place to live with good backpacking? (Missoula: hotel, house, buy)

[huskerfreak]

hello all. I am thinking of moving to western montana in a year or two now and I'm looking for a good town to live in. basically it needs to have really great backpacking(my favorite), decent hunting and fishing, and good snowmobiling. I'd like to live a few miles outside of town and not have to pay a whole ton for housing (200,000 or less for 5 or more acres with a smaller house). also I like medium sized towns (5-10 thousand people) but It's fine if I live in a small town as long as the people are good, conservative, christian folks. thanks for your time everyone

[bigtrees]

200k for five acres and house is hard to do in most of Western Montana.

However, you could buy a seasonal cabin and snowmobile to town in the wintertime - you'd get plenty of time on the sled!

[huskerfreak]

Originally Posted by wesley81

From your back posts it looks as if you've been looking around for that small town mountain paradise for a while.

Well, they're pretty hard to come by, especially with acreage. Mountain areas in the intermountain west tend to be mostly public land, and/or wilderness preserved. That puts the existing private land in small order, and as such, quite expensive. Everyone wants to own their own fantasy version of paradise...

That isn't to say that there won't be places you could find on the cheap that are small towns near the mountains, but they tend to come with their own problems, mostly weather, isolation, and job prospects.

And to tell the truth, these three are usually quite tough for most people to overcome.

Good luck, however.

yea, i've been looking everywhere basically. wyoming-too expensive, colorado-expensive and one big mountain hotel.

anyways, weather, isolation, I have no problem with.
I've winter camped in 30 below, and spent a month in northern ontario living about 60miles from the nearest town.

i'm not like most people who read "call of the wild" and decided one day that they wanted to live in the mountains.

job prospects is a little harder. I'd prefer a job in outdoor recreation and i make a lot of my money now writing and singing(i don't want to go into singing really, lol).

[bigtrees]

Originally Posted by huskerfreak

anyways, weather, isolation, I have no problem with.
I've winter camped in 30 below, and spent a month in northern ontario living about 60miles from the nearest town.

It's not the cold in western Montana that's the problem....it's the endless gray, the weeks on end without sunshine, and the rain that doesn't go away in the spring.

[lorelei2873]

Originally Posted by bigtrees

It's not the cold in western Montana that's the problem....it's the endless gray, the weeks on end without sunshine, and the rain that doesn't go away in the spring.

I live in western Montana and don't find this to be the case. I would say this is true in Missoula and NW Montana but not necessarily SW Montana. We don't get much rain and the sun shines a lot, even in January. November is pretty gray but other than that it's fine.