Big Sky, Montana’s Beloved Ski Destination, Is Just As Spectacular During Summer

“Big Sky has always been a sacred place,” says Menka Vansant, a horse wrangler at the Old West–flavored Lone Mountain Ranch, homesteaded in 1915 in the Madison Range of the Rocky Mountains, above Yellowstone National Park. For centuries, she explains, the area was used by as many as 49 Indigenous tribes, including Crow, Sioux, and Blackfeet, who rested here en route to the Yellowstone caldera to hunt and forage. On this warm, dry morning in late July, we're trotting along sloping, sun-dappled trails among lodgepole pines, spruces, and firs, occasionally passing through luminescent meadows dotted with Indian paintbrush and fleabane. Menka, a self-confessed rock enthusiast, tells me she once found a fossil with a seashell pattern along the trail, a remnant of an era, more than 70 million years ago, when Big Sky was underwater. In a world where it can take a lot of conscious effort to not feel frantic all the time, there's comfort in moving through a landscape that slows you to the pace of geological time. Like many people I meet in and around this unincorporated community of about 3,000 year-round residents, Menka came to Big Sky having lived an interesting life elsewhere. Afte