Outdoorsmen have been moving to Montana for as long as there’s been a Montana to move to, and John Snow, who made the jump himself in the summer of 2010, is the first to admit he wasn’t special. “I was just one of many out-of-staters resettling here, one hunter in an influx that’s gained steam ever since,” he wrote in Outdoor Life back in 2022.
Bozeman satisfied the checklist he’d drawn up for his family: a college town with strong schools, a quality airport close by, good gun laws and shooting ranges, ski terrain, and public hunting and fishing right out the back door. It satisfied plenty of other people’s lists, too. The town’s population grew 43 percent between 2010 and 2020 and kept climbing through the pandemic, and the hunting and fishing industry followed the same current…Sitka, Blackhawk, Stone Glacier, Duckworth, Simms, Mystery Ranch, Schnee’s, Kenetrek, and RO Driftboats now all call Bozeman home.
What that migration cost is real: public ground in and around Gallatin County carries more boots, more rigs, and more flat-brim bros at the trailheads than it did a decade ago, and longtime Montanans have plenty to say about it over some beers.
Sympathy, though, is not surrender, and Snow’s answer to the crowds is the one most of us eventually stumble into…pick your expectations to match your water, and go anyway. He backs out of another hunter’s spot on national forest ground and pushes 300 yards deeper, where his buddy tags a bull while the other guy is still wondering what happened; he takes a private, particular pleasure in pulling trout out of a run somebody else just fished. “People are the easiest and most predictable animal to pattern,” he writes, and he still finds solo water inside Bozeman city limits, with nothing but the sound of current over rock and an occasional trout breaking the surface.
That’s why the anger only goes so far when another freshly minted resident shows up…as long, he says, as they heed the sign hanging in one of his favorite Bozeman dives: “Welcome to Montana: Remember you’re a refugee, not a missionary.”
Thoughts?
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