Living the Montana Dream: Tom Breathnach escapes to US cabin heaven

Of all his US travels, a winter trip to the stunning Montana mountain wilderness has been the best yet, says Tom Breathnach

'Montana delivers the trip of a lifetime'

I'd just awoken to a dream, to an ethereal wilderness, to almost being a real life tile square on a #getawaygoals Instagram feed. What started as a simple search for an off-grid escape in the US had led me to the far-flung state of Montana and its spectacularly rugged region of Glacier Country. And as I was discovering, my base of Northwest Montana Retreat, a remote off-grid cabin six miles up a pine-shrouded mountainside from the town of Troy, was just about as soothingly unplugged as I could get.

For two days I’d been switching off from the daily hustle and switching on to nature, in the most idyllic possible sense. I’d no electricity, running water nor Wi-Fi but was enveloped in the lap of wilderness luxury amid the screensaver-like backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. Beautifully appointed with a rustic TLC, my stove-fuelled cabin offered a cloud-like comfort, toasty warmth and in an age where social media drives travel choices like never before, it was supremely aesthetic.

“I guess Instagram even has an impact on our architecture and design choices nowadays,” cabin owner and Troy native, Hy Boltz, told me.

“When I designed this cabin, I wanted to frame those incredible lake views, so that when you lie down on the bed, you almost feel like you’re sitting in an Instagram post.”

And in the battle of Insta vs Reality, the retreat was the winning combo of style and substance; over my short stint here, I’d felt like I’d been to an enriching wilderness rehab. I’d invested my time reading, tuning to the sounds of a largely dormant forest and watching cloud formations wagon wheel into the valley became must-watch viewing. Two days was never so time rich.

Northwest Montana retreat cabin

The cabin retreat in my rear view mirror, it was time to continue my Montanan road-trip onwards and upwards. It may be the fourth largest state in the US — and bigger than Germany — but, as home to just over 1m people, Montana is blissfully low on development and cathartically high on drama. Amid the stunning mountains, river and forest scapes, prompts of cultural colour popped the route; from “Women for Trump” signs to a “Relist The Wolves” billboard referencing the Biden administration’s failure to mark the animals as a protected species in Montana. There’s a languid pace to life here that grabs, at times unexpectedly. While stuck behind a pick-up truck at a drive-thru coffee shop in Troy, a bumper sticker of an assault rifle captioned “f**k around and find out” prompts me to be a bit more patient waiting for my Americano. What’s the rush, I guess?

To dovetail with my visit at New Year’s Eve, I was off to Whitefish, a one-time logging town turned skiing resort which today makes for a quirky, outdoorsy escape in Montana’s craggy wilds. With labyrinthine trails on offer, I decided to find my bearings with a spot of mountain biking and after renting a set of fat-tyre wheels in downtown Whitefish, I geared off for an ascent up the nearby Lion Mountain. From there, views spanned out over Skyles Lake and the seemingly infinite mountains and to the north was where my day — and my year — would reach its crescendo: Whitefish’s Big Mountain.

The landscape during Tom's Montana road trip

Come evening, I headed to the chalet dotted Whitefish Village for its annual torchlit parade where hundreds of snugly suited visitors had gathered to watch a troop of skiers career downhill waving neon lights to an orchestrated fireworks display. This took a New Year’s Eve bash to new heights.

The next morning, I kicked off 2023 with a visit to one of Montana’s top attractions, Glacier National Park. This remote wilderness nicknamed “The Crown of the Continent” blankets 1m acres of pristine lakes, forests, meadows and mountains and makes an alluring alternative to the state’s more tourist-trundled Yellowstone. Glacier still draws up to 3m visitors a year but, at 9am on New Year’s Day, it would appear I’m the first man in.

There’s an eerie majesty to driving alone through Glacier’s snow-ploughed roadways, even if I was feeling like an extra in some National Park Armageddon.

The park’s blockbuster Going to the Sun Road had been barricaded off for winter maintenance so I explored around the deserted Apgar Village where I trudged along the shores of frozen Lake McDonald as shards of ice lay collapsed across the surface like frosted Legoblocks.

Before a few hikers finally emerged around noon, a lone bald eagle high in the cedars had been my only company for the escapade.

And while I imagined what a hiking heaven this wonder must be in summer, experiencing Glacier National Park all to myself was quite the trade-off.

Glacier National Park

From Glacier National Park, my weeklong road-trip led me south where Montana’s landscape was beginning to yield to farmland, prairies and lonesome crossroad communities.

I was now entering The Flathead Indian Reservation, one of the largest Native American strongholds in the Rocky Mountain region where, in a patchwork of mixed communities, about ten thousand members of the Salish and Kootenai tribes live alongside double that figure of non-Tribal Montanans.

My final base was the genesis for my entire trip, Calowahcan Cabin, a jaw-droppingly stunning property overlooking the moody Mission Mountains which form part of a protected Tribal wilderness of the same name. Owned by northwest Montana natives Stephanie Morton and her husband, Brian, Calowahcan is one of the most trending Airbnb’s in the Northern Rockies and after eyeing it back in September, I was lucky to snap up a couple of nights’ stay in its booking calendar.

“Brian is pretty handy,” Stephanie tells me, “so he pretty much designed and built the whole cabin himself.”

Her Montana modestly belies the wow-factor of the structure which seems straight from a Netflix series on dream tiny homes. Along with a Pinterest-perfect bedroom which peeps out upon the snow-capped peaks and a luxury bathroom complete with oversized tub, a highlight is the floor-to-ceiling windowed kitchen and lounge, which, shrouded in pot-plant greenery, makes the perfect vantage to soak in those mountain views.

“I guess it’s a balancing act of wanting our guests to have an awesome time here but also trying to keep this area of Montana a bit of a secret,” Stephanie adds.

“My husband and I are both locals but we still feel so lucky to live here in the Flathead region with these incredible mountains literally at our doorstep. The area is actually protected and you need a permit to recreate here so it still receives very few visitors. We love going hiking here in the summer… it’s just so unspoiled that it can be tricky to find the same trail twice.”

Not only are the mountains spectacular but they are also home to one of America’s primary conservation zones for grizzly bears. So rich is this habitat in bears, in fact, that in summer it’s forbidden to enter the lands as the grizzlies descend on the food-rich lowlands to gorge. While the bears are reassuringly hibernating at this time of year, there’s another species of megafauna who call the Flathead Reservation home, the iconic American bison. The Bison Range is a protected swathe of prairies just south of my cabin and at the visitor centre, local Roxie Avecedo is on hand to tell me all about the range’s history.

“It all really started when a tribe member named Atatice brought seven bison calves back from Canada in the late 1800s to reintroduce the animals to the area after they had been wiped out here,” she explains.

“From those first calves, today we’ve about 370 buffalo roaming along the range along with pronghorn antelope, deer, coyotes and even black bears.”

Calowahcan Cabin and Mission Mountains 

The bison are elusive creatures in the winter as harsh prairie winds draw them to the refuge of the ponderosa pines in the hill but I soon spot a herd of above 25 which made for pretty epic observing.

Driving back to Calowahcan Cabin that evening, the skies began to clear and the honey-hued golden hour soon surrendered to Montana’s famous night skies. They don’t call it Big Sky Country here for nothin’. Lying down on the sofa that evening, lights out, I gazed out as I soon became shrouded beneath a sea of stars. As the Big Dipper illuminated over a wilderness of slumbering bears, I stayed up, glued to the spectacle for as long as my eyes could linger. This had been my most memorable US adventure and when Montana delivers the trip of a lifetime, you want to hang on to the night.

GETTING THERE

• Info: I flew Aer Lingus from Dublin to Seattle, then caught a connector flight to Spokane, Washington with their partner Alaska Airlines (aerlingus.com; €747 return).
• Montana lies 80 miles east of Washington via the panhandle of Idaho. My choice was based on affordable car rental fees at time of travelling but check out other airports in Montana itself including Missoula and Kalispell. Hertz rental was €650 for a week but I booked a 4WD, typically only necessary for aspects of remote, winter driving. Both cabins, Northwest Montana Retreat (from €120) and Calowahcan Cabin (from €220) were booked via Airbnb. My hotel in Whitefish, a newly opened ski-lodge named Après, is available from €125 per night. For more on this spectacular region of Montana, see glaciermt.com