Oktoberfest brings beer, Bavarian culture to Big Sky

By Fischer Genau DIGITAL MEDIA LEAD

Beer was flowing, bratwurst was sizzling, and the sun was shining in Big Sky Town Center this weekend as the community embraced its second-ever Big Sky Oktoberfest. The three-day festival, one of few in Montana, offered locals and visitors the chance to enjoy German craft beers, play traditional German games and celebrate Bavarian culture.

“The energy and the enthusiasm that we’ve heard about it so far has just been great,” said Dana Wikan, a Big Sky resident who co-founded the event with her husband Larry. “It’s been overwhelming.”

Very few places in Montana organize Oktoberfests, the most notable almost six hours away in Whitefish, with smaller festivals in places like Anaconda and Red Lodge.

“I want to be the premiere regional Oktoberfest event,” Larry said. “We like this one and we’d love to just get more and more people involved.”

Tyler Nail had never been to an Oktoberfest until this year in Big Sky. He bought lederhosen, traditional leather breeches worn by men in Bavaria, last year to wear to an Oktoberfest event, but it arrived too late from Europe and Nail had to wait until this year to break them in. Naturally, the first thing he did was run two miles in it.

Nail, who recently founded Aprés Brewing in Bozeman, ran the Lederhosen Fun Run in his Bavarian breeches and stuck around afterwards to play cornhole and hammerschlagen.

“I’m having a great time, this is a really cool event,” Nail said.

Shana Seelye is also new to Oktoberfest, but after helping Larry and Dana organize Big Sky’s first in 2023, she’s grown fond of the tradition.

“This has been super fun,” Seelye said. “People come, they’re happy, they’re excited, and all of us want to get dressed up.”

Seelye helped the event evolve this year as it expanded from two days to three and added the Lederhosen Fun Run, a two-mile loop in town that kicked off the final day of Big Sky Oktoberfest.

The event also featured a biergarten featuring Paulaner brewery from Munich, Germany, and a steinholding competition, a classic Bavarian contest of strength where competitors hold up a full one-liter beer stein in front of them with a straight arm for as long as they can. One attendee asked Larry if they could do an all-women steinholding contest, and when he agreed, over 20 lined up to compete.

Bigger than beer

Larry and Dana moved to Big Sky in 2017 from Seattle, where Larry worked for the German brewery Warsteiner and helped stage Oktoberfests along the coast as a supplier. After arriving in Montana, they noticed a glaring lack of the iconic fall festival and thought it could be fun to organize one themselves. Last year, they finally went for it.

“We love the support and how the community’s rallied around it,” Larry said.

Neither of the Wikans are German by heritage, but they share an enthusiasm for the culture and intend to make Oktoberfest a Big Sky tradition. They hope the Lederhosen Fun Run continues to grow after this year’s introduction, and next year they plan to bring a projector screen into the tent so people can watch football on Sunday.

Proceeds from this year’s event will go to Big Sky Futbol Club, a local youth soccer club the Wikans helped found, but Larry and Dana have a bigger goal to support all youth sports in Big Sky.

“Supporting local families to participate in anything they want to do is something that’s really important to us,” Dana said. “People shouldn’t say, ‘Oh, I can’t afford it,’ or, ‘It’s too expensive, my child won’t be able to participate.’”

Some of the money raised this year will go towards starting a foundation to fund scholarships for youth sports like soccer and skiing, as well as equipment, travel, and other costs. The Wikans have three kids of their own, two of them twins, so they know how expensive it is to have active children.

One of Larry and Dana’s goals was to create a family-friendly event where kids had something to do while their parents had a beer, and there were people of all ages at Town Center over the weekend, playing games, running in the Lederhosen Fun Run, and celebrating traditional German culture. If they have it their way, Big Sky Oktoberfest will eventually become a tradition of its own.