Small is Beautiful: An Ode to Tiny Towns

A FEW YEARS AGO, my girlfriend and I drove into the Ruby Valley in Southwest Montana, rugged country where wind tsunamis scour the sagebrush prairie and Black Angus roam. The only tourists around are fly-fishers trying their luck on the Ruby River. Not one of the valley’s towns supports more than a few hundred people.

I spent an afternoon fishing the Ruby, but I’d mostly brought Christine because I knew of a good, clean one-story motel in Twin Bridges, where you could step out into the night and see a mess of stars. And to behold a silence absolutely total—just so long as there’s no wind.

We live in Missoula, a city of 80,000, equidistant from Glacier and Yellowstone Parks. During the pandemic, Missoula enjoyed the well-documented spike in remote workers, good-faith wanderlusters, RVs and luxury camper vans, and the turbocharged housing prices that went along with new popularity. Smaller towns nearby felt the squeeze. Darby, a throwback whistle-stop down the Bitterroot Valley—outfitted with flat-front Western façades and one of the state's greatest dive bars, the Sawmill Saloon—became home to Yellowstone’s Dutton Ranch, and then lots of selfies.

It is indeed easy to suspect that, at this point, any town worth visiting has had its mystique blown up into a million little fragments on Instagram. This is understandable, but not true. In the Ruby Valley, we found solitude, empty dirt byways and a town of 700 souls with a Led Zeppelin-themed bakery and pizza joint attached to a brewery, one with beer worth bringing back home.

These days, we’re opting for this deeper, off-off-the-beaten-path tack. This style of travel takes a creative mindset and a yen for hardscrabble outposts beyond what’s ended up on anyone's Best Of list. It also begs for an openness to disappointment. You simply might not find what you’re looking for: But for every Livingston, Montana—cowboy-chic Yellowstone gateway that got the Anthony Bourdain treatment—there’s a Sheridan, or a Boulder (not that Boulder): distant oases, languishing in timeworn, True West seclusion. Bartenders sear local ribeye steaks on chargrills, right by the liquor display. Writers still treat the land like a supporting character. Lesser-known ghost towns and haunted hot springs beckon from down the lost highway.

Read More: Wildsam's List of the Coolest Small Towns in America

These are nationwide possibilities. I once briefly lived in Gainesville, Florida. You can hop on 441, the Tom Petty Highway, cruise past farmland spiky with saw palm, and time-travel into Micanopy, an antiquarian's dream in a live oak grove (pop. 660). Or escape into High Springs (pop. 7,000), hit the farmer’s market and canoe its turquoise streams. Want to get weird? A tarot reading in Cassadaga (unincorporated, pop. < 100)—a spiritualist community sidled up to the Ocala National Forest—is essential Floridian wayfaring. Its centerpiece is a historic, Spanish Mission-style hotel employing mediums and mystics.

Strange zones out of freeway-earshot still evoke the transcendental country of Robert Johnson, Sam Shepard and Georgia O’Keeffe, the Old Weird America of music writer Greil Marcus and Dylan’s Basement Tapes. And, trust me, the above-mentioned towns are the easy ones. A sound prescription for the wandering soul: It’s time to up your game. If you want to think big, you've got to think small. No. Smaller. Unlearn how to read a map, and then teach yourself again. Even on your phone. Pay close attention to what draws the least attention: that little line wriggling up your screen (maybe zoom on that dot—that town and the empty space around it).

Mystery. Uncanny lands. Unknown waters. Strangers, turned friends. Neon signs flicker down darkened streets in towns you’ve never heard of, and passionate people, perhaps a shade off-grid, are building, painting, brewing and playing music on boot-worn bandstands. It’s this spirit and energy that fuels the lifecycle by which American small towns rise from obscurity. And it’s nice to get out there and visit when they’re just getting off the ground.

Check out some of the Wildsam team’s favorite small towns of the moment.