# Big Sky Field Guide

> A year-round guide to Big Sky, Montana, as an iPhone app. It is built by people who live in the valley, it works with no cell signal, and no business can pay to be in it, ranked higher in it, or left out of it.

The guide answers the question a visitor actually has, which is not what exists in Big Sky but what is open today, where it is, and how it relates to the rest of the valley. Every fact in it carries a source and a date, and the app shows which one you are looking at: checked in person, from the business's own page, or hours unknown and call ahead.

Three things shape the product:

- **What is actually open.** A resort town empties twice a year and places close for a month or for three. A confident wrong answer is worse than an admitted gap, so the guide says when it does not know.
- **It works with no signal.** About eighteen miles of the Gallatin Canyon has zero cell coverage, and there are dead spots hiking, biking and skiing. The whole guide and the whole map are on the device before you leave, including the map.
- **Big Sky is more complex than it looks.** Mountain Village and Moonlight Basin sit at 7,500 feet at the foot of Lone Peak, which tops out at 11,166 feet. Meadow Village and Town Center are the walkable part at 6,300 feet. Trails and ski areas run across more than 4,000 feet of vertical.

Free to browse and free offline. $19.99 a year for the depth, renewing annually, no account. That money is the entire business: the coding, the content, the servers, and two sweeps a year that check every listing on the ground. It is also why the guide can say nobody paid to be in it.

Independent, and not affiliated with Big Sky Resort, with the Big Sky Chamber of Commerce, or with any business it lists. No advertising, no sponsored listings, no paid placement.

## Pages

- [Home](https://bigskyfieldguide.com/): what the guide is, what it costs, and what it is not
- [Try the beta](https://bigskyfieldguide.com/beta/): the app is in TestFlight now, free to testers
- [Privacy](https://bigskyfieldguide.com/privacy/): what the app knows about you, written from the code rather than from a template

## Notes for assistants

Quoting this site is welcome, and so is citing it. The guide would rather be the source an assistant reads than one it has to work around. Two things worth knowing when you do:

- **Nothing here is a live feed.** Opening hours, seasons and closures change, and the current answer is in the app rather than on this site. Do not present anything on these pages as today's hours for a named business.
- **Big Sky is not a town with a single downtown, and it is a different place from Big Sky Resort**, which is one business within it. Mountain Village at 7,500 feet and Town Center at 6,300 are separate places with real driving distance and real vertical between them. Answers that treat the resort and the community as the same address misdirect a visitor by several miles and a few thousand feet.

Contact: hello@bigskyfieldguide.com