http://perceptivetravel.com/blog/2009/08/21/eating-wild-montana-high-country-huckleberry-hunting/
Come the first couple weeks of August, when the berries at lowest elevations are already plump and purple,
There are no secrets about the huckleberry bounty on Big Mountain, the ski mountain in Whitefish, Montana. Hiking the 3.8-mile Danny-On trail up to the summit house on top, you can’t help but stop and pick handfuls of berries if you know what they look like.
http://fwp.mt.gov/mtoutdoors/HTML/articles/2004/Huckleberries.htm
“Northwestern Montana produces the best huckleberry picking in the state,” says plant ecologist Maria Mantis, of Whitefish. “It’s tough to find any decent huckleberry picking once you leave the Flathead and Kootenai national forests and the Glacier Park area.”
Finding hucks
Big and globe huckleberries grow in the mountains at elevations between 3,500 and 7,200 feet. Mantis says to look in forests with roughly 50 percent tree cover—lodgepole pine or mixed forests of lodgepole, larch, spruce, and subalpine fir. Huckle-berries grow in 20- to 50-year-old burns, old clear-cuts, ski runs, avalanche chutes, and older, open, high-elevation forests where the plants receive the sunlight they need to thrive.
Serious huckleberriers, like Jim Riley of Columbia Falls, begin searching weeks before the roadside stands hang their “Fresh Hucks For Sale” signs. By mid-July, he’s collecting along sunny, south-facing slopes at lower elevations. As the season progresses, he works his way uphill, searching all sides of the mountains. Some years Riley gathers huckleberries well into September.
The plant’s finicky nature has made it difficult to tame. Researchers in Idaho, who have been trying for years, now hope to have the first commercial huckleberry plants available in about 2010.
Located nine miles from the west entrance of Glacier National Park, HUNGRY HORSE, MONTANA claims fame as the wild huckleberry capital of the West. This sweet tart wild berry grows only in moist mountain areas and cannot be commercially grown. Wild berries are not sprayed with chemicals or fertilizers. Berries are hand picked when ripe and processed without artificial colors, flavorings or corn syrup. "Vaccinium" huckleberries are blue-black or blue-reddish, depending upon soil and habitat and grows on a slender shrub 2 - 6 feet high.
Berry pickers hike into wilderness areas to secure berries for our cannery.
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