Driving through the canyon, the craggy peaks of the hills are covered in a dense layer of conifer trees, broken up by small grassy meadows. The hills get smaller as I make my way through the valley, leaving behind the mountains for the grassy plateaus of Montana.
The Gallatin River rushes past me in sloppy white peaks, its banks overflowing with the spring melt. This time of year, the snow this region is so famous for is gone. It is the time of fly fishers and river rafters, and I spot many of both on my drive.
I am making my way from Big Sky to Bozeman, Montana, checking out several cannabis dispensaries along the way. Recreational cannabis has been legal in the Big Sky State for just over four years, and it’s my first visit to the state. I started my journey on a sunny Friday afternoon, with four dispensaries loaded up in my GPS.
The Montana Cannabis Market
Montana legalized medical marijuana back in 2004 and recreational weed in 2020. Adults over 21 can purchase up to an ounce of cannabis flower, 8 grams of concentrate, or 800 mg of infused products/edibles. Home grow is allowed, although it’s more of a joke allowance: up to two plants per household – generous.
Montana has a high weed tax rate, slapping a 20% tax on recreational products and 4% on medical. As of May 2025, the state had reported over $1 billion in cannabis sales.
One of the biggest differentiators in the Montana market is the residency requirement, which states that all owners and controlling parties in a dispensary must reside in Montana for at least one year, and the “day-to-day” operators must live in the state full time. This is a far cry from a state like New Jersey, where MSOs have quickly taken root in the market.
Visiting Four Dispensaries in Montana
Honey Sour, Big Sky
Purchased: 1 g Groove Solventless Live Rosin
Honey Sour is a dispensary with five locations in Montana. It was my first stop on my tour, being the closest to where I was staying. It was dead at noon on a Friday in May, decidedly the quiet season for this resort town. I chatted with the budtender as I took cash out – most dispensaries here don’t accept credit cards.
Honey Sour, like many local dispensaries, grows its own flower. There’s a heavy focus on indicas and indica hybrids, and Honey Sour’s menu was decidedly devoid of sativa strains. The budtender told me that sativa and their hybrids just take too much longer to grow to make the investment worth it. He also told me that wintertime is their busiest season. Tourists usually opt for disposable vape cartridges while the locals adore flower and prerolls, a sentiment I heard echoed across my other dispensary visits.
I picked up some live rosin batter from Groove Solventless Concentrates. While I’m a flower lover, I enjoy solventless concentrates for their purity and potency, and the smoothness they add to any high experience. I packed a small scoop of the batter in my evening bong to share with company, and we were all flying high.
Montana Kush, Gallatin Gateway
Purchased: an eighth of Pennywise
Montana Kush came highly recommended to me by industry colleagues, and the budtender at Honey Sour told me the Gallatin Gateway location was by far the best. The dispensary is housed inside a show home for a log cabin home building company, and it is simply gorgeous. The two-story log cabin home is more of a log cabin mansion, with giant timber beams and large windows that perfectly frame the Madison Mountain Range I had just driven out of.
Here I found a massive display of weed strains, one half of the counter dedicated to sativas and the other to indicas. The flower, grown in Gallatin by Montana Kush, was displayed deli style – always a delight to see. There were several dozen options, but I immediately narrowed in on two type II strains. After smelling both of them, I grabbed an eighth of Pennywise. The budtender agreed with the assertion that Montana locals love flower – evident by their massive display of weed.
This budtender was the first to introduce me to Montana’s biggest quirk in cannabis: the bag fee. Cannabis must leave dispensaries in a compliant bag, which requires a double-lined zip lock and a THC warning. Most dispensaries charge customers for these, with fees ranging from $1 up to $7. Montana Kush charges $1. Bags can be reused to avoid the fee, and I left the bags I picked up along the way with some family I was staying with.
As excited as I was to find multiple type II flower options in a recreational dispensary, the Pennywise flower was nearly a year old. You can read my review of the flower here.
710 Montana, Bozeman
Purchased: One preroll
This dispensary was on my list because it was one of the stops that Veronica Castillo made years ago, when she toured Montana for Fat Nugs under Big Sky.
710 Montana has several locations throughout the state. In Bozeman, the dispensary is housed in an old bar. Perhaps it was the drastic difference between my previous stop at Montana Kush, but the vibes here were polar opposite. I was here looking for some live rosin edibles, which they did not have. The prices were higher than Montana Kush, and heavily leaning towards indicas. I ended up just getting a preroll here, which smoked fine (for a preroll.) However, the budtender here was kind enough to waive the $1 bag fee on this transaction.
Pure, Bozeman
Purchased: A Q of Durban Poison
A visit to Pure Dispensary was my main motivation for coming to Bozeman. Owned by Montana native Trent Hancock and his wife, Pure differentiates itself with some of the cleanest flower on the market. No pesticides, no treatments, just a high-end HVAC system and the personal touch of their growers.
Coming from the bar vibes of 710 Motana, Pure was another world – clean design, high-end decor, and plenty of cannabis educational materials, from little flyers to books. Pure grows their flower in Billings and displays it on gorgeous glass jars. I picked up a quarter of their Durban Poison.
Trent and I weren’t able to connect while I was in town, but I picked his brain on the Montana market over the phone.
“There’s a lot of good in the Montana market,” Trent told me. “The residency requirements in the state have kept the market filled with smaller businesses and not larger MSOs. I don’t think we’ll see a lot of the market consolidation we’ve seen in other states here because of that. The residency requirement really gives Montana cannabis a bright future.”
Trent is known for his clean cannabis advocacy, particularly on LinkedIn. “I started in cannabis in the medical days. I was seeing these sprays being used on the plants, that were medicine for people. Grows would spray pesticides on the flower and then turn around and sell it to cancer patients. It wasn’t right.”
His experience in the medical market and Oregon’s early recreational market drove him to find new solutions for growing clean cannabis. The result is an incredibly complex HVAC system that allows his team to grow cannabis indoors without sprays or contamination. Pure recently opened their second location in Billings.
Sky High in Big Sky Country
This state is stunningly beautiful – and cold. I left in early June, when morning temperatures were still well below freezing. I can imagine visiting in January at the peak of ski season, the mountain town dispensaries packed with tourists from prohibition states, each eagerly clamoring for a cartridge or pack of prerolls.
Overall, I felt the Montana market had diversity in product offerings, strain types, and price points. It’s not as cheap as some states I’ve been to (like Oregon) and a few of the dispensaries had mostly indica-leaning options, but I saw enough variety between the four that if you’re looking for something specific in Montana, be it a strain type, terpene dominance, or minor cannabinoid, you’re likely to find it.
