The ‘Wild Huckleberry’ Is Redundant

Story by Jen Karetnick

I’m going to Montana this summer - but too early to fight bears for berries, it seems! -Katherine

Photo: Dani

The ‘Wild Huckleberry’ Is Redundant

By Jen Karetnick

If the only wild huckleberry you’ve heard of is the character from “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” then you likely haven’t been in northwest Montana in the summer-fall shoulder season. That’s when it’s all wild huckleberries, all the time.

Indeed, these little berries are huge business in Big Sky towns like Kalispell, Bozeman, Missoula, and Whitefish, where roadside stands pop up from mid-August to mid-September. During this time, they also flavor everything from freshly baked bear claws — Danish pastries shaped like paws — to bottled craft beers. (The local breweries feature seasonal huckleberry beers on tap as well.) 

It’s not just huckleberry season, it’s huckleberry madness: Every restaurant, café, bakery, and bar has at least one huckleberry-infused item on the menu. These range from main course proteins served with huckleberry glaze to desserts topped with huckleberry compote to cocktails like the huckleberry habanero margarita.

Botanically known as the species Vaccinium membranaceum, huckleberries range in color from red to black, with scarlet on the tart side and those trending toward purple on the sweet end. They appear — and taste — like a cross between cranberries and blueberries, the latter of which the early European colonizers mistook them for. They called them hurtleberries (their name for blueberries). Through the mysteries of linguistics, hurtleberries eventually became huckleberries.

Unlike blueberries, however, huckleberries belong to two genera in the Ericaceae family, rather than just one. Also unlike blueberries, which still grow in the wild (see: Maine) but are mostly farmed (see: your grocery store), they can’t be cultivated. While horticulturists will likely never stop trying to domesticate huckleberries, they simply don't flower and fruit well in the lower elevations where most people live and farm or garden. Instead, huckleberries prefer 2,000-11,000 feet above sea level, thriving in the underbrush of the Rockies. These areas are mostly hard to access unless you’re hiking in protected green spaces like the Flathead National Forest or Glacier National Park.

Thus: wild huckleberry is a redundant term since all huckleberries are wild. But it’s still what you see advertised on Montana roadside signs and at farmers’ markets, and in other states in the mountainous Pacific Northwest, such as Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, the last of which has named it the state fruit. But you can see how much influence the huckleberry has on the Montana local economy in particular just by landing at Glacier Park International Airport or Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport, where all the take-home items glow purple and scream huckleberry, or by browsing at made-in-Montana souvenir shops like The Huckleberry Patch or Montana Gift Corral.

But if you’re not into huckleberry milkshakes, barbecue sauce, licorice, macarons, or any other food item (or scented product) you can think of, you can try the berries in their natural form by going for a hike and plucking them along the way. Just be warned that local pickers guard the whereabouts of high-producing thickets as zealously as bears do their cubs. And speaking of bears, well, they love huckleberries, too: you’ll want to carry bear spray and make lots of noise when approaching bushes. Finally, it’s easy to confuse these small dark berries with others that might be toxic. So if you aren’t local to the area and you’d like to go climbing up (and we do mean up) that path for the most natural huckleberry sample of all, it’s best to hire a guide.

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