What started as a normal day, circa 1980-something in Michigan, would become a turning point for nearly everything that followed in Brad Robinson’s life.

That morning, Brad had learned that he had numeric dyslexia. As a student pursuing a science degree at Michigan State University, the diagnosis felt significant. He wondered whether the path he had chosen was still possible.

A few hours later, Brad was working a shift at the ski shop where he had been employed throughout college. A woman came in looking for skis before heading home to Missoula. On the drive back to Montana, she planned to cross-country ski through Yellowstone National Park.

Brad was stunned. “Wait,” he remembers thinking. “You can do that?”

He walked around the corner, opened a phone book, and began looking for Montana. “The whole bloody state is 406,” he says, smiling at the memory.

Brad dialed the University of Montana and reached the admissions office, which answered the phone as “The Lodge.”

“The Lodge,” he thought. “How cool is that?” He was sold.

By the end of the day, Brad had gone from questioning whether he could continue his education to imagining an entirely different life nearly 1,800 miles away.

That day set the tone for much of what followed. Brad does not try to map out every turn in advance. He follows curiosity, says yes to what feels right, and trusts that the path will reveal itself along the way.

“I’ve said before that I am ‘in it’ for the journey, not the destination,” he says simply

Brad’s professional life has followed that same pattern: stay open, enjoy the process, and see where the next door leads.

After moving to Missoula, he found a job at another ski shop. On his first day, a coworker invited him to a local brewery after work. Brad had been homebrewing with his friend Neal back in Michigan, but visiting a working brewery made the idea of starting one themselves suddenly feel possible.

Still buzzing from seeing the concept in action, around two o’clock that morning, Brad called Neal and told him he needed to move to Montana.

Neal arrived around six weeks later and found a job at the same ski shop. The two friends worked together, lived together, and began imagining what their own brewery might look like. They eventually brought in a third partner, Bjorn, who wrote the first version of their business plan for a college class project.

As Brad tells it, people must have gotten caught up in their enthusiasm, because before they knew it, they had raised money from investors across the state and secured a substantial small business loan. They quit their retail jobs just before Christmas and were soon renovating a building, ordering fermenters, and writing large checks for equipment.

Their idea became Big Sky Brewing Company. Although Brad is no longer affiliated with the brewery, it is still operating today, more than 30 years later, carrying forward a story that began with plenty of trial and error.

Like any worthwhile journey, mistakes, surprises, and a few unexpected twists are bound to happen along the way. One such moment came when a power outage led to the accidental origin story of one of the brewery’s best-known beers.

When the power cut off, a batch of Moose Drool, Big Sky’s signature American brown ale, did not turn out as planned. Rather than throw it away, Brad wondered whether they could transform
it into an imperial stout. That experiment became Ivan the Terrible, a beer that developed a following and reputation of its own.

Brad still laughs when he sees it promoted all these years later. “It’s curiosity,” he says. “It’s being willing to fail.”

Brad also became interested in another part of brewery life: the community of people and organizations that gathered there. Nonprofit groups regularly came to the taproom for letter-stuffing parties, and as Brad learned more, he found himself drawn to the mission-driven work.

After ten years at Big Sky, he left the brewery and followed his curiosity again into the nonprofit sector. He first worked at the Montana Natural History Center before an opportunity with the Montana Nonprofit Association brought him to Helena. From there, his path eventually led to a role with the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts.

“I’ve had four or five really fun chapters,” Brad says. “It’s all woven together. Because that’s what life is.”

Today, Brad’s websites also include Blogtana, NatureMT, Find Yourself In Nature, Montana Nature Network, and PureHelena. Each remains a work in progress, some more so than others, but together they form an interconnected collection of public resources that Brad believes work best alongside one another.

His nature-focused sites offer trail information and image libraries designed to help people identify the wildflowers, birds, butterflies, and other species they might encounter. More broadly, each website is rooted in Brad’s belief that people only protect what they love, and only love what they understand.

He describes them as “love letters to Helena.”

“We only love the things that we spend time with and learn to understand,” he says. “We have something that people travel here to experience. We need to cherish and protect it.”

That appreciation also shapes the way Brad thinks about travel.

When his children were younger, they would occasionally wake before sunrise, drive to Yellowstone, spend the day meandering through the park, eat wood-fired pizza in Gardiner, and still make it home to sleep in their own beds that night.

Brad wanted them to understand what it meant to live within reach of a place that other families spend years planning and thousands of dollars to visit.

To Brad, the goal of an experience like that is not to return home restless, wishing he were still somewhere else. It is to be fully present while there, then come home with a renewed appreciation for the beauty that also exists right outside his door in Helena.

“We don’t pine for what we just did,” he says. “We enjoy that we did it, and then we realize there is still a lot of beauty here. Because otherwise, you’re just living to not be where you are.”