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The Glidden Auto Tour, famous in its day, made its final run along Montana’s barely passable Hi-Line Route. In Montana Quarterly (fall 2022):
The nine-day Glidden Tour of 1913 was the first automobile-based planned road trip through Montana. Discomforts and mechanical problems limited participants to an average of only 178 miles per day.
But the Glidden Tour glitters because it was the first Montana event to see the road trip as a destination itself, rather than a mere journey. And one surprise is how wrong its vision was of how road-tripping should work.
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When touring was tough
In Big Sky Journal (summer 2022): The Mountain West in the 2020s has been characterized by increasing crowds. In 2021, Montana’s Flathead County grew by 3.5 percent and Billings was briefly ranked as the top emerging market in the entire nation. By February 2022, the median value of a single-family home in Montana’s Gallatin Valley was $896,000. In 2021, Yellowstone National Park’s 4.9 million visits represented the most ever and a 44 percent increase over 2011; Glacier’s 3.1 million visits were a 63 percent increase. In many areas, restaurants, campsites, and trails are oversubscribed.
This sudden influx has historical precedent. An early-1900s trend, often summarized by the catchphrase See America First, brought waves of tourists and transplants who defined the region’s culture and economy for decades. If we’re wondering what happens next, we could start by looking at what happened then.
See America First
In Montana Quarterly (fall 2021): Like the horse, railroad, tractor, and cellphone, the all-electric vehicle (EV) is a technology that will transform life in Montana. We are about to see how that transition will play out.
“Electric pickup trucks like the F-150 Lightning will be a game-changer,” says Kyla Maki, who works on electric vehicle and alternative fuels for the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. In May, Ford announced the 2022 release of an all-electric version of America’s most popular pickup truck, starting at about $40,000.
With up to $7,500 in federal tax credits, the truck could have cost parity with gas-powered pickups. In early reviews, Motor Trend said that it will also have improved ride and handling, going from zero to 60 in 4.4 seconds. The only question, then, will be the question hanging over the entire EV sector in a vast, sparsely-populated state.
How will you charge it?
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Montana's electric vehicle frontier
The "Named Highway Trilogy"
I wrote about the very first automobile roads, which had names instead of numbers. And I did it as a trilogy, because much great art, like "The Naked Gun," comes in trilogies.
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We meet the granddaddy of named roads, and investigate its curious recent Wyoming resurgence.
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Going very deep on named roads, this episode, like The Naked Gun 2½, is arguably the funniest of the three, and the most relevant to today’s politics.
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A Grand Unifying Theory of named roads: all roads lead to Yellowstone.
Selected previous work
A.A. Anderson and the Yellowstone Forest Reserve (WyoHistory.org, 2017)
The man who invented dude ranching (Magic magazine, 2017)
Ansel Adams in Yellowstone (Big Sky Journal, 2016, unavailable online)
Steve Mather and the founding of the National Park Service (Magic magazine, 2016)
Understanding the 1988 Yellowstone fires (Points West, 2016, unavailable online)
How to survive a Montana snowstorm (Last Best News, 2014, unavailable online)
John Steinbeck's Montana (Montana Quarterly, 2015, unavailable online)