The Crail Ranch: Before the Lifts

Before Big Sky Resort existed, before the highway was paved, before the first skiers came down Lone Mountain, the meadows at the base of the peak were ranches. The first non-Indigenous person to homestead in what is now called the Big Sky Meadow Village area was a man named Daniel Inabnit, who built his first cabin on the property around eighteen eighty seven. He grazed cattle in the mountain meadows each summer and spent the winters elsewhere.

In December of nineteen oh one, a man named Augustus Franklin Crail purchased the Inabnit homestead and began expanding it. He acquired surrounding parcels until the ranch covered about nine hundred sixty acres. The Crail family ran a mixed operation on their Gallatin Canyon land.

Gus Crail built a small water-powered sawmill and sold lumber to neighbors and to the ranches scattered through the canyon. He grew a specialized variety of wheat and raised sheep and later cattle. He and his family lived in Inabnit's original log cabin while they built a larger main house.

By nineteen thirty four, the Crails had done well enough that they closed the sawmill and focused entirely on cattle ranching. When the consortium developing Big Sky Resort assembled land in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, the Crail Ranch was among the first properties purchased. Between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty, most of the ranch buildings were removed, the meadows and hay fields were converted to a golf course, and the original small cabin and main cabin were used as bunkhouses for resort workers.

Today the Historic Crail Ranch is preserved as a small museum on the resort property, the last visible remnant of the eighty years of ranching life that preceded the ski resort.