I lived in Montana for 15 years and in response to "good job with bad weather"....yes it was a good job, but the weather wasn't bad...just normal for Montana. I lived 60 miles NE of Missoula at the 4,000 foot level where the winter weather "broke" in mid-March, usually with daily snow squalls and lots of freezing & thawing. April saw lots of rain squalls, but there was usually several feet of snow still on the ground where I lived. It never really turned nice until May, then in June there's about 3 weeks of rain. If you want the Big Sky, go in July or August when the temps are around 90-100, but there's never any rain. The "fall break" hits in the 1st half of September with 3-4 weeks of rain, then in October there's a month of Indian Summer...crystal clear but chilly with deep freezes at night. By Thanksgiving the snow has already stuck, and you won't see the ground again until late April.

But all that was at 4,000 feet in a snow belt....everything varied WIDELY, as Kalispel was only 90 miles away and we called it the Banana Belt. They'd be in shorts mowing the lawn while I shoveled snow. East of the Continental Divide was an entirely different ball game...their weather comes down from Canada and not from the Pacific like west of the divide. If the wind there stops blowing momentarily, people fall down!