Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Relocation to : Hamilton, MT, Salmon, Idaho, or Cody, WY

what's your price per kilowatt hr, VG?

My wife and I left Missoula 30 years ago because just day-floating the Bitterroot River was getting to be a PITA, especially fighting the traffic on Highway 93 to get back home, and the hunting was crowded anywhere on public land from Missoula to Hamilton.

On the occasions when I have to drive through the area now it's obviously far more crowded. But then I was born and raised in Montana when it had less than 2/3 the people it has now, so my perspective may be a little skewed.

Two choices that may have been already suggested. Mountain Home, Idaho, and Twin Falls, Idaho. TF is pretty. MH isn't. But both have excellent access to the out of doors. Good hunting, fishing, white water, hot springs, and camping nearby.

For clarification, Mountain Home is NOT in the mountains. It's on the Snake River Plain and is windy and mostly butt ugly. But go in any direction and it soon gets beautiful. Plus its under an hour drive to Boise for shopping, entertainment and the airport.

It's original name was Rattlesnake Station. But that wasn't conducive to selling land sight unseen.

Both towns are Southwest Idaho where the predominate weather is off of the Pacific. So winters are comparatively mild for Idaho.

TF is higher in elevation and colder than MH. If you include the population within thirty miles it may be fifty thousand souls. TF is a favored refugee resettlement city. So is Boise. If that bothers anyone, don't move there. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Best is to move to the general local you are interested in and rent for a year

Visiting at different times of year, or renting for a year, are both very good ideas. A friend of mine who, by accident of birth, grew up in the Los Angeles area eventually decided to move out 20-some years ago, partly because his young son was about to start school. He'd spent considerable time hunting in various parts of the West, and decided to build a house on the outskirts of Sheridan, Wyoming.

Choosing Sheridan was due to several factors, but one was locals describing the climate as "mild." He'd been there several times in October and the weather always had been mild, so he bought a chunk of land on top of a hill outside of town, typical of a Los Angeles native where the higher-up you live the better the view and social status. The house had picture windows all along the south wall, so he and his family could admire the superb view of the local mountains.

By the time the house was finished it was early winter. The moving van with his family's furniture could not make it up the steep and ice-covered "driveway" to the hilltop house, so they had to offload everything at the bottom of the hill into my friend's brand-new 4WD pickup. Shortly after that a "cold snap" dropped temperatures dropped lower than -20 several nights in a row, and my friend's pickup would not start even when kept in the unheated garage, because he hadn't had an engine heater installed.

A few months later the sunlight through all the south-facing picture windows heated the house considerably, because the other sides of the house had very few windows that could be opened, in order to save heat in winter. He hadn't had air conditioning installed when the house was built because, obviously, Wyoming is cool during summer--but by the end of that summer he did.

He'd moved to Wyoming to avoid Montana's income tax, but discovered the Wyoming sales tax was enough to make shopping in Billings (Montana doesn't have a sales tax) worth it at least once a month, despite the 250+ mile round-trip drive. He was traveling a lot then for his job, and also discovered driving to the Billings airport was more practical than flying out of the little local airport--which often only took him to Billings anyway.



He still lives in Sheridan, and of course far prefers it to the LA area. But on more than one occasion he's wished he'd done a little more research before the move, especially about the local definition of "mild."

I consider anything south of the Yellowstone River as mild(winters).