Hello and welcome to the 77th edition of the Bozeman Build Report covering business and trade events happening in the Northern Rockies!

Today we cover energy acquisitions, EquipmentShare opens in Helena, hydropower, Montana hotel prices, Kalispell visitor spend, Farmers Almanac, eating weeds, Gallatin county hotels, and more!

Make the most of it,

Daniel

_{When and what is the Bozeman Build? The BB is a 1x/week free email newsletter delivered Monday mornings focused on Montana trade content and news. We are not a financial or building advisors.}

Montana Trade Pulse

August 19, 2025 Black Hills Corp. and NorthWestern Energy to Combine in All-Stock Merger to Create a Premier Regional Regulated Electric and Natural Gas Utility Company. The combined company will serve approximately 2.1 million customers across eight contiguous states -- Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. (BHE)

August 19, 2025 Puget Sound Energy announced on Tuesday that its Beaver Creek wind farm, a 248-megawatt wind project located on the high plains in Stillwater County is now fully operational. (Daily Montanan)

Aug 19, 2025 EquipmentShare, a technology and equipment-rental company, celebrated the opening of its Helena location on Monday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and donations to two nonprofits. EquipmentShare is one of the fastest-growing construction equipment solutions providers in the United States. They have 330 branches open nationwide, and aim to open another 600 locations in the coming years. (KRTV)

August 21 2025 Governor Greg Gianforte yesterday welcomed a new business investment in Montana’s growing semiconductor industry and cut the ribbon on Eshylon Scientific, a semiconductor manufacturing solutions company, in Bozeman. (State of Montana Newsroom)

August 22, 2025 Moonlight West to launch in Big Sky with four lifts planned. (Lift Blog)

August 21, 2025 FCC documents show some internet providers struggling to bring service to Montana (Daily Montanan)

August 22, 2025 Fishing was closed on the entire Big Hole and Jefferson Rivers due to low stream flows. The closure began at midnight on Aug. 23. The Jefferson River drought plan recommends a river-wide angling closure when stream flows fall below 280 cubic feet per second (cfs) at Twin Bridges. On the Big Hole, the drought plan triggers a river-wide angling closure when flows fall below certain thresholds. Streamflows fell below 100 cfs at Wise River and 150 cfs at Melrose, prompting the closure. (Drought Reporter UNL)

August 24th, 2025 Sunday, August 24 is National Hydropower Day. Nearly 35% of electricity for Northwestern Energy customers in Montana comes from hydropower. Northwestern Energy, Montana's largest utility, owns and operates 11 hydroelectric facilities across the state, including Hauser and Holter in Lewis and Clark County and five dams in Cascade County: Black Eagle, Cochrane, Morony, Ryan and Rainbow. (KRTV)

Montana Department of Transportation News

• I-15 Helena North work resumes; brief ramp closures anticipated

• Roadway resurfacing has begun on Dodson South Canal project

• Crews to begin striping activities on I-90 through August

• Public invited to open house for Lincoln – Applegate Intersection

• Montana Transportation Commission Meeting

• Notice of Proposed Rulemaking

• Work on US 2 near Kalispell to pause for 30 to 45 days

Best Western Comps

Was interested in hotel rates across Montana. To keep things consistent - we set the date parameters to Aug 25-26 and compared Best Western only.

Flathead Economy

Discover Kalispell publishes these super cool monthly research updates covering market and tourism trends. In the June Report, I found a few things interesting..

• Glacier Park International Airport continued to post double-digit growth in passenger volume in June, with the total number of travelers coming to 128,970 – a 10.2% increase compared to one year prior. Year-To-Date (YTD), passenger volume totals 451,997 travelers, up a whopping 11.4% from last year

• These reports show the sources of spend (cities that card owners reside in)

• The seasonality of spend in this area

Indian Summer

Over dinner, a friend said “I think we are going to have an Indian Summer” an Indian summer is defined by wiki as a period of unseasonably warm, dry weather that sometimes occurs in autumn in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Several sources describe a true Indian summer as not occurring until after the first frost, or more specifically the first "killing frost".

She might be right, the 2025 Fall 2025 Weather Predictions From The Old Farmer’s Almanac is pointing towards a warm dry Autumn across the Rockies region, dry across the entire states. Don’t believe in the folklore of the Farmer’s Almanac? The National Weather Service is pointing at the same outcome.

With regards to 2025-2026 winter - The Almanac is calling for for a season of dramatic swings and widespread wintry weather." Unlike last year, which was a "calmer, gentler" season in most regions, this year's theme is: "chill, snow, repeat. - Difficult to tell at this point so sorry to get any Chionophiles hopes up.

Bozeman Trade Pulse

October 3rd-5th 2025 Bozeman Real Estate Group and SWMBIA will be co-hosting the 2025 Bozeman Parade of Homes. (Bozeman Real Estate Group)

August 23, 2025 Digger Days was hosted by Eagle Mount - Digger Days welcomes people from across the state and further offering them the opportunity to sit in the cab and operate the controls of the biggest, baddest construction equipment. (Eagle Mount)

Aug 19, 2025 Whistle Pig Korean in downtown Bozeman recently offered a two-day tasting event featuring purslane, a succulent, leafy plant that grows wild on many Montana farms and is often pulled as a weed. (Montana Ag Network)

Gallatin County Hotels

Gosh darn, developers have been building a ton of hotels around town which isn’t a bad thing, more competition drives prices down which will make it more affordable for visitors. Antidotally, it seems that overnight prices have already dropped significantly although i’m sure the price gouging will continue to occur during peak seasons and during cat griz like events.

I was trying to get a pulse on how many hotels are in the county, did some searching, and found the Bozeman Chamber listing 47 hotels in their search engine. Diving deeper the Bozeman Chronicle wrote an article about a year ago in September of 2024 called 'Room to grow': Hotel rooms in Bozeman area projected to double in five years “If you add in future projects in various stages of planning the Chamber is tracking, the number of hotel rooms in Bozeman could balloon from 2,535 today to 5,127 in the next five or six years. Taking Bozeman, Belgrade and Three Forks together, the number of rooms in the area could go from 2,936 today to 6,355.”

Below are a few hotels being constructed off Airway Blvd.

Northern Rockies Misc

The 85th Anniversary of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally wrapped up August 10th (Sturgis)

August 7th 2025 Denver International Airport is considering the deployment of a small modular reactor as part of goal of becoming "the greenest airport in the world and to be energy independent". (World Nuclear News)

Aug 20, 2025 SDSU lost $66 million in federal research funding but hopes to get it back (Black Hills Pioneer)

August 21, 2025 The 2025 Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium was hosted last week. (Kansas City Fed)

Apr 30, 2025 Around 122 new smaller, single-family homes are planned for north-central Cheyenne, with ground scheduled to be broken in about a month. (Wyoming News)

Thank you for reading,

Daniel Zavadil

bozemanbuild.com & blockbiome.com