As I walked into the living room of Charly Blackwood and Will Shanahan on a Wednesday afternoon, I was welcomed by the smells of cinnamon, warm buttery oil, and sweet honey, and a nod from their cat Zoey.

Whenever I enter the Flathead Valley, my body relaxes. My shoulders drop, my breathing becomes easier. I feel a grounding that flows through my body and centers me. The earth pulls me, and I want to embrace every tree, float in all the rivers, see every cloud.

Every seemingly small decision creates a larger, lasting impact. That one seemingly small pebble, plunked into the shallow shoreline, would create a storm on the other end of the lake.

“No matter who the threat is, no matter what the threat is, you look them in the eye so that they know you’re human.”

On a wintry evening in 2018, I was out walking with my boyfriend around the Downtown Bozeman Art Walk. It was cold, and we had ducked in and out of several businesses before we stepped inside Old Main Gallery. The first painting I saw held me still.

The American West exists in mythological creatures: the outlaw story of Billy the Kid, the aim of Annie Oakley, the controversial celebration of General George Armstrong Custer, and the ever-present regal shoulders of the great American bison.

I first sat at the potter’s wheel when I was 9, and I knew from that moment on that I wanted to continue finding ways to be around clay in any capacity possible. For the next 15 years, I played with polymer clay, took every ceramic class I could, and participated in summer art camps to fuel my love for the ceramic arts.

Rich and deep seasonal tones, set within the lost details of blurred landscapes, reveal scenes of sublime yet raw experiences in Dana Berardinis’s Forgotten Lands. This robust other-earthly body of work, drawn from memory and experience, was created by the artist over the period two years.

A charcuterie board, but one where you can eat the board, too.

Summer has always been lemonade. Cool hose water, fresh grass, sea salt or mountain air. But, over time, it’s easy to forget summer as it was— those simple pockets of magic nostalgia that are waiting to be found again. So, in an effort to remember when summer was three glorious, free months with little to no schedule or responsibilities, I made lemonade.

This simple recipe is from our wonderfully 1970s “Recipe Collector” binder. The one that holds a slew of index card recipes from friends, newspapers, parties— all in different styles of handwriting, some yellowed, some with ingredients stained into the paper.

On a frozen Eastern Montana day, one of the best feelings is coming in from the cold to thaw out. Your toes and fingertips have a biting pain in them from getting too cold, your eyelashes are sprinkled with frost, and you’re covered in hay dust, manure, and God only knows what else is on that dirty coat.

My maternal grandmother, Twila Wilhelm, is the only person I know who still bakes a plateful of goodies to give to family around the Holidays. Miniature loaves of poppy seed bread, homemade potato mints, chocolate-covered toffee, and the ever-elusive divinity are coveted items that we all await to receive each year.

Chocolate Bavarian cream pie has been a Rowson holiday staple for generations. Of course, like most family recipes, I thought that the Bavarian cream pie was a proprietary Rowson family heirloom.

An æbleskiver (ei·bluh·skee·vr) is a traditional Danish pancake— a fluffy sphere about the size of a tennis ball. My Nana always makes them for Christmas, and we always did the same growing up. The family record for number of æbleskivers consumed in one Christmas morning is held by my Uncle Nick: an impressive twenty-one.

My grandma, the GM, lover of root beer floats and chocolate, and Eastern Montana’s historian was a force to be reckoned with.

Today, when I lifted the pie crust to be draped over the top of the apples and sugar and cinnamon, I realized I was moving in the kitchen with the same effortlessness I watched my grandmother use. She drifted from countertop to countertop, mixing ingredients, shutting cupboards, and deftly lifting wax paper to lay crust atop a pie that already smelled like heaven.

When I took over Montana Woman, I was afraid to speak up for myself. I was afraid to come off as “bossy,” to be too loud, too direct. I carefully crafted my emails to avoid the possibility of someone being upset. Even when, as the owner and editor of this magazine, I had every right to stand my ground and call people out, I still made myself small.

Your sex does not determine who you will be, what goals you will make, or what waves you will create once you come forth into this world. But, I have always known that I would fight for you and the limits placed upon our sex for generations and generations— in all the same ways my mom (your grandma) did.

I think that one of the main reasons people live inauthentically is because of fear: fear of disapproval, fear of being judged, fear of failure. Stopping fear in its tracks and consistently showing up in life as yourself opens the door for magic to happen.

When they reached the homestead in the evening, she found that home was a dugout cut into the side of a gumbo hill; a structure composed of fieldstone, cedar branches, and logs that sported a door and a single window. While he went in search of water, she made up the house with what little they brought and waited. Alone for miles, she sat listening to a host of new sounds that could not be seen at night. 

Yesterday, my son threw a type 3 tantrum in the parking lot of the grocery store. Screaming, limbs locked, holding on to the cart like his life depended on it, while I tried to get him into his car seat. 

She wears the change of the season as a second skin. As the trees entertain their autumnal dress, so too does she welcome the shifting air.

Everyone talks about that feeling when they land.
Sweeping in, dropping slowly,
Gliding through the valley.
Engulfing you on all sides—that Big Sky.

Whether you’re just passing through or putting down roots, I want to let you know that you now have a responsibility to help keep this place an incredible place to be.

My family’s farm has sat at the site of where the Badlands and Yellowstone collide for four generations. My childhood was spent running barefoot to the river, collecting rocks and agates off the banks with my siblings, before irrigating the crops amidst clouds of mosquitoes.

Before Miriam Schlotzhauer was the creator and owner of Mio Mi Clothing LLC, she was a bicycling acrobat in Austria, a trained HVAC technician, and a passionate climber.

My decision to purchase a small floral shop in the heart of Cut Bank felt like an unexpected career choice at the time. 

In February of 2019, my husband and I were enjoying a birthday getaway in Helena— the place we met, graduated from Carroll College, and got married— when I turned to him and said: “What if we bought the Rose Petal?” 

Solo backpacking can be extremely intimidating, and this was the number one thing several of you asked for when polled about what topics you’d like to see me cover. While there are plenty of ladies out there who jumped straight into it without ever having gone before (even in a group!), that’s not for everyone— and that’s okay!

One of the most frequently asked questions I get about solo backpacking is how to keep from getting bored. It comes up a lot in online forums, and the most common answers I see from others are podcasts, audiobooks, e-books, phone games, etc. My own answer is simple: be bored.

I wrote a letter to myself from the future as an exercise in self-care. I was tempted to write all about how thin I am in the future, how I’ve magically aged backward and become super athletic. But, alas, I tried to keep it realistic and attainable. Writing it challenged me to think about what path our society could take— the path I hope we’ll choose.

Recreating in the outdoors is to Montanans as playwriting is to Shakespeare. They just go together. Montana hosts an abundance of opportunity in this regard and, no matter the mode, one should always be prepared.

Let’s set the scene: it’s late July. A perfect Montana summer day— a bluejay sky, a light breeze, a few innocuous clouds here and there. It was a day made for the river, so we went.

How can we read disastrous headlines, know terrifying statistics, hear all the doom and gloom and still fail to act? I’ve felt the discomfort of fear in my stomach when I hear the news.