Plenty of great reasons to visit Missoula
With hiking, fishing and biking, there are plenty of reasons to visit this “really small big city” in Montana
My boyfriend works for a software company based in Missoula, in northwestern Montana. I tag along on his work trips as often as possible and on every trip its relative dearth of tourists perplexes me. With a population of about 70,000, Missoula is Montana’s second-largest city. It is an easy day’s drive from both Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. A river flows through the center of downtown and is lined with a robust system of trails. Downtown is stuffed with historic, crenelated brick buildings. Restaurants serve seasonal menus that highlight local produce. There’s even Lewis and Clark history; members of the 1804-1806 expedition were the first Europeans to visit the area. (The Salish had already been wintering in the Bitterroot Valley for hundreds of years.)
“Missoula is a really, really small big city,” said Todd Frank, who moved here in 1981 when it was still a mill town and today owns the gear shop Trail Head. “There’s great dining, culture and social consciousness and anything you want to do outdoors — hiking, mountain biking, fishing, whitewater (rafting), backcountry skiing — is within an hour or two, and it is world-class. It’s heaven.”
Since I don’t live in Missoula, I’ll just visit as often as possible,
waiting for the trip when I discover the rest of the world has found my secret mountain getaway.
Go Local faves
Every spring, the International Wildlife Film Festival, which was founded in Missoula in 1977 and today is the longest-running wildlife film festival in the world, takes over the historical Roxy Theater. The rest of the year, the Roxy shows foreign, independent and classic films to audiences who are there as much to see movies like “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” as they are to eat hot, buttery popcorn served in giant aluminum bowls. Catch concerts at the Wilma, a theater built in downtown in 1921 in the elaborately ornamented Sullivanesque style and renovated in 2015, or the Kettlehouse Amphitheater, an outdoor venue adjacent to the Kettlehouse craft brewery and on the banks of the Blackfoot River.
University of Montana forestry students cut the first switchbacks for a trail up Mount Sentinel at the eastern side of the school’s campus in the early 1900s. In 1909, students gave Sentinel hikers an easier destination than the peak’s 5,158-foot summit: a giant “M” only 620 feet and three-quarters of a mile from the valley floor. Originally made from whitewashed rocks, today the M — 120 feet long and 100 feet wide — is concrete. Hiking the 13 switchbacks to it is a workout, but if you want more expansive views of the five valleys surrounding Missoula, continue another mile and 1,300 vertical feet to Mount Sentinel’s summit. You can also find 2 miles of flat hiking trails in the Rattlesnake Greenway, an urban oasis home to about 100 species of birds.
Guidebook musts
The West is a mecca for fly-fishermen. “It’s the place you want to make a pilgrimage to,” said Chris Dombrowski, who has guided fly-fishermen in Montana for 21 seasons. “Within the West, I don’t think you can beat Missoula.” Especially if you go with a guide. “Within an hour’s drive we have something like 52 different floats on four separate rivers, and if you peel out to 70 miles, that number doubles,” said Dombrowski, who, when not guiding, writes poetry and nonfiction. For close-to-town fishing, guides bring clients to the Kona Bridge Fishing Access Site, where they launch a drift boat into the Clark Fork River, and there is also wade fishing.
Walking into the ready room at the Missoula Smokejumper Visitor Center — home to 50 of about 400 highly trained firefighters across the country who parachute from low-flying planes to fight wildland fires in rugged and remote areas — feels like you’re invading the smoke jumpers’ privacy. The ready room is a stop on a free, hour-long tour of the center, which is the oldest of the nine smokejumper bases in the country. While it humanizes these seeming superheroes — on the tour you learn that the physical requirements of the job include walking 3 miles in under 90 minutes while carrying 110 pounds — other stops are more surprising. The biggest room is dedicated to repacking parachutes and there is a sewing room. (Smoke jumpers make and maintain their jumpsuits, harnesses and gear bags.)
Eat Local faves
Because Charlie Baumgartner wouldn’t talk to a reporter, I’m not sure how the tiny cafe in the back of the bar he’s owned since 1980, Charlie B’s, came to be called the Dinosaur Cafe and serve Cajun and Creole food. I had the Dinosaur’s “gumbolaya” — a combo of jambalaya and gumbo — three times in four days. I also came to see why Charlie B’s — with blackand-white portraits of grizzled regulars covering its walls and actual grizzled regulars sitting in high-backed pleather bar stools chatting, arguing and reading the Missoulan daily newspaper, shooting pool and watching one of several flat-screen TVS — was named “Best Bar in Montana” by the Daily Meal. Think “Cheers,” but with ranchers, loggers, former miners and railroad workers, cowboys and writers.
Don’t worry if you show up toward the end of the weekend brunch at Scotty’s Table and the bistro is out of Shakshuka (poached eggs in a sauce of caramelized onions, roasted peppers, tomatoes, cumin, paprika and chili flakes, topped with local feta and cilantro) and cerdo con mole (confit pork shoulder served with a seared polenta cake, mole and two over-easy eggs). Order a burger and an espresso, settle into one of the tables on the shaded patio and listen to the music playing at the Carousel for Missoula in adjacent Caras Park; it’s from the largest band organ in continuous use in the United States.
Guidebook musts
You could spend your entire trip visiting Missoula’s many craft breweries, or hit the Dram Shop, which has dozens of beers on tap and more than 100 in bottles or cans. Also on tap are local and regional ciders and kombuchas, as well as red, white and rosé wine. While it’s got beer covered, the Dram Shop is B.Y.O.F. (bring your own food). Order a burger to go from Wally & Buck, which recently opened a storefront nearby after several years as one of Missoula’s most popular food trucks. One of Missoula’s best fine-dining restaurants — Pearl Cafe, founded by Pearl Cash, who grew up in the Bitterroot Valley on a subsistence farm where her mom made everything from scratch — is adjacent to the Dram Shop. Cash created a limited menu of small bites and favorites from her restaurant’s French-inspired menu that can be delivered to the bar.
I’ve made trips to Missoula just to hang out at Break Espresso, a cavernous cafe with worn oak floors, fast Wi-fi, classic pastries and layer bars, substantial wood tables and chairs, and bankers’ lamps. The pie selection includes about a dozen flavors, all of which are baked in the kitchen in the rear of the cafe and several of which are available by the slice.
Stay Local fave
Even if you’re not into flyfishing, you’ll appreciate the Dry Fly Apartments for its downtown location, proximity to the Clark Fork River and riverfront trails and parks, and the 120-year-old exposed interior brick walls. If you are an angler, staying here is a no-brainer: The five two-bedroom apartments are above the Grizzly Hackle Fly Shop, which has been voted Missoula’s best fly shop numerous times and is so confident in its guides that it offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Public spaces in the apartment building feature oil paintings of fish by Derek Deyoung, who is the artist behind Montana’s “wild trout” license plates.
Guidebook must
Although the developers of the newly opened, 175-suite Marriott Residence Inn Missoula Downtown weren’t able to restore and remodel the National Historic Landmark Missoula Mercantile Building, they built new on the site where it formerly stood. They honored the past with prints of historic photos sourced from the University of Montana’s Mansfield Library and new blackand-white photos of artifacts retrieved from the merc before it was demolished. Across from the lobby elevators, a diamondshaped sculpture, “Prose and Connotations” by Jack Boyd, pays homage to Montana writers.
Explore Local fave
Garden City Brewery opened in the Northside, one of Missoula’s oldest neighborhoods, in 1895 and kept locals happy until it closed in 1965. The neighborhood was without a brewery until 2009, when Kettlehouse Brewing Co. opened a production facility and tasting room here. Now breweries, and even a cidery, are renovating the area’s abandoned warehouses and factories faster than you can say “Propinquity Reconciliatory Robust Porter” — one of the beers brewed by community activismminded Imagine Nation Brewing Co. (and named to honor those who brought about the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland). Draught Works, voted Missoula’s “Best Brewery” and “Best Brew” two years running in the Missoulan’s Best of Missoula survey, transformed a Northside warehouse with open, barrelvaulted ceilings into its production facility and tasting room.
Guidebook must
The Clark Fork River cuts right through the center of Missoula, and the section between Ben Hughes Park and the Orange Street Bridge is the site of the city’s biggest traffic jams. Every day between June and September, hundreds of people float this part of the Clark Fork. The watercraft of choice? Everything from normal tire tubes to air mattresses made to look like a giant slice of pizza and inner tubes shaped like unicorns. Anything goes, so long as you’ve got enough control to paddle clear of any wading flyfisherman working a riffle along the riverbank and of the kayakers and surfers playing in Brennan’s Wave. This man-made standing whitewater feature named in honor of a local professional kayaker who died while paddling a river in Chile is just past the Higgins Avenue Bridge. Both sides of the river have paved pathways, collectively called the Riverfront Trails, that you can use to walk back to where you started; this trail system is worth exploring on its own, too.