It would make for a pretty lame T-shirt: “I went to Bozeman and didn’t once set foot on a hiking trail.”
On a recent visit, I avoided this mortifying distinction by scrambling up Drinking Horse Mountain Trail, a three-kilometre loop that starts in town. But there is so much going on in the paved parts of this idyllic town that you could easily go days without finding time to take in the natural splendour that surrounds it, which includes a half-dozen mountain ranges and a little park called Yellowstone.
I wanted to go to Bozeman because I’d spent a decade falling in love with—and dreaming of relocating to—Big Sky Country, as it’s known. I had recently been hired to teach writing at the University of Montana in Missoula, the state’s laid-back alternative to what Missoulians see as Bozeman’s glitz. But I felt like I’d ended up with the wrong partner. Despite having nearly twice Bozeman’s population, Missoula seemed to vibrate with half the energy. Many Montanans prefer that. But I was moving from New York City, and it was Bozeman that offered the singular satisfaction of enjoying a world-class meal on the way from one barren rock face to another.
Winter comes early to Bozeman, which sits at an elevation of nearly a mile, and my visit last October coincided with the area’s final week of fall. It was a pageant: the paper birches and Ohio buckeyes blazed with such fire against the tawny humps of the Bridger Mountains, a subrange of
