Living in Montana

Montana Weather

We often get asked how cold it is in Montana. So we created this page so you can easily see it. The weather is not crazy cold like many of you would think of. Bozeman, Billings, Helena, Great Falls, and anything east of the Bob Marshall Wilderness gets COLD. It’s cold over there like nothing we or you have probably experienced. WE are actually in the mountain valley. We have a huge lake and apparently our entire valley was made from the great Missoula Flood that carried all the way to Portland Oregon.

It’s really not that cold here. It’s mild, BUT cold, just not crazy cold. The summers are amazing. The perfect temperature every day. 80’s and 90’s. The summer nights will stay light up until 11:00 PM at the end of the summer. The cloudy season starts about thanksgiving, and often we don’t see sun until the New Year. We often drive to Missoula or go skiing just to see the sun. The winters will be 20 degrees for a low and 35 degrees for a high. We get freezing fog. You’ll go to a movie, and you come out and your door locks are frozen shut from the inside and the entire parking lot has a razor thin sheet of ice on it. We ski in the fog. Yes, it takes a unique skill set to ski in the fog and look for orange markers that tell you which way is down. We measure foggy ski days by how many chairs you can see in front of you on the ski lifts. The annoying thing is that it will be crystal clear every evening about 6… 2 hours after the slopes close down. We have no humidity. Period. We get fires in August. Our seasons are more geared around bugs and events. We have fly season, bee season, mosquito season, fire season, cloud season, firewood season, snowmobile season, etc. Lots of seasons.

So what’s it like to live in Kalispell Montana? It is isolated. There’s only really one more town on the Way to Canada. You have to really want to get here and live here. Once you get used to it, it is completely different than any other type of living. It’s SO QUIET. The peace and quiet is a clarity that can’t be beat. Sometimes the wind will howl from Glacier National Park. If you’re on the East side of our valley you can feel it sometimes. The air must be 80 degrees colder. The smell is so crisp and clean you feel like you’re hanging out with a penguin on the North Pole. At any moment you can stop and hear nothing. Clarity! Peace! McDonalds WILL take 10-15 minutes. Nothing goes fast. Every gas station has a mini casino with video slot machines. Elk season for some reason is an actual accepted no-show, no-call event… We listen to the pine trees every day and night. Most of the time, the slow pace is everything you could ever want. Sometimes it makes you a little crazy. (Going for a 50-100 mile bike ride, or a drive to the hipster town of Missoula will usually cure this.) We see deer every day.

Huckleberry Days is kind of a big deal around here, even though we’ve seen the same vendors 15 times already this year. In October you get the most amazing landscape photos. The best skiing of the year is in May or June when the Going to the Sun road opens in Glacier Park. You can ski in a Tee shirt for free next to big horn sheep. Downtown Kalispell is continually bought out by someone with more money. The money for some reason keeps pouring into downtown real estate. Plumbers have to be scuba divers because all the lake houses suck their water from the lake. It’s annoying to always see some stupid news story about someone fighting the city or something about their lakefront home. Most businesses do a couple things to make a living. We’ve been lucky enough to be able to only do one thing and focus on doing it better than anyone else. Thank you to all our clients who make our living possible.