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Sacajawea, the left peak of the twin, from Corbly Gulch Road on an early January 2026 gravel road bike ride This is my entry to Outside Bozeman's Montana Made Me Do It contest. It's supposed to be a few hundred words about some past adventure. This is more serene than wild, so it's unlikely to win, but it was a fun adventure from way back that I'd never written about before. No idea what I'll get if I win besides my story appearing in the Spring Issue: OB tee shirt maybe or a

View from the top of Baldy It was a great season, it was a tough season, and it was all too short. Summer arrives late in the high country surrounding Bozeman. With about 17 hours of daylight at the summer solstice, the heat builds, the snow melts and the last of the passes open by mid-July. The melting snow floods mountain meadows releasing a nuisance of summertime bugs. So we get up as early as we can muster to head out running; cool early mornings and constant movement kee

Mounts Jefferson and Hollowtop As we reached the top of the peak the cloud mass that had already built to the north closed in on us: there would be no views. It was late summer 1984, Terry and I were out with Cindy and Peter, another couple of Bozemanite buddies. We had made it to Hollowtop Lake in the Tobacco Root Range the evening before. I remember the weather as having been stormy, so we never got a good view of peaks in the area; now that we were on top, we didn’t have a

Sperry Chalet with Lincoln Peak (center) “Look they stuffed another mountain in over there,” was a common refrain in the years I spent exploring the Glacier National Park backcountry with my buddy Huk. In the 1990s, Huk lived in Whitefish about an hour outside of Glacier, and he was in the park as much as possible during every short summer season; I visited for at least a few weeks each summer. We hiked many of the trails in the park: lots of day hikes and multiday backpackin

Leaving Landmannalaugar As was often the case, Oolav was angry. He was the high priest of the elves living around Landmannalaugar in the heart of the Icelandic backcountry, and he was tired of all the human activity in the area. He had elves redirect rivers across the road, but the humans kept coming in buses and trucks big enough to manage the crossings. They came to bathe in the elves hot springs, they came to hike the Laugavegur Trail through elfen lands and to sleep in hu

Blaze Mountain and Spanish Peak I have done at least a dozen backpacking and trail running trips into the Spanish Peaks over the years—not counting hikes to Lava Lake—but I have never made it all the way into Spanish Lakes.  I can count five times that I’ve been in the South Fork drainage of Spanish Creek, I even turned onto Spanish Lakes Trail in the summer of 1980, but I didn’t make it all the way to the lakes. The plan on that trip was for my buddy Huk and I to spend the f

Mid-March 2025: There are places on the planet that have a mythical feel to each of us; which places have that feel are different for you...

Kiener's Route on Longs Peak in red; Green dot is our perch: picture courtesy of Summit Post September 2nd, 2010: It was getting late. ...

Outside Bozeman Spring 2025. The title at the top is my name for the article. The article, as it appears in Outside Bozeman, has a...

This is an old story, both because it took place more than 40 years ago and because I wrote it more than 20 years ago. It's also the...

“Two beers please Jake,” Ella said to the bartender while holding up two fingers to make her order clear in case he couldn’t quite hear...

Josh standing at the edge of Death Canyon near Pass Lake “So wait, you’re telling me that the only things on this sandwich are breaded...

Enchaining: def , to bind or hold as if with chains. Ever since I moved to Bozeman in June 2020, I have found the prospect of enchaining...

When I first ventured into the Yellowstone backcountry, I found it threatening.  It was in June in the early 1980s when Terry and I...

Altitude trumps latitude.  It’s something we all know to be true.  ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ which coat the mountain’s high altitudes in...

Phelps Lake BEAR! Bear in the brush! I had been hiking along blurting out my usual chorus of “Koo-Ka-Doo,” and “Human in the Forest,”...

Early July, 1983: We awoke to brilliant blue skies on the third morning of our journey. The first two days had been stormy. First came...

When we are out on adventures, we no longer talk to the folks we meet about the Great White Father in the East, nor do we hunt and trap...

As of Spring 2023, my medical training had been limited to watching the occasional hospital show that I am certain provides an entirely...

As we drove along Spanish Creek I found myself saying aloud, “Wow, they paved this all the way in.” Terry replied, “You knew that, are...