Flagpole installation acrossMontana

Flagpoles in Montana

Montana is the fourth-largest state in the country, and the wind figures its towns publish sit close together. What changes from one to the next is the ground, the frost and the wind nobody mapped. The pole, the concrete it stands in, the flag on it and the labour to raise it all come back on a single price.

Wind here. Montana towns publish their own design figures, and they run in a narrow band: Missoula at 105 mph, Helena at 106, Great Falls at 107, Billings at 110 and Bozeman at 115, all of them 3-second gust figures under the codes the state has adopted. Ten miles an hour across the fourth-largest state in the country is not much, so the map is rarely what decides a Montana pole. Three other things do. Frost is the first: Billings, Great Falls and Helena all take the bottom of the footing to 42 inches, and Bozeman goes to 48 under a two-storey building, so the hole costs more here than the pole standing in it does elsewhere. The calendar is the second, because the season for pouring concrete is short and a pole wanted for a spring opening is ordered in the autumn. The third is the wind no figure records: along the Rocky Mountain Front the chinook comes off the mountains with nothing in front of it, and Livingston, one pass east of Bozeman, had the second-highest average wind speed of any airport station in the country over 2000 to 2010.

• The western valleys — Missoula publishes 105 mph and a three-foot frost depth, the mildest pair of numbers in the state, and Kalispell and the Bitterroot sit with it. A standard shaft usually covers it, so the argument here is about height rather than wall.
• The Rocky Mountain Front — Great Falls publishes 107 mph, and along the Front that figure understates the job. The chinook comes straight down off the mountains with nothing to slow it, so bench and open ground at Choteau, Conrad, Cut Bank and Great Falls itself are treated as fully exposed and get wall thickness before they get height.
• The high valleys and the gaps — Helena publishes 106 mph and Bozeman 115, two valleys apart, which is the clearest sign that a Montana floor figure does not travel. A gap or a pass behaves nothing like a valley floor, Livingston is the standing proof of it, and an exposed address in this band is looked up on its own.
• The Yellowstone valley and the eastern plains — Billings publishes 110 mph and writes exposure C into its criteria, meaning open terrain rather than sheltered town. East of it, out past Miles City, Glendive and Sidney, nothing stands upwind for a long way, and blowing snow and grit take as much off a finish over twenty years as one bad afternoon does.

Flying the Montana flag? We sell it, sewn to the state's own design specification and sized to sit under the national flag on your pole. See the Montana flag →