are forged and everyone leaves with a smile.
Carli Johnson is a writer who enjoys rafting the rivers of Southwest Montana, skiing Bridger Bowl and discovering the important communities that make this place feel like home. She is based in Bozeman and is the social media coordinator at Outlaw Partners.
All the sandwiches in the café are named after local dogs, this pup is visiting for the day as an honorary Tumbleweed pet.
Cowboy
Cowboy Bar Guide
Big enough for the two of us
Our team's favorite watering holes in the Greater Yellowstone
he creek of floorboards. The squeak of swinging double saloon doors and they open, and close again. The pop of a cork from a bottle. The tip of a hat. They’re all elements familiar to anyone whose movie taste frequents the Spaghetti Western genre. And the setting? The good ol’ Western bar.
Saloons west of the Mississippi date back to unruly days even before railroads, serving the region’s early population of fur trappers, cowboys, soldiers, lumberjacks, lawmen and outlaws alike. The region’s earliest was in Brown’s Hole, Wyoming, founded in 1822. Bars serve as an important port in which both neighbors
Cowboy Cafe
Dubois, Wyoming
and visitors could exchange the latest headlines, celebrate a victory or nurse a defeat, grab a meal and libation, and feel at home, no matter if they were or not. Today, while times have certainly changed, the spirit of the Western bar lives on—in fact many of the originals still stand proudly serving their communities. We asked the Explore Yellowstone team to reveal their favorites, and we’ve compiled them here for our spring 2025 Cowboy Bar Guide. These are the spots that not only make this town big enough for the two of us, but big enough for anyone who’s of the mind to pull up a barstool and appreciate a cold drink. Cheers.
- THE EDITORS
Stacey’s Bar
Gallatin Gateway, Montana
Dubois is a classic old West town, and the Cowboy Cafe fits right in with its rustic, homey feel. The cafe embraces Western hospitality, with friendly service and a cozy, welcoming vibe. One of the biggest reasons people love the Cowboy Cafe is its homemade pies. Flavors like huckleberry, apple, peach and pecan keep visitors coming back. Located along Highway 26, the Cowboy Cafe is a must-stop for road trippers heading to Yellowstone, Grand Teton, or outdoor adventurers exploring the Wind River Range.”
The Miner Saloon
cooke City, Montana
Cooke City is quite an experience. It’s really a mission to get there, and the town is incredibly small. During the summer this bar in the middle of nowhere is filled with fly fishermen traveling from far and wide to fish the local rivers. While during the winter it’s packed with snowmobilers and backcountry skiers seeking the incredible snow that the nearby mountain ranges offer. Either season, it’s an incredible spot, and offers an awesome remote Montana bar experience.”
– GEORGE V., BOZEMAN, MONTANA
Tucked off of U.S. Highway 191 between Big Sky and Bozeman along the Gallatin River, Stacey’s is a mainstay that provides a warm environment, hearty steak dinner and honest pours of local brews. While the area around it grows, Stacey’s remains consistent and reliable.”
– COCO C., BOZEMAN, MONTANA – ERIC L., BIG SKY, MONTANA - JOSH T., ARVADA, COLORADO
To me, this bar embodies the true spirit of the West with its perfect blend of locals and tourists, creating an atmosphere that feels both welcoming and timeless. Stepping inside, you get a sense of old Montana—like you’ve been transported back to its early days. The food is exactly what you crave in Big Sky Country—a hearty steak or a classic burger that hits the spot. And with the addition of the dance hall, it’s more than just a bar—it’s the ultimate place to kick back, enjoy great company, and experience an unforgettable night.”
Million Dollar Cowboy Bar
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Have you ever seen 40 of the world’s best professional bull riders arm wrestle for who pays the bar tab, while the late Toby Keith shows up and grabs the mic from the house band on stage and starts singing classic country songs? These are the types of legendary stories that happen at the Cowboy Bar.”
– ERSIN O., BOZEMAN, MONTANA
The Tetonia Club
Tetonia, Idaho
Located on the main drag of Tetonia, this club feels like a warm cabin when you walk in complete with a wood stove in the corner. It’s not uncommon to see a singular cowboy sitting at the bar or a funk band there to play for the night. While this is also a classic ski bar, there’s nothing more Western than skiing, in my opinion.”
– TAYLOR O., BOZEMAN, MONTANA
Roadkill Bar
McLeod, Montana
Where else can you find a bar in the middle of nowhere with the following sign posted out front: ‘WARNING. Property patrolled by a crazy bitch with dogs and automatic weapons. ANYONE found here at night will be found here in the morning. Have a nice day.’”
– ELI K., BOZEMAN, MONTANA
Pony Bar
Pony, Montana
What’s not to love about the Pony Bar? Credit cards beware, this bar takes cash only, no exceptions. The moment you walk into the Pony Bar you are greeted with the bright lights of 30-year-old slot machines, live music, pool, and, last but not least, CHEAP drinks! Not to mention, gun raffles. What’s not to love?”
– PATRICK M., BOZEMAN, MONTANA
Pony Bar is off the beaten path. It has cold beer and good food. It’s usually quiet and has a special place in our family history.”
– EJ D., BOZEMAN, MONTANA
The Ranch Bar
Anaconda, Montana
It’s where the locals go and there’s a feeling of community. The cheers of Anaconda!”
– LESLIE K., BIG SKY, MONTANA
Snow Creek Saloon
Red Lodge, Montana
The Snow Creek Saloon boasts a classic, rustic charm with its wood-paneled walls, vintage decor, the local people (and usually local dogs) creating a genuine old West feel. One afternoon after skiing all day we were sitting there having a beer and someone rode their horse into the bar. The saloon regularly hosts live music performances, ranging from local bands to touring musicians, adding to the lively atmosphere and creating a fun, energetic vibe.”
– GRAHAM M., BOZEMAN, MONTANA
Corral Bar
Big Sky, Montana
Built in 1947 with all original structure still intact, the Corral is one of the few remaining pieces of the old Montana West, especially here in Big Sky. Originally built as a dance hall and watering hole for cowboys wrangling in the area, the walls still have bullet holes from late-night altercations gone awry. It’s one of the oldest buildings in Big Sky and continues to be a great spot for locals and travelers alike.”
– GRIFFIN H., BIG SKY, MONTANA
The Bank Bar & Vault Restaurant
Wilsall, Montana
I love Bank Bar because it’s still a place where you can throw peanut shells on the floor, grab a burger made with beef from the ranch across the street, and run into interesting locals. The bartenders are fantastic and there’s the infamous two-headed calf in display. Plus, you can’t beat the view of the Crazies from the window. Will always swing by for a drink and bite when I’m in Shields Valley!”
– MIRA B., BOZEMAN, MONTANA
Adobe Stock Photo
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A Sanctuary for the Soul and Senses
Bodhi Farms
Bodhi Farms is more than just a boutique eco-resort—it’s an experience designed to reconnect guests with nature, wellness, and mindful living. Located in Cottonwood Canyon, this 35-acre retreat offers luxurious glamping accommodations, farm-to-table dining, rejuvenating spa treatments, and immersive outdoor activities, all guided by a deep
As soon as a guest steps out of their car, they begin a journey toward serenity.
“Walking along the creek and crossing the bridges helps calm your nervous system before your massage or your dinner,” Tanya explained.
“We want to connect people with nature,” Rayner added. “Our goal is to provide a space where individuals can experience the beauty of Montana sustainably and authentically.”
Opened in June 2020, the boutique eco-resort features nine luxurious glamping tipis for accommodations. Guests can dine at the farm-to-table wild game Field Kitchen Restaurant, housed in a large tipi and connected to a mobile kitchen. The resort offers a variety of activities, including hiking, farming, off-site fly fishing, and relaxing massages.
“The outdoor spa offers yoga, massages in a heated tipi, and a woodfired sauna. The Yoga Shala is open on all sides, bringing your practice into nature,” Rayner shared. The tipi sides are opened during warm, sunny days and closed on colder ones while the heated floors allow for a warm practice year-round. The Wandering Sauna provides a space for gathering and is located near the creek.
Five-star comfort is found in the Nordic tipis. Tufts and Needle mattresses swaddled with high-thread count sheets and heated blankets provide a touch of luxury. Six windows and clear front and back doors offer natural light and mountain views while a private porch equipped with a hammock allow for further relaxation. Wi-Fi is available; however, Rayner emphasized that “the best experience for the guest is sleeping by the creek,” where the soothing sound of flowing water can lull them to sleep.
A guest can begin their day with a cup of coffee made using the in-room coffee maker and enjoy a farm-fresh continental breakfast.
“Our glamping buffet includes grains, cereals, fruits, juices, and eggs from our chickens, along with coffee made from beans sourced from Ghost Town Coffee Roasters,” Tanya shared.
The food served at Bodhi Farms pays homage to the area’s rich history, showcasing the local bounty and a steadfast commitment to sustainable cooking. The goal is to celebrate seasonal produce and draw inspiration from the eating practices of Native tribes, which include sourcing indigenous game and fish, along with wild berries, native greens, and herbs.
During the summer months, seasonal produce is grown in the 1 1/2-acre garden. After five years of building the soil and learning what thrives in the southwestern Montana environment, Rayner said they’ve become more focused.
“We are reducing the number of things we grow. We are keeping it simple,” she said. By doing this, the culinary team can have more consistent products to cook with.
Rayner oversees the menu for the property.
“I am a highly involved owner,” he said. “We have a 200-page cookbook with recipes we have tasted and approved.”
As a boy, Rayner hunted white-tail deer with his father and uncles in Texas. Although he used a gun during childhood, he later took up bow hunting in high school and practiced archery. Early on, he learned how to process his harvest, making sausages and jerky. Recalling Thanksgiving, he shared, “We would shoot our own turkey for our feast.”
He taught himself the technique of “whole animal cooking.” His inspiration initially came from Francis Mallmann, an Argentine celebrity chef, author, and restaurateur specializing in Argentine cuisine, particularly Patagonian barbecuing methods.
“I would host cookouts for friends using whole lambs,” he recalled, fondly remembering a feast he prepared during the solar eclipse in Jackson, Wyoming, in 2017.
Over the years, the Smiths have collected ideas from farm-to-table dinners they attended, creating every dish to be custom developed. While Rayner provided input for the heartier dishes, he credits Tanya for the lighter and fresher recipes.
The ingredients for the dishes served in Field Kitchen Restaurant come from Bodhi’s in-house garden and local farms, supplemented by produce from Three Hearts Farm, SporeAttic Mushrooms, and Chance Farms, all local to the area. Breads are freshly baked by On the Rise, with flour supplied by Wheat Montana. Wickens Ranch in Winifred, Montana, provides beef, while the chicken is sourced from Black Dog Farms in Livingston, Montana. Trout comes from Native Fish Keepers, and Montrail Bison supplies bison. For cheese, the creamy goodness is contributed by Amaltheia Organic Dairy, Lifeline Farm, Vintage Cheese Co., and Kalispell Kreamery.
The beer and spirits offered at Bodhi Farms are Montana made while their wines are sourced from near distant neighbors with more experienced wine makers from northern California, Oregon and Washington. Their cocktail menu features drinks with fun and playful descriptions. The Cowboy cocktail is perfect for those who have “worked hard all day,” while the Thirsty Farmer is described as “a Huckleberry Lemonade for grownups.”
Bison tartare served on a fry bread crisp, roasted roots salad made with mixed greens and Montana honey mustard dressing, and mushroom barley risotto with ricotta are just a few of the dishes on the menu with items changing to fit the season. For dessert, offerings include carrot cake made from homegrown carrots and Bodhi s’mores, which a guest can cook over a campfire just outside the restaurant.
Bodhi Farms follows a zero-waste principle, ensuring that no food waste ends up in land ills; instead, it is recycled. ; ,
The leftovers that cannot be used to feed the chickens, which lay the eggs, and the two pigs purchased each year are composted. The eggs not used for their dishes are sold in the restaurant, and the pigs are butchered in the fall.
Rayner described their aerobic composting technique as “lasagna mulching,” layering in wood chips to make a hearty compost. To recycle meat, oils and other fatty substances, Bokashi or anaerobic composting methods are employed.
“We have exciting plans to enhance our operations,” Rayner said. “We are adding a greenhouse so we can operate year-round.”
This year, Bodhi Farms will collaborate with Tournant from Portland in early summer. Tournant owners Mona Johnson and Jaret Foster focus on a farmto-fire approach to cooking. Their meals are inspired by the seasons and the local harvest, which aligns with Bodhi Farms’ philosophy.
Over the years, Rayner has taught wood fire cooking classes at Bodhi Farms, so he eagerly anticipates sharing ideas with these fire experts during a wild game, surf, and turf feast featuring bison, elk, Pacific oysters, and crab. The fire masters plan a ticketed dinner at Bodhi Farms on June 25.
Bodhi Farms will host their third annual Montana Farmto-Table Food Festival in July, featuring local chefs and seasonal produce for a walk-about eating experience in the field behind their restaurant. Last year, participants included Butter Bakery, est. 1864, Fielding’s, I-Ho’s Korean Grill, and The Flip Flop Guy.
At Bodhi Farms, enlightenment for the appetite and soul is found in a space not far from the bustling city. Owners Rayner and Tanya want all to “Come to eat and drink, come to celebrate, come to relax and be well.” With the natural offerings of bounty and spirit from a yoga practice, glamping by the creek, or dining in a Nordic Tipi, a guest departs with the gifts of harmony and namaste.
Flavors and deliciousness from under the Big Sky excites Stella Fong. She is always on the hunt for the stories and the people behind the good food in Montana. Through her radio show on Yellowstone Public Radio, Flavors Under the Big Sky, and books - Historic Restaurants of Billings, Billings Food, and Flavors Under the Big Sky: Recipes and stories from Yellowstone Public Radio and Beyond, she shares what bounty can be found here.
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VICTOR EMPORIUM Best of the Region
Ski days at Grand Targhee were what my friends and I looked forward to each week while working the winters at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. We would choose a quiet day during the week and make the trek over snowy Teton Pass to Targhee for memorable powder days that ended with a trip to the Victor Emporium on our way back home. These trips were always to get the famous Purple Peaks milkshake.
Right on Main Street in Victor, Idaho sits the most nostalgic and quintessential ice cream shop serving up milkshakes, ice cream, fishing gear, and Teton Valley souvenirs for all the visitors coming through.
n a random “Targhee Monday,” as my friends liked to call it, a really nice and funny guy that I’d met while skiing came with us to go enjoy a powder day at Grand Targhee. Both of us had a plan to leave earlier than the rest due to work so we rode back together, just us.
Before we hit Teton Pass, he asked “have you had a Purple Peaks milkshake, yet?”
“No, what’s that?” I replied.
He pointed to make a quick turn into the parking lot right off Victor’s main street. We parked in a parking lot attached to a building with a large, colorful mural of a rainbow trout and a grizzly bear sharing a milkshake, an eagle flying overhead. The words painted across the top read:
“Home of the World Famous Huckleberry Shake!”
We walked inside and the smell of ice cream and warm waffle cones filled the space. In the back, past displays of local gifts and fishing tackle, was the ice cream counter. People sat perched on retro stools, watching as milkshakes were spun together by hand in metal mixing cups.
It was like taking a step back in time, a time where there were soda shops with brightly colored signs, vinyl seats, and a charm that doesn’t quite exist in establishments anymore.
At the counter, I started to order a regular huckleberry milkshake, but my ski buddy quickly interrupted.
“No, you have to get the Purple Peaks.”
I changed my order and watched the workers behind the counter scoop fresh huckleberries and Oreo chunks into the mixing cups. We paid at the register and took our milkshakes to go and sipped on them as we drove over Teton Pass back down into Jackson Hole.
That winter, I made several more stops at the Victor Emporium after ski days, never realizing that soon, I’d be living close enough to enjoy it in every season.
Like many who have lived in Jackson Hole, I eventually lost my housing and found myself moving to the Idaho side of Teton Pass. What started as a place to land soon became home, and with it, the Victor Emporium became more than just a post-ski stop—it became a place that marked the transition of seasons and the simple joys that made this valley feel like home. That chapter was made even sweeter by the ski buddy who first introduced me to the Purple Peaks milkshake—someone who, not long after, became more than just a friend. Together, we made the move to Victor, where the Emporium and the valley itself became part of our shared story.
Living in Jackson Hole had always been about the grind—working multiple jobs and maximizing every minute in the mountains. Moving to Victor felt like hitting pause. Most of the friends I’d made in Jackson weren’t willing to drive Teton Pass to visit, and there wasn’t much to do at night except the occasional show or trip to the bar. I decided to disconnect completely, pouring all my free time into exploring the woods and immersing myself in the beauty of Teton Valley.
I spent four years living in Teton Valley, in a house located beneath the shadow of Taylor Mountain off Old Jackson Highway. During that time, I experienced this area through all its seasons, each one offering a new adventure, whether it was running up Fossil Mountain in Darby Canyon, volunteering on a local farm during shoulder season, exploring the Big Hole Mountains in the fall, or enjoying the many powder-filled ski days. In each of those seasons, the Victor Emporium was my constant, my go-to for a Purple Peaks milkshake—a sweet reward after a long day of work or a grand adventure. No matter the time of year, the Emporium remained a comforting, familiar part of my life that I looked forward to—a symbol of the place I called home.
Though I no longer live in Teton Valley, I couldn’t stray too far. I made the move to Bozeman, a place with its own unique charm, but I still find myself drawn back to the valley to visit often. The Victor Emporium remains a must-stop for me, a sweet connection to a chapter of my life I hold close to my heart. Every time I sip on a Purple Peaks milkshake, I’m reminded of the first afternoon my partner and I spent together, sharing laughs and stories. It’s a moment that stays with me, as does the sense of peace I found in Teton Valley—its mountains and the quiet moments that made it feel like home.
Taylor Owens is a writer who spends her days running in the sun, playing in the snow, or on the hunt for the best breakfast across the West. She is based in Bozeman and is the content marketing director at Outlaw Partners.
Left: Outside the house below Taylor Mountain in Victor, Idaho.
Top Right: A day of work at Cosmic Apple Gardens in Victor, Idaho.
WORDS & PHOTOS BY TAYLOR OWENS
Bottom Right: Posing behind the face cutout at Victor Emporium.
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