Twenty years ago, I lived in a town named Bozeman. Sadly, it no longer exists.
In the 1990s, Bozeman was a magical place with dive bars that smelled like New Orleans in the summer and trailheads that were empty on a Sunday morning. Sometimes, I would take off to Yellowstone National Park for a long weekend in August and not even reserve a campsite. A southwestern Montana cowtown just 80 miles from Yellowstone, Bozeman had it all–uncrowded rivers, affordable homes, and $5 burritos.
Bozeman is not that place anymore. Montana is not that place anymore. I live in Missoula now, about halfway between Bozeman and another perfectly good (yet ruined) mountain town named Whitefish. In 1996, I came to Yellowstone to scrub toilets, make beds, and have one hell of a good time. I had so much fun that I stayed in Bozeman and became a bona fide Montana resident in 1998. Twenty years is a long time for awesome places (once discovered) to stay the same, and I’m sure the people who moved to Bozeman 20 years before me remember that time fondly, too.
Yet the scale of growth in places like Missoula, Whitefish, and especially Bozeman is downright cancerous. In just the past decade, the population of Missoula increased 10 percent, Whitefish 30 percent, and Bozeman increased by 43 percent. Since my wonder years two decades ago, Bozeman’s population has increased by 93 percent. No wonder I didn’t recognize that old mountain town of my roaring 20s when I went back last summer for my kids’ swim meet. There was traffic, $14 cocktails, and way more condos than cows.
On a break between the semifinals and the final, I was having a beer with another dad at the swim meet. A greying fishing guide (who isn’t) and writer (who isn’t), he knew the Bozeman of yesteryear, too. We wondered aloud what happened to Bozeman. What does it take to ruin a perfectly good mountain town? Well, it all starts with a big mouth.
Tell Everyone About It
Any press is bad press—even articles like the one you’re reading here. I figure Bozeman is a lost cause, so I get immunity.
If you’re in the mood to throw up a little in your mouth, check out this article from Travel and Leisure magazine. The author writes, “I wanted to go to Bozeman because I’d spent a decade falling in love with—and dreaming of relocating to—Big Sky Country, as it’s known. I had recently been hired to teach writing at the University of Montana in Missoula, the state’s laid-back alternative to what Missoulians see as Bozeman’s glitz. But I felt like I’d ended up with the wrong partner. Despite having nearly twice Bozeman’s population, Missoula seemed to vibrate with half the energy. Many Montanans prefer that. But I was moving from New York City, and it was Bozeman that offered the singular satisfaction of enjoying a world-class meal on the way from one barren rock face to another.”
If you move to Montana from California or New York City, keep that to yourself. And two, for the love of God, don’t write another “Oh my god, I just love your little mountain town” story for a national magazine and its website.
If you want to empty the entire contents of your stomach, pull up any “Best Mountain Town List”. If Bozeman isn’t listed as number one, you can bet it’s in the top 10. The only people who want this kind of press are local real estate agents and magazine editors. Great towns are a lot like Fight Club. The first rule of a great mountain town is that you don’t talk about how great it is. Just say the weather sucks. There are no jobs. You can’t drink the water. Everyone is ugly. No one looks good in spandex…the list goes on.
It doesn’t help that season five of Kevin Costner’s Western soap opera, Yellowstone, drew 10 million viewers. The show doesn’t take place near Yellowstone or Bozeman. I hear they actually film it in North Dakota, which, I might add, is much lovelier than Montana.
Build a Bigger Airport
Swim meets are known for excessive amounts of downtime, and I had some time to kill. I met my friend, longtime Bozeman resident (no, he wasn’t born there), and hunting celebrity Randy Newberg at his office. He gave me the address by the football stadium, and as I drove in circles through parking lots, my vision of Bozeman’s alfalfa fields gave way to apartment complexes and football fields of asphalt.
“Randy, what happened to this place?” I asked. Without skipping a beat, he attributed the growth to the airport adding flights to places like New York, Austin, and San Francisco. He’s absolutely right, too. For perspective, keep these numbers in mind. In 1997, the airport surpassed 200,000 “enplanements” for the first time. Enplanements are the number of passengers to board a plane; I had to look that one up. Around 2000, Bozeman had summer flights to Minneapolis, Seattle, Salt Lake City, and 760 parking spaces.
In 2012, the airport started adding flights. United offered seasonal once-weekly non-stop service to New York/Newark. The service expanded in 2014. Portland and Oakland got flights, and parking lot capacity doubled in 2013. The same year, Bozeman becomes Montana’s busiest airport. In 2014, enplanements surpass 475,000. Are you seeing a trend here?
Before 2019 and COVID, airlines were flying non-stop to Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Philly, San Francisco, Atlanta, and more. Enplanements topped 775,000 in 2019 and 900,000 in 2021. From February 2021 to February 2022, the airport saw two million passengers. That’s a whole lot of people loving one place to death. And visitors didn’t forget about Bozangeles once COVID came to town.
Price Out the Locals
COVID-19 brought plenty of misery. Presumably, those who felt it the worst lived in densely populated dens of humanity like New York City and Seattle. I don’t blame people for leaving those places, especially when you couldn’t leave your apartment. The problem is everyone came to Montana at once.
Being cooped up with your spouse or kids in some city where you were expected to work from home, order takeout, and wait for death is not as appealing as hiking with your new Labradoodle in the wilds of Montana. If you could cash out and move to one of Outside magazine’s best outdoor towns, then that’s what you did. And that’s a problem for the people who already found their refuge from humanity.
In 1998, I was in college and wanted to buy a two-bedroom, one-bath house two blocks off Bozeman’s Main Street. The list price was $89,000. I asked my parents for help with the downpayment, and they scoffed at the price tag. I moved away a few years later. With my swim meet downtime, I went looking for that little house.
Miraculously, it was still there. In contrast, the old apartment I rented in a three-plex just four doors down was a massive multi-plex complete with a corrugated steel exterior and the obligatory bench made out of old K2 skis in the front yard. Zillow estimates my little dream house is now worth around $560,000. That’s an increase of nearly 500 percent in 24 years.
Bozeman’s salaries haven’t kept pace. For would-be Bozeman transplants selling their houses in Seattle or California, Bozeman prices are a steal. Better yet, you can move to Bozeman, keep your corporate job with its big-city paycheck, and buy your own starter mansion somewhere in the foothills of a nice pasture that use to be elk habitat. It’s Yellowstone’s version of the American dream.
Bozeman simply doesn’t have jobs that reflect its cost of living. Housing alone is 56 percent higher than the national average. The average annual salary is $67,000. No cop, school teacher, liftie, waitress, hair stylist, mechanic, or nurse could ever own a home there unless they bought it 20 years ago.
Live There Before It’s Cool
And finally, I think I’ve come to the root of my problem, the nail in my Bozeman coffin. I miss Bozeman like I miss my 20s—neither of which I’ll ever see again. There’s nostalgia and the memory of having little to no responsibilities. I lived in Bozeman just as the internet was getting legs. The town was still a secret. I was living the dream, working three jobs, paying $425/month for a one-bedroom apartment in a house on Lamme. I skied at Moonlight Basin for $35. God, I sound like an old fart. Even so, I miss what Bozeman was before it became a victim of its own awesomeness.
Everything changes, but Bozeman’s rate of change in the past three years has been like a 13-year-old boy going through puberty. It’s awkward and tough to watch. I have good friends who are already planning to bail on Bozeman once their kids are out of school. They’re tired of the permanent tourists, the Audis, and all the fake cowboys who don’t have any shit on their boots. Those friends chose a sleepy Montana town over an hour away. They’re not keen on me mentioning where, and I’m sure as hell not going to write about it.
