Baseball and The Big Sky: America’s Pastime in the West

Topher Sedlak

Part Two: Minors & Majors

Baseball and The Big Sky: America’s Pastime in the West Part One: Roots and Sticks

Topher Sedlak

Montana might not be first place you envision when hearing baseball. The earliest game using modern rules took place in New Jersey across the Hudson River from New York City. But that’s only part of the story. The Old West was chock full of…

Stargazing in The Big Sky

Topher Sedlak

Photo by Topher Sedlak There’s really no better place in the summer than Montana. Warm dry breezes, never muggy. The gold sun blazes in an immense vault of blue. Zero fire ants, poison oak, or poison sumac. Minimal mosquitoes. We’re…

Watching a Live Stream

Topher Sedlak

The setting: The second half of May, all of June, and often the first week of July. The valley and foothills are intensely verdant. Above, acres of shining snow cling to the peaks. This is the season many of our ancestors, both Native and otherwise…

Bozeman’s Bumper Crops: Local Produce and 3 Fiddles Farm

Topher Sedlak

Before the Second World War, Montana produced 77% of its food. This was apples and onions, honey and butter, poultry and pork, dried beans and salad greens, not just the beef, wheat, barley, and cherries well-known today. Our valley was famous for…

The Milwaukee Road

Topher Sedlak

Three Forks, Montana 1974. Little Joe #77 works during the last week of electrification. Courtesy A. Burns at American Rails. Behind a curtain of forest, at a spot called Ravenna, a lone building stares out in silence. Its red-brick body is a…

Heart of The Valley

Topher Sedlak

One summer 20 years ago, a group of friends from Minnesota made a Big Sky Country visit. We hung around Bozeman and Hyalite for a few days before a trip up to Glacier and Flathead. While driving down Willson Avenue, an older man in a beat-up truck…

Fight The Funk With Bozeman’s Winter Events

Topher Sedlak

Summertime fills up, like cramming 10 pounds of spuds into a 5-lb bag. There are visitors from other states, there’s maintaining a garden—watering, weeding, maintenance, harvesting, and keeping ahead of bugs, not to mention all the regular…

Some Winter Wisdom

Topher Sedlak

Last month, we walked through the East Side and up Peet’s Hill. Several kids, one in a football helmet, were sledding the mini bowl. Clouds covered the Bridgers, but a huge vault of blue spread over the valley. Bench legs stood in green patches…

Relax Christmas Is Twelve Days Long

Topher Sedlak

You know the feeling: You’ve worked for something so hard, or anticipated something so much that, when it finally comes, it’s a bit of a letdown. An anticlimax. Or, an event starts so early and drags on so long, even something good, that…

Our Valley’s Namesake: Gallatin, the Genevan Tom Sawyer

Topher Sedlak

We’re surrounded by places named for historic figures—John Bozeman, Sacajawea, Charles & Angelique Anceney, Nelson Story. However, the namesake of our valley is largely invisible. Many locals know that Meriwether Lewis and William…