Big Sky

Big Sky is a young town by Montana standards, built up around a ski area that newsman Chet Huntley founded in the early 1970s, and it still feels a little improvised — a resort village dropped into a valley of working ranches, national forest, and one very serious mountain. Lone Peak’s bare granite summit, over eleven thousand feet, dominates the skyline from almost everywhere in the valley, and Lia and I found ourselves glancing up at it constantly, the way you’d check in on weather. The name, borrowed from a Huntley broadcast phrase, undersells the place slightly: this is big everything, not just sky.

Lone Peak and the tram

We rode the Lone Peak Tram, a small enclosed cabin that hauls skiers and, in summer, hikers straight up the mountain’s final vertical pitch to a summit deck with views stretching to the Spanish Peaks, the Madison Range, and on clear days, the edge of Yellowstone itself. Even in July there was a raw, thin-air intensity to standing up there, wind snapping at our jackets while marmots whistled somewhere on the scree below. Coming back down, we hiked a section of the Beehive Basin trail instead of riding, switchbacking through wildflower meadows loud with pikas, and understood why this valley draws climbers and skiers with roughly equal devotion.

The Gallatin River and the road to Yellowstone

Highway 191 threads south from Big Sky along the Gallatin River, a stretch of blue-ribbon trout water made famous in “A River Runs Through It,” and we pulled off more than once just to watch fly fishermen work the riffles in the evening light. The same road continues on into Yellowstone National Park’s northwest entrance, less than an hour further, which makes Big Sky a genuinely practical base rather than just a scenic one. We spent a morning driving that stretch with the windows down, elk grazing unbothered in roadside meadows, before turning back for a burger at a saloon that still had ski-patrol jackets pinned to the rafters.

Getting There

Big Sky sits about forty-five minutes south of Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport via Highway 191, an easy and scenic drive that follows the Gallatin Canyon most of the way. It’s also roughly an hour’s drive from Yellowstone’s West or North entrances, making it a common stopover for park visitors. There’s limited resort shuttle service within the village itself, but a car is necessary to reach Big Sky and to explore the surrounding canyon and national forest.