State guide

Montana Nature Guide

Montana is two landscapes joined down a single spine — the glaciated peaks, cold cirque lakes, and subalpine meadows of the Northern Rockies in the west, and the vast, wind-combed mixedgrass and shortgrass steppe of the Great Plains rolling east toward the Dakotas. Between them runs the Rocky Mountain Front, where prairie crashes straight into mountain and grizzly country meets wheat country. The year here is governed by hard cold and altitude: a long subzero winter, an explosive spring migration through Freezeout Lake and the Centennial Valley, a brief and brilliant high-country summer, and some of the darkest night skies left in the Lower 48 over USDA zones 3b to 5a.