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On Big Sky Time
Chris Wardle is aiming to revitalize the U.S. watch industry—from Bozeman, Montana
By Elvis Mitchell
Photographs by Andrew Geiger
 “I’ve always been a watch enthusiast,” announces Chris Wardle, the
amused and amusing founder of the Bozeman Watch Company, to a lunch
party at Stacey’s, a restaurant roomy enough to qualify as a borough in
New York, just before he cheerfully orders. “Rocky Mountain oysters for
everyone!”
Discussing watches in a joint where
Hemingway wouldn’t be out of place—hunched in a corner and immersed in
cleaning a bolt-action rifle blindfolded to soothe the burr of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s criticisms—seems, quite frankly, strange. Montana is an
unusual place to find a man so devoted to watches that he created a
company to make them, and so seduced by the lure of the great outdoors
that he chose to design and partially build them here. I’m sure the
noisy pack of fly-fishermen on my flight could not have been more
indifferent when I mentioned I was in Bozeman not to hunt or fish but
to visit a horological entrepreneur.
Actually, if watches seem
an alien accessory for the Man on the Range, know that the little
storage space inside the right pocket of your jeans was created as a
home for a pocket watch. Cowboys, it turns out, don’t have quite the
knack for telling time by tracking the sun’s trail across the sky that
you might imagine. Wardle, a Michiganian who has been here for almost
20 years, is a man who comfortably bridges two worlds. His
timepieces—ten hand-tooled watch styles born in Bozeman—also evoke the
new local gestalt of chic earthiness. The contemporary revivification
of the town’s center looks as if one of the arid, slowly dying Western
burgs in a Larry McMurtry novel had been seized by Restoration
Hardware. The Bozeman Watch Company’s office, with its
B-in-a-broken-circle logo that might have been created by some heir of
Baume or Mercier who took up a branding iron and burned it onto the
building, sits in the middle of a recently spiffed-up block.
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