Winter 2024 Mountain Outlaw

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WINTER 2024

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F E AT U R E S WINTER 2024 | THE MONTANA ISSUE

Sen. Jon Tester smiles from his pick-up truck. Read more about Tester, this issue's Featured Outlaw, on p. 178.

Photo courtesy of Sen. Jon Tester

178

The Tester Appeal

People love Jon Tester.

But what about Montana’s three-term U.S. senator is it exactly that strikes a chord with the people he serves? Mountain Outlaw Managing Editor Bella Butler explores the senator’s embodiment of Montana and The Tester Appeal.

147

Big Sky Resort: 50 Years

Big Sky Resort has not only had a profound impact on Montana, but on the entire ski industry.

Mountain Outlaw writer Jack Reaney celebrates Big Sky Resort: 50 Years with a collection of stories from the people who love it and the people who’ve shaped it.

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The OTO Rides Again The OTO Ranch has been somewhat of a ghost town in the last several decades, home almost entirely to the wind and wildlife that predate even the oldest dude ranch in Montana.

But an opportunity to revive it might change that. Writer Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan breaks down what’s at stake if The OTO Rides Again.

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52 TRAILHEAD 20 Our editor’s picks celebrate all things

Montana, from films, books and music, to Montana brands you want to add to your shopping list.

OUTBOUND GALLERY 28 Houseless in Montana Portraits of life without a roof in Montana

LAND 52 This Is My Prairie An intimate exploration of Montana’s southeastern landscape

60 After the Burn How wildfires are shaping Montana winters

66 Guide: Montana’s Winter

Wildlife Montana’s winter sets a new stage for its wildlife.

ADVENTURE 72 Dispatch: Backcountry skiing

in the Balkans In the war-torn Balkan States, an annual backcountry ski fest seeks to reconnect its people through a shared love for exploration in the mountains.

80 Montana Lines Q&A with

professional freeride skier and Montana native Parkin Costain

80 86 Embracing the Spirit of

Maverick One Montana mom and pop ski area is keeping its focus on the simple joy of skiing.

90 By Hoof and By Plank

Skijoring marries the traditional and modern Wests.

CULTURE 100 OTO Rides Again The fate of

106 130 Recipe: Taste of Montana Bison short ribs and huckleberry mules

134 Fiction: Slough Creek One man’s dance with solitude in Yellowstone’s backcountry

140 Poetry: God-Sighting in West Yellowstone A lyrical account of Yellowstone’s iconic fauna

HISTORY

Montana’s oldest dude ranch hangs in the balance.

147 50 Years of Big Sky Resort Big

vs. Griz showdown is one of the oldest rivalries west of the Mississippi. And arguably the best of them all.

160 The Diary of Norton Pearl

woman explores cultural appropriation of Native people in a personal essay.

166 Red Light Montana A new

106 The Last Best Rivalry The Cat

110 Let My People Heal A Lakota 116 This is a Montana Story Two

Montana women weave together a personal account from an active shooting, Montana’s relationship with firearm violence and an analysis of the tie between healing and connection.

CREATIVE 126 Humor: Glacier People vs.

Yellowstone People Are there stereotypical Glacier People and Yellowstone People?

Sky Resort celebrates half a century of the Biggest Skiing in America.

A 1910s Glacier ranger endures the park’s grueling winter in the name of discovery. downtown Bozeman restaurant is telling the story of the state’s red light era.

174 The Montana Governorship

Montana’s leadership is founded on a connection to its people.

FEATURED OUTLAW 178 Sen. Jon Tester embodies Montana

LAST LIGHT 191 Moonlit tram

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featured contributors Owned and published in Big Sky, Montana PUBLISHER Eric Ladd

SALES & ADVERTISING Ersin Ozer Patrick Mahoney

VP MEDIA Mira Brody MANAGING EDITOR Bella Butler

ACCOUNTING Sara Sipe Taylor Erikson

ART DIRECTOR Robyn Egloff

CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER Megan Paulson

COPYEDITOR Carter Walker

CHIEF FINANCE OFFICER Treston Wold

VIDEOGRAPHER Micah Robin

VP DESIGN & PRODUCTION Hiller Higman

ART PRODUCTION ME Brown Megan Sierra

DISTRIBUTION Ennion Williams

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Sami Bierman, Alexis Bonogofsky, Nancy Radick Butler, Jen Clancey, Sarah Comeau, Gabrielle Gasser, Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan, Jack Marshall III, Michael Ober, Taylor Owens, Yetta Rose Stein, Ednor Therriault, Toby Thompson, Sophie Brett Tsairis, Jack Reaney, Scott Yorko CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS/ARTISTS Scott T. Baxter, Mark Bedor, Alexis Bonogofsky, Christopher Boyer, Bella Butler, Tom Cohen, Hazel Cramer, Jonathan Finch, Jacob W. Frank, Gabrielle Gasser, Pat Gaines, George Grant, Kirby Grubaugh, Neal Herbert, Melina Mara, Kate Middleton, Chloe Nostrant, Bryant Olsen, Rocio Guerrero Parra, Holly Pippel, Jack Reaney, Edward M. Reinig, Diane Renkin, Micah Robin, Jed Sanford, Ethan Schumacher, Kene Sperry, Madeline Thunder

Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan The OTO Rides Again | p. 100 Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan is a Montana-based writer and editor.

She’s drawn to stories on climate solutions, the environment, sustainability, and public lands, and has recently contributed to The New York Times, National Geographic, Sierra, 5280, and Trails.

Away from her desk, she can be found introducing her two kids to the West’s finest mountains, rivers, and everything in between.

Kene Sperry Herd XIII | Cover Montana-based Kene Sperry draws on a long, international career as a photographer to produce largeformat limited-edition fine-art prints. By exploring the interaction of light and dark in nature, his un-manipulated black-and-white photography becomes an exercise in abandoning divisions: shadow fades to light, snow blends into sky, earth looks fluid as water. Sperry’s oeuvre blurs familiar boundaries to allow the viewer to see through fresh eyes, with a quiet wonder, and recall our fundamental belonging to the natural world.

Sarah Comeau Let My People Heal | p. 110 Sarah Comeau was born and raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas and comes from a long line of horsemen and cattle ranchers. She is very active with her traditional Lakota ceremonies and has spent the last few years starting horses and learning from some of the country’s best cowboys.

Sarah hopes to incorporate her Lakota culture with natural horsemanship and share this knowledge with young Native American girls as a way to give back. Sarah now makes her home in Livingston, Montana working as a nurse and healthcare consultant and is a mother of three awesome kids: Bailey, Isabel, and Laney.

Michael Ober The Diary of Norton Pearl | p. 160 Michael J. Ober is three generations deep into Montana’s history and lore. Born in Havre, Montana, he graduated from the University of Montana with a BA and MA degree in American History and, later, a Master’s of Library and Information Science from the University of Denver. His professional career spans 40 years as Director of Library Services at Flathead Valley Community College where he also taught Montana History and English Composition. Seasonally, he worked as a wildland fire fighter, backcountry ranger and law enforcement road patrol ranger in Glacier National Park for 44 years.

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ON THE COVER Herd XIII, Kene Sperry, Editions of 33 Fine art photographer Kene Sperry captures the remembrance of the connection of all life in a continual series of migration patterns in the Greater Yellowstone.

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from the publisher OUR MONTANA

On a warm fall day I found myself sitting by the edge of a small spring creek nestled among a landscape of high alpine wildflowers in the backcountry of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness.

Cedar Mountain cast a formidable shadow from its broad ridgeline, and I admired the pearl white mountain goats as they navigated the cliff edges and ate lichen on the rocks. I had heard that these were the types of meadows where the Tukudika, or Sheepeater Indians would summer and hunt, escaping the bugs of the lower-lying meadows of Yellowstone National Park. As I scanned the surface of the soil near the river’s edge, I spotted a beautiful black obsidian arrowhead, and I thought of the Tukudika enjoying the same view of the Spanish Peaks and the grandeur of Lone Mountain many years ago.

“For other states I have admiration,

respect, recognition, even some affection.

But with Montana it is love.”

– John Steinbeck

Today, Montana is one of the fastest growing states in the country, with bustling economic success. Montana is also a popular travel destination, with people from around the world coming to enjoy our clean mountain air. The rich historical stories bringing us to modern times are incredible, capturing the imagination of writers and producers and the attention of presidents, professors, musicians, artists and investors.

But what actions will we take in 2024 as we further settle the natural expanse of “The Last Best Place?” The next few years will likely continue the great migration West, with Montana seeing a large influx of people from bigger cities coming to enjoy our 147,000-square-mile state and eventually calling places like Missoula, Whitefish, Bozeman, Big Sky, Livingston, Billings and Miles City their new home. Future generations will add value to our communities, bringing new ideas and passion for the Bitterroot Flower State.

With change comes responsibility. Sitting on a ridgeline enjoying a tie-dye sunset, walking among ancient forests, floating down a gin-clear river with native trout, or hunting for a bugling elk on a frosty morning are all sacred experiences.

But with them comes a tremendous obligation for each of us to help protect this special place for future generations.

To truly protect something you must first fall in love with it, which is an easy task in Montana. As the world engages in turmoil and headlines detail the problems plaguing our planet, I urge you readers to be extra grateful for places like Montana.

Relish the feeling in your heart as you sit in Yellowstone

Eric with his wife Kaley and faithful dog 'Black' Betty enjoying a pristine western river. Eric is wearing the football jersey from famed football player and firefighter Eric Stevens, who is battling ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. #AXEALS.

admiring bison or as you drive across the state enjoying wheat meadows and snow-capped peaks. And take pleasure in the rich stories of neighbors and friends as you enjoy the fun and passion of a Cats vs. Grizzlies football game.

Montana has been good to me and my family, and I carry a genuine responsibility in helping to protect her. My admiration and respect for Montana runs deep; I have set up my businesses—like this magazine—to be a voice for capturing and preserving the stories and supporting the people, businesses and charities who work to make Montana special.

This edition of Mountain Outlaw captures a slice of Montana history and a taste of her tales; I hope it provides an opportunity for us to further develop an intimate relationship with this special place—through stories that capture its hardship as much as its magnificence. At the start of each section of this magazine we’ve taken care to display the stunning work of local photographers. Those photos are as much a piece of the magazine to be enjoyed as the stories themselves, all captured by Montana creators, inspired by her creation.

I hope you enjoy it. Gratitude to the amazing team of writers, editors, photographers, graphic designers and videographers who produced this piece and the advertisers who support this work.

Let’s make history we can be proud of together.

Eric Ladd Publisher 17

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TR AILHEAD Great Falls, MT: Fast Times, Post-Punk Weirdos, and a Tale of Coming Home Again Comedian, musician and selfproclaimed weirdo Reggie Watts has returned to his home state of Montana to perform in past years, but his new memoir is perhaps his deepest coming home yet. Like its title, the book covers a lot of ground, from Watts’ upbringing as a biracial kid in northern Montana’s vastly white human landscape and coming of age in the �80s, to earning a music gig on James Corden’s “The Late Late Show,” and of course, coming home. It’s everything we crave in a memoir—a tale of belonging punctuated by candid hindsight—draped in Watts’ signature offbeat humor. The beautiful inside sleeve of his book, which was released Oct. 17, 2023, declares its pages a love letter to the place he grew up, the true kind that is “messy and complicated and dirty and beautiful— and as weird and wonderful as Watts himself.” penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714088/ great-falls-mt-by-reggie-watts/

Backcountry Ranger in Glacier National Park, 1910-1913: The Diaries & Photographs of Norton Pearl While Montana is still defined by its rugged terrain, accounts of Glacier National Park ranger Norton Pearl’s early 1900s winter patrols rival any modern-day concept of wild. Through his fascinating diary entries, Pearl paints a vivid—sometimes harrowing—picture of what a sparsely peopled and newly established Glacier had in store for its few intrepid explorers and stewards. Published in 1994 and edited by one of his relatives, Backcountry Ranger shares Pearl’s entries and photographs, offering a portal into a Montana of the past that few got to experience. With his accounts of 40-mile snowshoe days, and even the death of a fellow ranger, this anthology of Pearl’s entries is a great way to dive into a Montana-themed adventure this winter from the comfort of a fire-side seat.

Read more about Pearl on p. 160.

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Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger and Higher Education Missoula-based author Stephanie Land is following up her award-winning debut memoir Maid, the inspiration for a hit Netflix series, with Class, which landed on shelves on Nov. 7, 2023. Land’s latest work picks up where she left off, having escaped abuse and poverty as a single mother in pursuit of her dream to become a writer.

Class sees Land through her studies at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she’s confronted by familiar challenges with new twists. Against all odds, Land overcomes navigating an unforgiving educational system while living under the poverty line and raising a child—and turns it into a necessary and vulnerable work that is both an avenue for connection and understanding. simonandschuster.com/books/Class/ Stephanie-Land/9781982

Sun House David James Duncan is known for big stories that explore life through vibrant characters, interaction with the natural world and intrinsically human questions. His latest novel, Sun House, is perhaps the best demonstration of this. After receiving acclaim for The Brothers K and The River Why in the �80s and �90s, Duncan published what the LA Times called his magnum opus in 2023. While his former work was set in the Pacific Northwest where Duncan grew up, Sun House is a spiritual epic that weaves several storylines together in Montana, Duncan’s home of nearly 30 years and a place to which he recognizes generational lineage. The more-than 800-page read isn’t for the casual browser, but may be the perfect companion for a long winter. davidjamesduncan.com/sun-house

Mending the Line

Class C: The Only Game in Town

Montana is increasingly popular both as the subject of TV and film, as well as the setting. Mending the Line is an example of both.

Written by Bozeman writer Stephen Camelio and shot in Bozeman and Livingston, the film tells the story of a Marine wounded in Afghanistan who meets a Vietnam vet at a VA hospital in Montana who teaches him the therapeutic power of fly fishing. With a collection of awards already under its belt, Blue Fox Entertainment released the star-studded film to theaters in June of 2023. Perhaps a reflection of Montana’s restorative powers, the storyline is reminiscent of many real-life programs based throughout the state that offer similar healing opportunities to veterans through outdoor recreation and exposure to nature.

Its stunning setting was enough to pique critics’ interest, an allure Montana is no stranger to.

This one is a bit of a throwback, but Montana’s rearview is often as captivating as what’s in front of us. Released by Montana PBS in February of 2008, Class C: The Only Game in Town is a stunning example of how Montana’s culture, land and challenges can all be captured in a single cross-section. In an hour and a half, the raw documentary follows five high school girls basketball teams on their bids for a title in Montana’s rural athletic division: Class C. In the frill-free, interviewheavy style of a 2000s PBS piece, the film examines rural life in Montana, the threat of small towns drying up, and the saving grace of high school basketball—and the belief in dreams that comes with it. pbs.org/video/montanapbspresents-class-c-the-onlygame-in-town/

Center for Large Landscape Conservation The Center for Large Landscape Conservation is a Bozeman-based nonprofit executing critical work to fight habitat fragmentation and restore natural resilience to climate change. Currently, CLLC is providing support to applicants seeking funding through the recent Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to establish safe wildlife crossings. With vehicle-wildlife collisions reaching record numbers, particularly close to growing urban interfaces, safe wildlife crossings are an increasingly important issue in Montana. largelandscapes.org

Browse all Trailhead features online

bluefoxentertainment.com/ films/mending-the-line 21

TR AILHEAD Mountain & Prairie Podcast We know—you’re trying to get through the hundreds of other podcasts your friends, family and Instagram have told you to listen to, but hear us out. If there were one show to capture the American West in its most connected form, “Mountain & Prairie” is it. The show’s host and founder, Ed Roberson, interviews characters that cover a spectrum of backgrounds and expertise, the common thread being their intimacy with the region. Roberson embraces themes that grip Montana and its surrounding states with vulnerable poise, inviting tragedy, adversity and honesty to the conversation alongside hope, celebration and love. One of our favorite episodes was recorded live at the inaugural Old Salt Festival on a family ranch in Helmville, Montana, last summer, where Roberson conducted a live interview with author David James Duncan before Duncan read an excerpt from his book, Sun House, which we’ve recommended above in the “Read” section. mountainandprairie.com

Lies are Sweet | Cactus Cuts Bozeman’s Cactus Cuts captures a sound that both feels like tradition and youth, the flavor of true bluegrass elevated by modern Americana and colorful folk. Since forming in 2020, the five-piece band released a four-track EP in 2023, “Lies are Sweet,” that showcases the lyrical storytelling the band’s gaining fast recognition for.

Whether you’re listening in your kitchen or at one of Montana’s legendary venues Cactus Cuts has graced—like Pine Creek in Paradise Valley—it's hard to decide whether or not to tap your foot and listen intently to the words, or grab your partner for a swing. cactuscutsband.com

Hoary Marmot New to the airwaves, the “Hoary Marmot” podcast brings you news, stories and comedy from the characters of the Gallatin Canyon and Valley. Hosts Michelle Veale Borden, a longtime Big Sky local, and her TV comedy writer husband Joe Borden add their own quips and relatable anecdotes to interviews that range from Montana gubernatorial candidate Ryan Busse, to grizzly attack survivor Rudy Noorlander, as well as an episode that honored the late Big Sky figurehead, John Kircher. Named for the elusive mountain ground squirrel, “Hoary Marmot” is sure to have you feeling rooted in Big Sky Country—and doubling over with laughter. explorebigsky.com/podcast

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Glacier Distilling Company

Duckworth Distilled in the foothills of Glacier National Park in Corum, Montana, how could this stuff not be good? During the winter, we like the award-winning Wheatfish single-malt whiskey, but there are plenty of delicious options for any spirited palette. glacierdistilling.com

Built for Montanans, Duckworth uses Merino wool harvested from a family ranch in Dillon, Montana, to make hardy clothing with both performance and stewardship in mind. You might live in a cozy wool sweatshirt like Duckworth’s Powder High Neck like our editors, but high alpine seekers, be sure to try out the brand’s layer finder quiz to find the perfect piece for your Montana adventures. duckworthco.com

West Paw

B Bar Ranch

For our readers with furry companions, we have Montana-made products for your pups!

West Paw in Bozeman makes high-quality toys, treats, beds and other dog accessories.

Better yet, the company is a certified B-Corp, so you know your money isn’t just supporting a Montana business, but a better world, too. We’ve spent many mornings throwing the durable Bumi toy for our dogs, but there is truly something for every pooch in West Paw’s collection.

Raised in Montana’s Tom Miner Basin and Big Timber, B Bar Ranch’s beef tells a story of land, of stewardship and pride in good food. These yummy beef products are available throughout the state, on B Bar’s website or through RegenMarket’s online shop of sustainable, home-grown products. If you crave a tasty protein at snack time, we recommend the summer sausage, possibly paired with your favorite sharp cheddar and Montana wheat bread. bbar.com

westpaw.com

Even as the industry grows, Montana is still home to some of the West’s most endearing mom-and-pop ski areas, which embrace natural charm and the simple joy of skiing. Take for example Showdown, the state’s oldest and still family-owned ski area, or Havre’s volunteeroperated Bear Paw Ski Bowl. Read more about Maverick Mountain, a local favorite, on p. 86.

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M O N TA N A I N N U M BE R S THE PEOPLE

Population 1.1 million

Cow population 2.2 million

Population per square mile

THE ECONOMICS Median household income . . . . . . . . $60,560 Households with broadband internet . . . 85%

Top industries

Top exports

• Financial activities

• Copper

• Government

• Electrical energy

• Trade

• Coal

• Health care & education

• Cattle

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Tourism is Montana’s fastest growing industry— 12 million people visit the state each year.

Montana has 92 craft breweries (and counting!) making it 3rd in the U.S. for breweries per capita.

Shred the Treasure State.

We have 14 ski resorts in Montana.

THE LAND

12 RECOGNIZED TRIBES ON EIGHT RESERVATIONS

Assiniboine • Blackfeet • Chippewa • Cree • Crow • Gros Ventre • Kootenai Little Shell Chippewa • Northern Cheyenne • Pend d’Oreille • Salish • Sioux

PRESENT-DAY TRIBAL RESERVATIONS: 8

Flathead • Blackfeet • Rocky Boy • Fort Belknap • Fort Peck Northern Cheyenne • Crow • Little Shell Chippewa Tribal Capital

Elk graze in Gallatin Gateway, a major migratory corridor just north of Gallatin Canyon. Photographer Holly Pippel enjoys capturing snapshots of the lives of these elk near her home in order to raise awareness for their vulnerability as the corridor becomes busier with traffic. Photo by Holly Pippel

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Kendra Alton sits with one of her five children inside their temporary housing granted through Family Promise of Gallatin Valley. Photo by Hazel Cramer

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OU T BOU N D GA LLERY H O U S E L E S S I N M O N TA N A Photos by Hazel Cramer On Sept. 13, 2023, the Wall Street Journal published a story about Missoula, Montana. In the opening photo, a kayaker pushes their paddle through a clear river, and sunlight falls through the gaps in the cottonwoods and onto the sandy bank beside him. It’s a scene quintessential to Montana’s western river town, right down to the cluster of tents and haphazard belongings on the beach. A bold headline is overlayed on the image: “This Montana Town is Facing a Homelessness Problem Similar to Larger Cities.”

Indeed, this is a deviation from the glorified way Montana usually ends up in national publications, touting its ski areas as idyllic winter vacations and its burgeoning college towns—like Missoula—as some of the fastest growing places in the country. But to residents of the state, this Wall Street Journal story isn’t groundbreaking. Such headlines have held front-page real estate in local newspapers for most of 2023, as have photos of similar homeless camps and city streets lined with dozens of campers and other make-shift shelters.

Homelessness is one of Montana’s most visible and contentious modern challenges, proving the state isn’t exempt from the rising trend of homelessness in the United States. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported in 2020 that an estimated 1,545 people are experiencing homelessness in Montana on a single night, or roughly 14.5 people per every 10,000, the 18th highest rate among the 50 states. The HUD’s 2022 report also found that nationally, Montana saw the second largest increase in the number of individuals experiencing chronic patterns of homelessness at 313%.

Some sources suggest more could be done at the state level to support communities dealing with this crisis, but recent action could change that. In Montana’s 68th legislative session in 2023, House Bill 5 appropriated up to $5 million in grants the Department of Commerce can offer nonprofits that provide emergency shelter to the homeless for “emergency shelter, property acquisition, construction, shelter space acquisition, or general capital improvement projects.” Others argue its more of a “macroeconomic problem,” with circumstances mainly driven by the real estate market moreso than state legislation.

Responses from Montana’s urban hubs further illustrate the scale of the issue, and the inflection point the

state faces in addressing it. Missoula, which has long grappled with its homeless population, took action on its exacerbated condition when its mayor declared a homelessness and sheltering state of emergency in June of 2023, an unprecedented action for the city. Subsequent sweeps have shut down encampments, costing the city more than $40,000 during the summer and displacing unsheltered people.

Across the Divide, action around homelessness has dominated city commission agendas and public discussion in Bozeman. Camper-lined streets are becoming increasingly visible, and “urban camping” has become a household term as well as a political one. In October of 2023, the Bozeman City Commission passed an ordinance requiring people sleeping in their vehicles or campers on city streets to relocate every 30 days, and allowing the city to issue civil fines of up to $25. The ratified version reduced terms of an original draft that required people move after five days and allowed fines of up to $100. The Bozeman ordinance, as well as related issues, have attracted significant community feedback, with people both suggesting that the regulations are too harsh or not harsh enough.

Bozeman businesses filed a lawsuit in the same month against the City of Bozeman, claiming the city has failed to enforce its own laws regarding urban campers.

The lawsuit requests the encampments are moved from near their businesses “to more suitable, safe and healthy locations.” The plaintiffs have also asked for a detailed plan, with deadlines and action items, “assuring the health, safety and security of all existing urban encampments on public lands or public streets,” Montana Free Press reported.

--

This issue’s Outbound Gallery attempts to deconstruct these headlines and statistics through the power of story.

Through Montana photojournalist Hazel Cramer’s intimate exploration of three individuals’ experiences of homelessness in Bozeman, Missoula and Billings, perhaps the hard line bisecting this issue can dissolve, and this gallery can inspire innate connection rooted in the human experience.

–The Editors

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M E E T H E AT H E R H AY E S .

Hayes is a Missoula resident who, since losing her employment in 2019, has also lost her housing. Hayes’ newest home is her camp on the bank of the Clark Fork River, an area subjected to Missoula city sweeps.

Hayes’ ID was stolen four years ago, marking the start of what she describes as a “red tape nightmare.”

To obtain a new ID, Hayes needs another form of ID. Growing up in an abusive household and in and out of foster care, her other forms of ID have been lost. Hayes says with her limited resources, tracking down something like a birth certificate has become nearly impossible. "With an ID, I could get employment, and then I could get on the way to getting my life back," Hayes said.

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Hayes stands near East Broadway Street in Missoula on Oct. 4, 2023.

Photos by Hazel Cramer

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Hayes starts warming coffee in her current camp as her partner David Stoen inspects their pigeon adoptees. "We have so much more to do every day to get our basic needs met than the normal person has to," Stoen said. "And we don't know, one day to the next, when they're just going to come and take this all away."

Hayes pets one of her unicorns in her stuffy collection. "You have to find joy in the little things because that's really all you have," Hayes said.

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Hayes holds a Missoulian article featuring a photo of herself advocating for the houseless in Missoula.

"I started doing some advocacy work because I realized someone had to start telling our perspective," she said.

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Hayes and Stoen caress on the corner where Stoen had been holding a cardboard sign asking for help for an hour. "This story is about so much more than me," Hayes said. "It's about the situation that everybody's in. The houseless community as a whole."

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Kneeling on the bank of the Clark Fork River, Hayes carefully adds new stones to her rock garden. "I don't know if I look for the heart-shaped ones, or if they find me," she said.

Hayes wears a butterfly ring to remember a lost friend from a dark time in her life. When she was 19, Hayes says she was captured and forced into a torture traffic ring. Another victim of the ring didn't make it out.

"We called her Butterfly because she was the smallest of all of us,” Hayes said.

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M E E T D O N AT K I N S O N .

Atkinson has been homeless on and off for 20 years and has fought a long battle with alcoholism. Upon turning 41 in 2022, he moved into the Montana Rescue Mission in Billings.

“It was the shame on my family’s face out here that made me want to better my life,” he said. “Just the look of hurt on their face of not being able to help me.”

Since joining the rehabilitation program at MRM on July 5, 2023, he’s been proudly working toward a new life, one where he can have a relationship with his 8-year-old daughter, go to college and move out of the shelter.

The MRM program requires shelter guests to save 80% of their paycheck.

Atkinson says it’ll help him pay for his HiSET (GED equivalency test), “and the only reason I’m thinking about trade school is because of this program—I want to be able to weld.”

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Atkinson is looking toward a better future. He stood for a portrait on Oct. 8, 2023 in front of the sugar beet factory where he works.

Photos by Hazel Cramer

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Atkinson holds two of his most sentimental possessions: his Bible and a picture of his daughter, with whom he is excited to restart a relationship. She was adopted in 2015, but Atkison says he stays in touch with her new family to follow her childhood. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he said.

After getting ready, Atkinson heads downstairs to the cafeteria which doubles as an emergency shelter room when it’s cold. “Eggs and bacon?” Atkinson said smiling, “This is a good day—it’s not usually like this.”

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After waking up at 6 a.m., Atkinson gets ready for work. “You kinda get used to sharing a bathroom after a while of being here,” he said. He shares a windowless bunk room and bathroom with 47 other men.

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Atkinson meets up with some buddies and walks the 10 blocks to the sugar beet factory. The MRM requires guests to save 80% of their paycheck, which Atkinson said will help him pay for his GED equivalency test. He hopes to attend a trade school for welding.

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Atkinson laces up his work boots in the MRM lobby. “Anyone else who’s in the same position as me should come over here and get as much help as possible. There are plenty of resources here in Billings—and if you want to get into a place, they’ll help you and make sure you’ll get in one.”

Atkinson leaves work to head back to the shelter. “Through this program, I learned to not be so judgmental of other people in my position. You don’t know what anyone’s going through actually. Until you walk in their shoes, how could you judge them?”

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M E E T K E N D R A A LT O N .

After breaking things off with her partner in Arizona in February of 2023, Alton packed her five kids and two dogs into their plumcolored minivan with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing and headed to Bozeman seeking family support.

The three-day trip drained Alton’s bank account, and her family was unable to house her and her kids.

“I didn’t have access to childcare, so I was just bumming money from people to stay in motels because I couldn’t get a job—someone had to watch my kids,” she said. “So there were maybe only four nights we had to spend in the car.” In April 2023, Alton’s case was adopted by Family Promise of Gallatin Valley, a nonprofit that provides solutions to families experiencing homelessness. Since then, the nonprofit granted Alton and her family temporary housing, which has allowed the single mother to make steps toward a stable future.

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Kendra Alton stands for a portrait outside her kids’ school in Bozeman. “The school has been amazing— they gave us 10 nights in a motel right before Family Promise took our case,” she said on Oct. 5, 2023.

Photos by Hazel Cramer

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Alton holds her youngest, Jorgi, as (from left to right) Butch, Jeremiah and Vanessa finish dinner in their temporary housing on the evening of Oct. 18, 2023. “Losing this place is my biggest fear. This is a home for my family now—I just can’t go through that again,” she said.

Jorgi, 3, has bathtime in the kitchen sink as the other kids cycle through the family’s shared bathroom to get ready for bed. “In the beginning, I would wait until everybody went to sleep and I would just go in the bathroom and just cry. Not even because I was sad, it just felt like the right thing to do—it was just all built up. I did always feel better afterwards though,” Alton said.

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Getting ready for work, Alton puts mascara on as her twins watch. “Having the older kids in school and the younger ones in daycare has been the best possible thing for us. Now I can go to work and get them after the day is done,” she said on Oct. 19, 2023.

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All five kids hang out around Mom’s room. Alton’s bed shares space with Jorgi’s crib (right), one of the dog kennels and the elliptical (left), all tucked in a corner right off the kitchen. “I applied for a new apartment through the HRDC, and we’re 10th on the waiting list. The three bedroom would be the most ideal,” Alton said on Oct. 19, 2023.

“Mom, I think my lips are really chapped,” says Veta, Alton’s oldest. Alton drives from PetSmart, where she works as an assistant dog groomer, to her kid’s elementary school for pick-up round one. “I’ll get the babies next,” Alton said on Nov. 3, 2023.

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Alton stands for a portrait on one of the last warm days in Bozeman with her five kids: Jeremiah, Veta, Vanessa, Jorgi and Butch.

“My kids are thriving here, and so am I.” If all goes according to plan, Alton will start at the PetSmart Academy Nov. 26, 2023, to become a certified dog groomer, meaning more responsibility and a pay raise.

Hazel Cramer is a documentary filmmaker and photojournalist in Bozeman, Montana. In her work, she draws attention to humanitarian issues in the hope that it will inspire readers to think critically about their role in society.

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A mountain goat peers over the water of one of the Spanish Lakes in the Spanish Peaks of southwest Montana.

Photo by Ethan Schumacher

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This Is My Prairie

A land profile of southeastern Montana, as seen through the eyes and heart of a devout steward Words and Photos by Alexis Bonogofsky

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t was 5:30 a.m. on the winter solstice.

A thin blanket of snow from the night before coated the ground, but otherwise it was pitch black outside. And cold. As I turned onto Nick’s driveway, I could see my headlights reflect off his horse’s eyes.

When I opened the screen door, it creaked loudly and banged closed behind me like it always had, no matter how quietly I tried to walk into the 100-year-old ranch house. The kitchen light was on but Nick wasn’t at the table. I knocked softly at first and then a bit harder. I opened the door a crack and stuck my head in.

“Nick? It’s me.” I stepped into the kitchen.

I saw a light on down the hall, so I walked toward it and saw Nick sitting

at his desk, hunched over his old laptop, squinting at the screen. He was wearing his outside clothes: a wool cap, a Carhartt jacket with rips and tears, work pants and boots, like he had just come in from feeding the cows.

“Nick?” He didn’t hear me. There was a small radio on his desk playing some old-timey music I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t remember ever hearing the radio in Nick’s house. I didn’t even know Nick listened to music.

“Nick.” I put my hand on his shoulder.

He turned to look at me.

“Well, hello young lady. What are you doing out so late?” For a moment, his question made me wonder if it actually was night.

A September sunrise lights up the Rosebud Creek Valley.

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Yucca super bloom on the Golder Ranch prairie in July 2015.

“I’m going to take some pictures, Nick.”

“Oh, you doin’ one of those night shoots again? You’ll need a place to stay though. The room upstairs is ready.”

“No, it’s going to be dawn in a couple of hours and I want to be in a good place by sunrise.”

For a moment he looked confused.

“Well, stop by when you’re done.”

Five and a half years after that solstice morning, I’m driving on a two-track across Nick’s ranch with my cameras in tow, probably for the last time. Dust kicks up behind the pickup and I find myself relaxing with the familiar smells of sage and grass. The prairie is not for everyone, but it is definitely for me.

When Nick passed away more than a year ago, I knew this day had been coming. His kids left the ranch years ago, like many ranch kids do, and it was inevitable that the ranch would be sold. I knew the price tag would put it out of reach for anyone from the local community. No one can make that sort of land payment just by selling cows. I figured it

was going to be bought by someone from out of state who wanted the ranch for an investment property and a private hunting reserve. Those folks don’t usually let prairie-loving photographers wander around their ranches whenever they feel like it.

I had met Nick when I was organizing to stop a proposed coal mine in the nearby Otter Creek Valley. Nick had been involved in coal mining issues most of his life. We would sit at his kitchen table and talk about the first coal mining boom in southeast Montana. I wanted to learn everything he knew, so I could be as effective an advocate as possible for the land and its people.

“The Big Sky country of Montana offers some of the best ranches you can find. And for the first time in 75 years, a historic ranch on Rosebud Creek is for sale.”

– Golder Ranch real estate listing I hop out of the pickup to open a gate and remember a particularly beautiful day I spent photographing the ranch.

Rainstorm bursts had passed by, one after another, through

Above right: Rancher Nick Golder relaxes at camp on the far back reaches of his ranch before moving cows closer to the ranch house in October 2014. Right: A pronghorn buck on the grasslands of the Golder Ranch in July 2015.

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Below: A petroglyph (a prehistoric rock carving) of a bear on a south facing wall of a large sandstone rock formation on the Golder Ranch.

Behind the bear is a lighter carving of a warrior bearing a shield.

Right: Intermittent rain storms move through the hills and valleys on the Golder Ranch in southeast Montana in mid-June 2015.

the valley. After years of drought, the sunlight’s rays shone through the clouds that day and lit up the tops of the hills striated with red, yellow, white and black layers, geological phenomena I never took the time to learn about.

The rain pulled the clouds closer to the ground. There were yucca blooms as far as I could see. I had been enamored with the landscape on this ranch for so long that sometimes I felt there was no other place worth photographing. It was the reason I had bought an expensive camera and taught myself how to use it.

“This legacy property checks all the boxes on your agriculture, conservation, recreational and investment property list—all within a serene setting rarely available in Montana. It’s easily accessible location allows for an authentic Western experience.”

– Golder Ranch real estate listing On my last day here, I want to visit all of my favorite sandstone rock formations, sentinels keeping watch over Rosebud Creek. They are surreal, graceful and imposing; a manifestation of an ancient conversation between wind, water

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and sun—a conversation that will continue on for billions of years, outlasting not only me and Nick, but all the future landowners of this place, people I hope will cherish it as much as I do.

One rock looks like an ocean wave hardened in mid-crest.

Another also bears resemblance to the sea, but this one is calm with smooth, gentle waves. Another has a narrow passageway that you can scramble up to on top of the rocks, over 50 feet high. The vantage reveals wildflowers, grass and little gnarled pine trees growing in the pocket of soil that has built up over hundreds of thousands of years. Other rocks take the shape of owls, hawks, even penguins.

“Recreation opportunities abound throughout the ranch including hunting, horseback riding, hiking, ATV and UTV riding and searching for artifacts that are both man-made and fossils.

Remnants of earth’s first visitors have been discovered in the area and on this ranch, providing a glimpse of past events. You could spend years exploring this Ranch and you may just uncover artifacts.”

– Golder Ranch real estate listing

Petroglyphs carved by people from the Plains tribes adorn many of the south- and east-facing walls on the rocks. One of the most striking carvings is of a bear. It has keyhole-shaped eyes, prominent claws and lines in its gut that look like arrows.

Behind the bear is a warrior with a shield, tall and skinny.

There are other carvings nearby: warriors bearing shields, deer, elk, bighorn sheep, disembodied faces, snakes.

This rock has seen tens of thousands of years of human life in the Rosebud Creek Valley. Native Americans lived, hunted, gathered, and held ceremonies in the valley for tens of thousands of years, and the Northern Cheyenne people still live here. The rock witnessed the Northern Cheyenne and Lakota as they prepared to battle the U.S. Calvary in their desperate fight to save the lives of their people and their way of life. It also watched Custer and his troops ride to their deaths at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. I guess those are the “events” to which the real estate listing is referring.

I sit at the base of the rock for the last time, my camera in my lap, my border collie, Hula, by my side, and imagine everything this rock has seen. I tell it to watch for me on the highway; I’d wave when I was in the neighborhood.

Nick hung the very first photo I had ever taken of his ranch on the wall in his living room. It wasn’t the best picture I’d taken of his place, not even close, but it was the first. He had been moving cows up a valley in late fall, bringing them closer to the house before winter set in. I remember the light that day, late afternoon golden rays that lit up the land like no other.

After that day, and over the course of 15 years, I would take thousands more photos on his ranch, the place that inspired me to be a photographer.

I take the photo off the wall, wrap it in bubble wrap, and box it up with the rest of the art that still hung on the walls of his house. I grab the box of Nick’s books his son had given me, and walk out for the last time. The screen door bangs closed behind me.

Alexis Bonogofsky is a writer and photographer who works and lives on her family’s ranch outside of Billings, MT. She also manages the Sustainable Ranching Initiative in the Northern Great Plains for the World Wildlife Fund.

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Even during Montana’s snowy winters, wildfire and climate change impacts smolder

By Gabrielle Gasser

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O

n a cold, clear winter day, facets glitter atop a blanket of snow covering a hillside just south of Big Sky, Montana, in Yellowstone National Park. A group of backcountry skiers ascend a slope covered in blackened tree trunks, moving in and out of the shadows they cast.

These charred skeletons are remnants of the 2018 Bacon Rind Fire that blazed through 5,200 acres. What the skiers don’t see as they climb uphill are the invisible processes that govern wildfire’s impact on winter as well as climate change’s command over this landscape.

Recent climate data published in the 2021 Greater Yellowstone Climate Assessment shows that temperatures are rising, wildfire season is expanding, and snowpack is retreating to higher elevations. These intertwined phenomena each help explain each other. Eric Larson, water supply specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, explains their relatedness in an equation that goes something like this: The snowpack naturally absorbs and reflects solar radiation, also called shortwave radiation. The reflection created by the snowpack is an important process that helps to cool the planet.

Summer burns leave an open slope peppered Backcountry skiers ascend a burned slope near Lost Trail Pass in Montana. Photo by Micah Robin

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Avalanche forecaster and educator Todd Glew examines a snowpack in a burn area in the Bitterroot Mountains. Photo by Bella Butler

with charred trunks where there was once a sheltering canopy of trees. Without their shade, the equation is altered, and the snowpack absorbs much more radiation than it reflects. Snow starts to melt—faster and sooner.

These earlier melt outs, according to Larson, can then affect the duration of the season and the peak snow water equivalent or the amount of liquid water contained within the snowpack.

He added that this in turn impacts water supply come late summer.

“Increased forest fires and the effects they’d have on our local watersheds is concerning, particularly because we might rely more on summer precipitation to sustain late summer streamflow,” Larson said. “That is not a situation I’d like to see, especially in a rapidly developing area where water supply demand is increasing.”

Impacts like these from wildfires are then amplified by climate change. According to Cathy Whitlock, regents professor emerita of earth sciences at Montana State University, the planet is projected to warm anywhere from 4 to 10 degrees

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by the end of the century, and so far Montana has warmed at a faster rate than the contiguous U.S.; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data reveals that Montana warmed at a rate of .2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade between 1901-2022 while the rest of the lower 48 warmed at a rate of .16 degrees Fahrenheit during the same period. Whitlock says this seemingly small difference is significant, attributing it to Montana’s northern, land-locked location as well as the state’s high elevation.

Whitlock was a co-author on the 2021 Greater Yellowstone Climate Assessment, which projects that a trend of rising temperatures will likely cause more precipitation to fall as rain or a rain-snow mix, rather than snow, leading to less snowpack and drier summers. Additionally, warming is leading to more precipitation in the spring and fall rather than summer and winter.

“It’s not so much that you’re getting less precipitation, but it’s that you’re getting less of the precipitation as falling snow,” Whitlock said. The type of precipitation makes a difference.

“Our snowpack is considered our natural reservoir of water,” Whitlock said. “The longer we keep snow on the mountains then there’s more recharge of the soils, soil moisture, more water going into our streams … If you lose that natural reservoir and instead you replace it with something like rain, which doesn’t last as long, it evaporates from the soils more quickly, then your soils are going to be drier during the fire season.” She says moving into the future, fire seasons will trend longer and drier because of the loss of snowpack and increase in rain.

Each of these factors has a cyclical effect on the other.

Warming and more fires means less snowpack which leads to less moisture which can then lead to worse fire seasons.

According to Custer Gallatin National Forest Fire Staff Officer Scott Schuster, the 2022-23 winter yielded a higherthan-average snowpack, but a warm May reversed a lot of those gains, melting the snow down to a near-normal level by June. But heavy summer rain was a saving grace, according to Schuster, and despite the early melting it was a quiet fire season. Last summer, 1,576 fires were recorded in Montana versus 2,630 total fires in 2021, according to the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.

Schuster, who has been fighting fire across the Western U.S. for 30 years, says when he first started, a 1,000-acre fire was considered large, and fire season was squelched by mid-September. Now, Schuster says the length of fire season is stretching on either end, and a June fire burning thousands of acres like the 2021 Robertson Draw Fire near Red Lodge, is considered commonplace.

This reality paints a picture of more of those charred, open slopes, promising changes to water supply, snowpack and even avalanche terrain. Bozeman-based Karl Birkeland has been working in the avalanche field for almost 45 years and currently serves as the senior avalanche scientist for the Forest Service National Avalanche Center. Though his focus is on snow, Birkeland said he is always interested in burn areas.

“If a fire wipes out trees in steep terrain, then [it] can form an avalanche path,” Birkeland said. “A place that might not have

had avalanche danger before, now you have avalanche danger.”

Birkeland says another trend he’s observing in the backcountry is that snowfall is increasingly retreating to higher elevations, leading to less runoff for the following summer.

Echoing Whitlock, Birkeland described the relationship between snow, fire and climate change as a “feedback loop.”

“When you start getting that snow line creeping up, the overall storage of snow ends up being less,” Birkeland said.

“That means less snowmelt available for runoff during the next summer. That’s one of the things that we’re seeing a lot of over this last decade or two is … a huge amount of variability [in the amount of snow stored] in some parts of the country compared to what there was before.”

A strong El Niño weather pattern is expected to command the 2023-24 winter season, which can bring drier conditions, though Whitlock said the effect could go either way for southwestern Montana since it is in an intermediate transitional geography zone. Regardless of what this season brings, longer-term data suggests a trend of hotter and drier seasons. This will not only affect the snow sports that so many recreationists in Montana enjoy, but also the places they have chosen to live.

“One of the biggest worries about fire is the fact that we have so many people living in these fire prone forests now,” Whitlock said. “We’ve had large fires in the past, but now we have lots and lots of people living in places that are likely to burn.”

Gabrielle Gasser is a writer and photographer who grew up in Big Sky, Montana, and currently resides in Bozeman. When she’s not outside skiing or hiking, you can find her curled up with a good book.

“Increased forest fires and the effects they’d have on our local watersheds is concerning, particularly because we might rely more on summer precipitation to sustain late summer streamflow. That is not a situation I’d like to see, especially in a rapidly developing area where water supply demand is increasing.”

–Eric Larson, Natural Resources Conservation Service water supply specialist

The Bacon Rind Fire, which burned approximately 5,200 acres south of Big Sky, photographed on July 30, 2018.

Photo courtesy of Custer Gallatin National Forest

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Winter Wildlife Guide A seasonal look at Greater Yellowstone’s adaptive characters

By Jen Clancey

Elk | Cervus canadensis According to the National Park Service, elk are the most abundant large mammal in Yellowstone. In the winter, their population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem decreases from summertime’s 10,000-20,000 to less than 4,000. Even with smaller seasonal herds, they are an essential food source for winter predators, composing 85 percent of wolf kills and supplying eats to 12 scavenger species.

A bull elk’s age can be identified by the size, width and number of points on their antlers. At 11 or 12 years old, an elk will likely have the thickest, heaviest and largest antlers in its lifetime. After that, their antler size will decrease. As spring rolls around, you may have a better chance of witnessing evidence of an elk’s path: shed antlers are replaced by new ones in the warmer months.

A cow elk moves through snow at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Neal Herbert/NPS

Fun Fact: An elk’s color changes from light tan in the spring, fall, and winter, to copper brown in the summer.

Courtesy Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation

Long-tailed Weasel | Neogale frenata While the long-tailed weasel is the largest and most widely distributed of the three North American weasels, you might have a hard time spotting them in the winter. During the spring and summer, the weasels sport a brown coat with a white stomach. But when snow begins to fall, their coats become entirely white as they transform into their winter version, the ermine. Not only does this allow them to hide from predators, but it also camouflages them when they are on the hunt for voles, mice, pocket gophers, smaller birds and rabbits. During the spring and summer, they add various reptiles and amphibians to their diet.

If you are keen to find these elusive winter creatures, here’s a tip from Wade: "Trying to follow their tracks isn't something that's going from point A to point B. It's this really crazy… track pattern, but it's because they're listening to the mice below the snow, and are following exactly on top of wherever that mouse is moving."

The 13- to 18-inch long mammals will likely be seen alone as they are solitary animals.

Fun Fact: The long-tailed weasel’s presence spans from southern Canada to northern South America.

Courtesy University of Minnesota-Duluth 66

A long-tailed weasel dons its winter coat.

Photo by Bryant Olsen

One of the wonders of Montana is the wildlife it hosts, its magnificence due in part to the resiliency needed to survive in an often-harsh environment.

Montana’s winters illustrate this best, challenging its living inhabitants with blustering winds, freezing temps, dumps of snow and all the side effects of such conditions—especially in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

As a Yellowstone guide for more than 30 years, Denise Wade knows this best. Since 2018, Wade has co-owned Big Sky Adventures & Tours, and her

clients are treated to a unique experience in the snowy season.

“A lot of the winter tours definitely focus on talking about adaptations that wildlife has to make to survive the winters here,” Wade said.

Whether you’re on a tour with Wade, out on an independent adventure or are simply observing the outdoors from your living room window, enjoy Mountain Outlaw’s field guide as a way to study and appreciate some of Greater Yellowstone’s hardy wildlife—and keep your eyes peeled!

Peregrine Falcon | Falco peregrinus Because these birds are mostly seen from March through October in the Greater Yellowstone region, it’s a real treat to spot a peregrine falcon during the winter. Coasting at 55 mph when flying, these falcons travel at speeds up to 200 mph when attacking prey—mainly songbirds and waterfowl—in mid-air.

"Peregrine falcons are beautiful to see," Wade said. But for the more casual bird spotter, she advises looking out for eagles if you’re itching to see a predatory bird. "We do get a lot of bald eagles that come down from Canada during winter here. So it's really common to see bald eagles in the winter, more so than the summer," Wade said.

The falcons' population began declining in the 1940s due to impacts from pesticide use. During the 1980s the National Park Service launched efforts to reintroduce the species through captive-bred peregrines, releasing them into Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. In 2022, the park service saw at least 21 young in studied territories.

A male peregrine falcon perches on a branch in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Pat Gaines

Fun Fact: The falcon’s name, derived from the Latin word peregrinus, means “to wander.” Courtesy American Bird Conservancy

Mountain Lion | Puma concolor The cougar, also known as the mountain lion, can be confused with the jaguar of New Mexico and Arizona, but is a smaller species that dwells in more rocky and rugged territories of the West. Due to their elusive nature, cougars narrowly survived an early 1900s campaign to kill off predators.

According to the National Park Service, cougars were all but eliminated from Yellowstone National Park but began a slow return to their historic homelands in the 1980s.

Wade says cougars are among the rarest animal to see during both her tours and own personal animal-watching. "Cougars are really hard to see. And for me personally, that's where looking for wildlife tracks and putting together those clues of tracks or scat or rubbings on trees or scratch marks [is important]," she said.

There are an estimated 32 to 42 cougars in the northern portion of Yellowstone National Park, and they are most often seen through the lens of remote cameras and webcams. In the summer, cougars tend to remain at higher elevation but as the weather turns colder, they begin to descend.

Fun Fact: On average, cougars kill elk every 9.4 days and spend about four days with each kill. Courtesy National Park Service

A cougar tom peers through tree branches in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Jacob W. Frank/NPS

Jen Clancey is the digital producer at Outlaw Partners.

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A DV E N T U R E SK I 'PROGRE S ' // 72 MON TA NA LI N E S // 8 0 EM BR ACI NG T HE SPIRIT OF M AV ERICK // 86

BY HOOF A N D BY PL A N K // 90

Cole Herdman takes a ride through the rolling hills of Southwest Montana as glowing rays push through an overcast sky. Photo by Micah Robin

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DISPATCH: CAN SKI TOURING DEVELOP IN THE BALKANS AND HEAL THE WOUNDS OF A WAR-TORN LAND?

By Scott Yorko

The last people on the mountain catch the sunset on Dog Peak in Albania at the 2023 Ski Tour Fest in the Balkans. Photo courtesy of solutions4u

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T

HERE’S AN OLD, rickety farm tractor weaving circles under a gray sky on the tarmac of Montenegro’s Podgorica Airport.

It’s decorated with multicolor swirls and flames and some googly eyes spray-painted around the headlights, and it appears to be lost, perhaps missing from a nearby parade. Then I see the wagon train full of suitcases trailing behind it and realize this is the international airport’s official luggage transportation vehicle. I’m tickled by the novelty until I look a little closer and realize that my ski bag is not on it.

Irma, the airport Lost and Found attendant with a wide, gap-toothed smile and a ridgeline of eyebrows under dark, curly hair, fills out some paperwork for my lost “sledding devices” and hands it to me before getting up from her tiny desk in baggage claim to walk out for lunch. “Do you think it will arrive in the next few days?”

I ask. “I’m heading pretty far out into the mountains.”

“Yes,” she says with an even wider smile beneath a devious eyebrow dip. “This is Montenegro.”

I nod and pretend to know what she means by that, deciding to take it as reassurance.

THE DRIVE OUT of the capital city to the dreary outskirts is not a scenic one at first. Regional roads pass billboards advertising cured meats. Some blocky, dirt-stained buildings are only a bit higher than adjacent trash mounds. Then the newly built highway, barely three years old, traces the frosty blue Ciena River, its bankside trees also littered with wet trash, into the belly of the Accursed Mountains. Dark, granite rock faces plastered with snow shoot up to the sky, encasing the road in a vertical walled canyon. After passing some medieval castle-like buildings made of stone, the range opens up to prominent 6,500-foot peaks in expansive terrain that looks more and more like a skier’s paradise, although most of it has never been skied.

Two hours later, the town of Plav awaits at the foothills of the 8,300-foot Bogićevica mountain area. This is the meeting point for the fourth annual Ski Tour Fest of the Balkans, when skiers and splitboarders from nine different countries come together and descend upon the mountainous, war-torn region of southeastern Europe in an effort to build a ski touring community from scratch while patching over somewhat fresh political wounds. Small cars are parked in a gravel lot next to a guesthouse, and people in brightly colored Gore-Tex outerwear contrast the gloomy clouds overhead as they stand around chatting

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bridge gaps across borders with neighboring countrymen, finding common ground with their fellow Balkan skiers, while Bosnia Serbia also laying the foundations for future development of these remote areas that can cater to ski touring visitors. Over the last two decades since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and Durmitor Montenegro’s independence in 2006, people have been hearing Montenegro Hajla promises of foreign consortiums coming to the Balkan States Plav Kosovo to develop large-scale ski resorts that will bring prosperity Bogićevica and heal the wounds of the war-torn countries. But thanks Podgorica Prokletije Brezovica to widespread corruption, political inefficiency and social Ad ria disengagement, it has yet to come to fruition, leaving some of t ic Albania North the best skiing in Europe outside of the Alps untouched—until Se Macedonia a now. But first we have to make it up the road.

Rain threatens to dampen the mood at the opening bonfire, as well as at breakfast the next morning. It’s the worst snow Italy season Europe has had in 20 years, but the vibe holds steady.

Greece “Yugoslavia was like one family that got broken up and we’re here trying to get back together,” says one tall Slovenian named Ziga.

“I’m so hype to see you new people here this year!” says a Bosnian snowboarder named Timur who’s mostly never not rolling up a smoke.

Irma the airport employee’s promise has proven empty, and without my bag I’m less psyched to ski in the rain in my jeans, the cotton t-shirt and underwear I’ve been wearing for four days, a trenchcoat I found in a closet, wool mittens knitted by a Slovenian grandmother, and borrowed skis. But people show up, beacons beeping, ready to ski, not taking this time in the mountains for granted, and the conga line of 30 starts up the valley in a drizzle, some wearing trash bags. These people are used to making do in less than perfect conditions, be they political, economic, social or snow. It feels silly not to join.

“We had the best snow I’ve ever skied in my life last year,” says a slender guy named Boris, a lifelong ski racer. “Those two-story houses over there were completely buried,” he points out as we pass a grouping of shepherd huts on our way toward Three Border Mountain, where you can stand at the intersection of Montenegro, Albania and Kosovo and ski through all three countries in an afternoon. Hundreds of thousands of bunkers exist in these hills from the wars, especially where we’re standing at such a strategic military location. Controlling the mountains meant controlling more and smoking. One of them is Gigo, a bald, 34-year-old entry points into one’s country and others. The same terrain professor of philosophy, environmental activist, and the that made this such a coveted war zone is also what makes it so festival’s Montenegrin founder and ringleader who’s loosely appealing to skiers—long, north-facing ridges with relentless directing folks. fall lines catching weather systems and funneling their snow “The history of the area is very complicated, but there was into the valley. always war between the East and the South with a lot of impact The entire party shares two small morsels of skin wax to fend from the Ottoman Empire’s conflict with Western Europe, off wet globs from forming underfoot, passing them up and so we’re at the border and all the wars happened here on our down the skin track, before gaining the windy ridge with no territory with people often having to fight their own neighbors,” visibility and quickly retreating down on a mix of windboard Gigo told me on the phone weeks earlier. “Our family’s history and wet, heavy mank. “At Ski Fest, you have to start off with is always connected with war in every previous generation, and struggles so you appreciate every little good thing that comes that’s all people know this area for…We want to connect them along,” says Boris, aware of this statement’s cultural relevance. instead with beautiful mountains and skiing. It’s our mission.”

Back at the Maslo restaurant, a stonewalled family residence Gigo sees the untapped skiing potential of this region as that the government has commandeered several times during an attraction that can break through old cultural barriers and

“OUR FAMILY’S HISTORY IS

ALWAYS CONNECTED WITH WAR IN EVERY PREVIOUS

GENERATION, AND THAT’S ALL

PEOPLE KNOW THIS AREA FOR… WE WANT TO CONNECT THEM INSTEAD WITH BEAUTIFUL MOUNTAINS AND SKIING. IT’S OUR MISSION.”

–Gigo, Ski Tour Fest founder

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wars, the owner, Almir, is throwing a party for locals with money from the Ski Tour Fest to establish a positive association with winter ski tourism. Meat is on the grill, balloons line the doorway, and old-time music plays with accordion sounds and operatic ballads from every Balkan nation. Men sit and smoke while several generations of women hold hands and dance, then sit and smoke.

“The message here is that we can all live together,” says Katrina, a local woman starting an art gallery down in Plav.

“We have a broken-up family all coming back together and if the politicians don’t put their fingers inside, it’s going to be the healthiest family in the world.”

It’s rare for political corruption to not enter the conversation.

“We had to pay [read: bribe] the local government to clean the roads just for this week,” Almir says. “And yet they want to build a highway and tunnel through this valley to Kosovo so some politician can use the project to take money from the people and buy votes with temporary jobs and never finish the project. We don’t want traffic and garbage. We want people who will come and stay for a few days and enjoy the nature, stay in guesthouses and eat our local food … Now when we want to organize something like this Ski Tour Fest, the people will trust us more than the local government. Three years ago, no one even came here in the winter.”

That night, outside the restaurant window, sleety raindrops become bigger and lighter as they try and try to turn to snow.

“EVERY WINTER SHOULD be white!” sings Almir at breakfast on the third ski morning, ecstatic over the 2 inches of fresh powder that’s fallen overnight and bonded to the old

snow. Folks hustle out the door and lap slushy spring turns off the summit of Dog Peak. Even the local legend, Esad, a devout Muslim lone-wolf and shepherd with several peaks in the valley named after his family, comes out to rip some turns.

Balkan voices are classically low, flat, and monotone, but today they’re punctuated with shrieks of “Hopa!” and “Woooo!”—the international sound of stoke. “Pamet U Glavu y Pun Gas!” they yell while straightlining patches of sticky snow. “Smart in the head and full gas!” It turns out these folks can really shred, arcing confident turns without wasting a single one.

The spring ski party is on and people are hugging each other at the bottom of runs. “It’s much more wild in the Balkans,” says Iva, a tiny blond Slovenian anthropologist. “You can get much closer to people here where they tell us ‘You are our brothers.’ We don’t hear that in Western Europe … There’s this feeling that we should get back together.”

One can’t deny the sense that they’re not just here to ski but to start a movement while everyone talks about “spreading the word” and getting out of this cultural rut of which they’ve grown tired. But change is slow and motivating the rest of the country to do anything different is an uphill battle, which is why sentences often end with “but this is Montenegro…” Each time I hear this, it reminds me that it’s day four and my ski bag still hasn’t showed up from the airport. One younger guy offers me some of his underwear and explains these words a little more, how it may sound like an assurance but it really means “I can say yes without any idea if it’s true or will ever happen at all.”

I try to accept that this is just my customary sacrifice to the trip, paying my dues with a common hardship to better appreciate

Below left: On the final day of the festival, participants get ready for cat skiing in Peja, Kosovo. Photo courtesy of solutions4u Below right: Ivan Kalezic, a member of mountain rescue service and one of the festival's organizers, evaluates the the snow conditions with another participant. Photo courtesy of solutions4u

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THE SAME TERRAIN THAT MADE THIS SUCH A COVETED WAR ZONE IS ALSO WHAT MAKES IT SO APPEALING TO SKIERS: LONG, NORTH-FACING RIDGES WITH RELENTLESS FALL LINES CATCHING WEATHER SYSTEMS AND FUNNELING THEIR SNOW INTO THE VALLEY.

the sweetness of fresh snow and fresh base layers whenever they finally arrive. It helps, but I still scoff when we skin by a trail sign with a hopeful sticker that reads “#ProgresIsHere.”

With such little winter tourism infrastructure in the region for mountain transportation, food, shelter and guiding, from a logistical standpoint, you pretty much need to attend Ski Tour Fest to be able to ski here. That also means that first descents are waiting to be nabbed with countless aspects still untouched by skis. On the fifth day in Bogićevica, my friend Tyler from Colorado and I recruit a young Slovenian for a pre-dawn mission to climb and ski a prominent double fall line couloir with snow painted across the cliff band of a 8,310-foot mountain called Krš Bogićevica, a face at which we’ve been staring all week. After a few hours of sunrise skinning up a road past some boarded up cabins, followed by an hour and a half bootpack, we were putting our mark on a virgin 45-degree run with exposed pow turns up high and heavy pillow drops through the forest down low. The rewarding mission and snow conditions, along with my gear that miraculously showed up the evening before, redeems my stoke in this place.

Back down in the town of Plav, Muslim prayer sounds at 3 p.m. near the place where our driver ran over a chicken.

Several people from the group are gathered in a field reading different countries’ border rules on their ministry websites. The Slovenians can’t go straight to our next destination in Kosovo from Montenegro because they won’t be able to go home through Serbia, which still doesn’t recognize neighboring Kosovo as a country because of their ongoing conflicts.

THINGS FEEL LESS rosy back in civilization, where police

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Domen Stular from Slovenia skis down Dog Peak in Albania.

Montenegran peak, Krš Bogicevice, stands tall in the background.

Photo courtesy of solutions4u

and soldiers ask for three or four different identification documents every time they pull us over for bogus reasons.

Compared to staying in a rustic mountain cabin, the hotel in Brezovica, Kosovo, feels weirdly vintage. It looks like a cinder block on its side with a creepy dungeon bathroom and old, suited waiters who appear to have been there since the hotel was built. Kids on a school trip clunk through the echoing hallways in rental boots to go hike the bunny slope since only one of the seven lifts at the resort still works. I’m struck by the irony of a sign outside of an apres bar that reads “Are You Ready For Progress?”

The whole 32-person Ski Tour Fest group gathers the next morning at 9 a.m. at the base of the mountain, ready to make use of the almost strictly uphill-use policy. Gigo announces that there will be three groups going out: Extreme, Less Extreme, and Tired. With that, everyone just stays in the same group and skis as a single unit. They’ve spent enough years divided. It’s a 2,637-foot climb to the summit of the resort which has no grooming or visible ski patrol. What is visible is a vast park of diverse terrain with cliffs and couloirs in every direction, steep, wide-open pitches, well-spaced tree runs and giant, snow catching gullies that could be a distant cousin of Alta with denser snow. The top 1,300 feet even skis through the neighboring country of Macedonia.

We skin by a stagnant one-seater lift with heavy icicles dripping from each chair. “I used to ride that 25 years ago,” says a blue-eyed Serbian named Uros. There’s no telling how long it’s been since the bullwheel last spun.

Lapping untouched runs on an empty resort with new friends is a treat, though the question of whether skiing is

making a comeback—or a start—remains unanswered. There are more than a few reasons to explain why there are probably not more than 100 backcountry skiers in all of the Balkans, despite so much terrain, and why it’s taking time to get off the ground.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is motivation. It’s hard to get traction on any idea in a place where people have spent decades with empty promisers blowing smoke up their ass. But change in a small country has to start small, and Gigo has seen small Balkan villages band together to stop big, corrupt corporations from going through with senseless road and dam projects that don’t ever benefit the local people. “It’s enough to find at least 50 not corrupted, not brainwashed people to make real change,” he says. He’s seen this with the NGO that he started, Nature Lovers Montenegro, which has raised money from the EU to help save rivers from development projects and convert old Soviet railways into bike trails. “People need to see that there’s economic opportunity in working with what they already have in the land, not relying on what some big company promises they’ll do.”

And among economic promise, perhaps other opportunities, as well.

“This kind of event brings life into local communities, especially in winter,” says Boris, the ski racer. “There’s so much room to grow a positive thing here, to build the ski community without waiting on these big resorts that will never come. At this scale, if just one local person from Plav sees the ski fest this year and gets into the sport, it’s a success.”

ON THE 10TH and final day of the festival, we make our way back toward Montenegro and Albania but stop for a day of cat skiing in Western Kosovo outside the small town of Peja.

The snowcat looks like a hot dog stand mounted on a piste groomer, but everyone files into the box and ascends the steep ridge to 8,200 feet. The Serbians in the group had to cover their country’s flag on their license plates with stickers and stash their cars at a secure place in town since they wouldn’t be safe bringing them through the military checkpoint we pass through in the mountains. It’s Gigo’s first time in this area of the country since Montenegrans couldn’t go there until their war ended in 2006 and his head is on a swivel. “It’s exciting to find all these new places so close to home,” he says.

“We need more guides in Kosovo,” says Bardhosh, the snowcat company owner and operator. “More groups are starting to come and we have to turn them away.”

We’re treated to another playground of features: cliffs, trees, mini golf zones, chutes. One jagged peak looks familiar and I soon learn that we’re just on the other side of the ridge from Bogićevica, where the festival began. The guides are staring back down into the valley, already making plans to turn the festival into a hut-to-hut touring trip next year with a severalday linkup hosted by local families in their cabins along the way. It’s never been done before, but anything is possible here.

Afterall, this is Montenegro. This is the Balkans.

Scott Yorko is a Colorado-based freelance journalist who prefers skiing in jeans by choice rather than by luggage-losing necessity.

A group of participants passes by Bogicevica Katun in the Accursed Mountains. Photo courtesy of solutions4u

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a

How Parkin Costain went from Whitefish grom to the next big name in freeride

By Bella Butler

Parkin Costain is on his way to Big Sky when I call him for our interview on Sept. 23, 2023. It’s just before 4 p.m., and he’s meeting his family for a mountain bike ride on Mountain to Meadow, a trail his dad’s company helped build. He pulls off to the side of the road to take my call, and I promise him it won’t take long. The days for evening rides are numbered, and soon, Costain will trade his bike for skis as he embarks on another season as a professional freeride skier.

The Whitefish native has always chased Montana’s big lines, starting with his home mountain and eventually favoring Big Sky’s Headwaters ridge. Costain, now 24, first gained industry attention in 2015 when he won the Grom Contest hosted by Teton Gravity Research, the extreme sports media company he’s been filming ski movies with for five years now. In 2017, he won the Quicksilver Young Guns Ski Contest, setting him up for an ambassadorship with Moonlight Basin the following year, and additional sponsorships to come.

From his spot on the side of the road, Costain told me about how a small-town Montana skier is becoming one of the more recognized names in freeride. He’s come a long way since winning that Grom Contest, establishing himself as a multi-sport athlete and growing his presence throughout the industry, but TGR certainly got something right in its 2018 blog when it said, “Get used to hearing the name Parkin Costain.”

Mountain Outlaw: What does it mean today to be a professional freeride skier?

Parkin Costain: The term has certainly shifted— more since social media has come out than really any other time. Back in the day you used to be able to just be a good skier, do your thing over the winter and then no one would really know what was going on in your life until the premieres came out and the magazine articles came out the next season. But these days it’s more like, every single day of your life you have to be a so-called professional skier. And you have to use your social media to spread the word and show the world what [you’re] doing more so on a day-to-day basis.

M.O.: And so you have that film component that’s still a part of it, and that’s always been a big part of what it means to be a professional skier. But now you have social Professional freeride skier and Montana native Parkin Costain flies through the air while ripping a backcountry line. Photo by Jonathan Finch

media. Tell me a little bit about how sponsors play a role in your career.

P.C.: So there’s a big misconception … that TGR, the production company that I film with and others, pays the athletes like they do in Hollywood, and that’s definitely not the case. It’s all your sponsors, that I'm super fortunate to have a great select few of, and they partner up with the production company, and then you’re wearing all next year’s gear and then doing promotional services for them. So they pay you but then they also pay the production company.

So you can still come out on top but it's not like in Hollywood when you're just paid to be in the film.

M.O.: Who are your sponsors right now?

P.C.: [I’m] currently with Scott Sports, Backcountry. com, Polaris, and then Moonlight Basin … It’s been cool this past year I branched out and I had been working with a couple different companies but now I feel like everyone that I am working with aligns really well with my multi-season kind of personality where I’m biking all summer but then pursuing skiing really heavily in the winter, and all the brands 81

that I’m working with now cater to all the activities I try to get up to.

M.O.: That’s really cool to hear. So that’s kind of an introduction to you as a skier. But tell me a little bit about your life growing up.

P.C.: I grew up in this little town, Whitefish, Montana, but [have] always been a Montana native … I had a ton of support from the community itself, but it was funny because I was skiing around on this hill that just never seemed to fully back my type of skiing. One day I did this chairlift jump. … I did a jump off this chairlift terminal that was kind of like Candide [Thovex] style, and he’s got a couple of really viral social media videos of him going really big over these chairlifts, and I did a really similar thing and my local resort where I grew up at was like ‘We never want you skiing here again.’ I just had no support for it whatsoever. And around that same time, I’d won a film contest called the Quicksilver [Young Guns] Ski Contest, and I was around Big Sky [Resort] and then met up with some folks from Moonlight and … [they] advocated for that [kind of skiing]. And they were bringing on these professional athletes to support each one of their clubs. So they’ve got Bode Miller in Spanish Peaks [Mountain Club], Scott Schmidt in [the Yellowstone Club]. And then somehow at a really young age, I just bumped into it and they brought me on board [at Moonlight], which was super cool.

M.O.: That’s a funny story. How old were you then?

P.C.: I was 17.

M.O.: What was the culture like skiing in Whitefish then, and how is it different now—if it is different?

P.C.: Definitely. My parents moved there 30-plus years ago and it was a total tiny little town that no one really knew about, like the population was just 2,000. They were just ski bums that loved the area because of the skiing that it catered to, but then also just the small hometown feel of it. And it certainly in the past few years has turned into more and more of a Jackson or kind of any of these mountain towns, Big Sky, in particular as well. All of them are getting more developed and the world has found out about them, probably partially due to social media, but then also COVID blew everything up in small little towns.

M.O.: Do you feel like your style of skiing, especially back then when you were 17 and just starting to show people what that looked like, was sort of unprecedented in Whitefish? Or was there a community of people who were getting up to skiing in the way that you were exploring it at that time?

P.C.: I felt like at that age, I definitely was starting to stand out and locally, there is some incredible talent that’s come out of there. Tanner Hall’s come from there. Maggie Boyden has come from there. Adam Delorme comes from there. And they all grew up in the same community I did, so there’s definitely something in the water. But then they transitioned into park skiing, where they moved to Park City not too long after they turned teenagers and then went and trained really hard and then pursued the whole slopestyle circuit. And I don’t

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Costain shoulders his skis on the Headwaters ridge at Big Sky Resort. As far as inbounds skiing goes, Costain says the Headwaters are his favorite, providing steep, exposed terrain.

Photo by Jonathan Finch

Costain is backdropped by sky near Dillon, Montana.

Photo by Jonathan Finch

Costain throws a trick on his bike in Virgin, Utah. Costain has recently taken on new sponsors to reflect his work as a multisport athlete, including skiing in the winter and biking in the summer. Photo by Jonathan Finch

Watch Costain’s chairlift jump and enjoy his early films

know what it was about me, I just continued to follow my dad around and didn’t go and do the park stuff. I went and tried to pursue some big mountain freeride competitions and definitely excelled in all of those. It’s a cool little community to grow up in and I don’t know what exactly got me to where I am except for just skiing a lot with my dad and people like to see what I get up to on a weekly basis in the winter, I guess.

M.O.: What else did growing up in Montana look like for you besides skiing?

P.C.: I was super fortunate to have this family that was always into the outdoors. So whether it was skiing or mountain biking, we were always playing outside, hiking in Glacier National Park, coming down here to Yellowstone and just throughout all the communities I’ve been involved in, it’s something my parents have really instilled in me is that we’re going to get out in the mountains and go play in the backcountry. So that was always a good way to grow up. And then also my dad started the trail company TerraFlow Trail Systems. And ever since I can remember I was just trying to jump in the excavator and go move dirt. It’s turned into a really cool project. Now, everywhere we go, there’s a little bit of some sort of trail

83

network that we’ve anything else as just like, ‘maybe this is actually happening.’ touched in Montana.

M.O.: Was it something you always wanted to do?

The way that it caters P.C.: It certainly has always been all I was ever interested in to the public and then … Well, not all I was ever interested in. I’m always trying to people are stoked pursue different business activities. But definitely skiing stood and they just have out as just like, I love this so much. I don’t want to ever not do a good time on the it. I was in the lift line when I was really young, and I had this things that we’ve classic line I always bring up where this guy asked me, ‘What put some effort into; do you want to do when you grow up?’ And I was probably like it’s really rewarding 7 years old and I’m just like ‘I mean, I’m just gonna keep skiing.’ to see that in all I’ve always thought back to that moment, which was really cool. these different little mountain communities.

M.O.: How has skiing in Montana and being from Montana—this landscape and these communities— M.O.: Shifting back served as a launchpad for your career in this sport? to skiing, do you P.C.: Oh, boy. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it certainly have a moment was a great training ground when I was coming up … Honestly when you realized when I was really young and getting into competing, skiing that you had made around in Whitefish, it’s literally always cloudy. And somehow it, that this as a that always gave us a little bit of an advantage when I was on professional career these little teams, and we were just used to skiing around and was kind of kicking jumping in the flat light …

Then moving out to Big Sky, it off for you? definitely catered towards my faster, bigger, charging type of P.C.: It definitely took skiing that I really love doing.

It’s just gnarly in the Headwaters a few years to ever feel and having exposed terrain like that, that you can hike up to comfortable saying from a chairlift and you get to ski that every day when you’re 16, that because I was 17 years old, it definitely just really catered to exactly the type of always like, ‘I’m just skiing that I was trying to do.

And it made me feel comfortable starting to maybe feel and be able to pursue that at a younger age than I think most that but I don’t want to big mountain skiers get to. jinx it’ … The first year that I definitely felt M.O.: Is there anything about the communities that maybe this is going in you grew up in and the cultures of people and support the right direction was networks that you feel like have informed your in 2018. So the year Costain jumps a cliff in Cooke career now? after I won the film City. Photo by Jonathan Finch P.C.: I think at a young age, I looked at all these other kids contest and signed that were competing and coming around to the same stops with Moonlight and I had some bigger support from sponsors; I was that were out of like big cities and had huge teams then we got involved with TGR and that’s when I got to go on with 100 kids and quite a few coaches but not enough to get film for one of their films called “Far Out” and definitely knew the one-on-one you kind of do in the smaller towns, where that was a step in the right direction. And then the year after everyone around you is just psyched to see what you’re getting that [I] did a couple small films with Benshi Creative where we up to and supportive and you get so much community vibes in had a ton of really great public response. And yeah, since then, these little towns that I’ve grown up in rather than like the big I think I’ve been in five TGR films and it definitely took two cities. I think that catered well to just me feeling confident and or three years of all that happening consistently for me to feel comfortable in my own skin and allowing me to kind of pursue comfortable and be like, ‘Alright, I’m on the right path to make this wholeheartedly. this happen.’

M.O.: Is there any moment that you can recall where you were like, ‘Oh, my God, this is happening’?

P.C.: Definitely when I got the call to go on the first “Far Out” film trip with Tim Durtschi and Colter Hinchcliffe and I was 18 years old. [I] didn’t really know anyone at TGR yet. They knew a little bit of who I was from previous film contests that I’d done with them but still had not been really involved in the scene yet. So getting a phone call to go ski [British Columbia] with those guys and go and shoot a ski movie was definitely a childhood dream and it probably stands out I think more than 84

M.O.: How do you think that skiing contributes to the culture of the state of Montana?

P.C.: I think it’s definitely a little bit in everyone’s blood, whether or not they moved here recently or they’ve been here forever. It’s just ingrained in our culture, like if you’re in Montana, you definitely are relatively close to a ski resort. And if you’re not then you definitely know someone that ski tours around in your local hills. So I think no matter where you’re at, it’s definitely just a part of who we are.

Bella Butler is the managing editor of Mountain Outlaw.

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racingT EmbEmbracing the Spiritit Spir thofeMaverick of Maverick

Maverick Mountain is a small ski area in southwest Montana. The lodge was first built in 1921. Photo courtesy of Maverick Mountain

A small Montana ski hill writes its own definition of success

By Sami Bierman

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he wooden lodge at the base at Maverick Mountain came into view as my snowboard glided downhill, the nose of my board invisible beneath 2 feet of fresh powder. It was January, and my first time visiting this quaint southwest Montana ski area. Everything about the trip felt like a pleasant surprise, quenching my desire for a ski experience I didn’t even know existed. Thanks to a recent storm, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. It was a welcome reunion with the Montana cold smoke I grew up on—though that’s not the only thing that felt reminiscent of the past.

When I pulled into the parking lot, I was shocked to find a spot right at the base, and I walked straight into the lift line.

There was only one chairlift, ensuring a guaranteed pace of skiers enjoying what felt like endless, knee-deep powder. The lift line was a place of snowy smiles, rosy cheeks, and friendly banter between old friends. Occasional whoops and hollers erupted as skiers descended the last pitch of snow before the base. From the moment I arrived at the mountain, the energy of what was being built (and what was being preserved), was apparent. I’d read stories about the trend toward consolidation and corporatization in the ski industry, but I had yet to experience the magic of what was being lost.

This winter will be Erik and Kristi Borge’s ninth season of owning and operating Maverick after purchasing the mountain from Randy Shilling in 2015. Hidden in the BeaverheadDeerlodge National Forest, Maverick offers 425 acres of terrain to skiers of all levels. The Borges view themselves as caretakers

of the mountain. But what they are protecting is much more than a nostalgic charm of what skiing used to be like; they are actively helping maintain the sport as accessible and integral to the surrounding community.

“There’s definitely an influx of people that are coming because they wanna go back in time and go skiing how it used to be. They don’t wanna fight in lines. They don’t wanna pay crazy amounts of money for tickets, or they can’t pay crazy amounts of money for tickets.”

–Erik Borge, Maverick Mountain co-owner Erik asserts that small hills are the ones creating the future generations of skiers. Given the cost-prohibitive nature of lift tickets at most large resorts, Erik recognizes that for a family of four to try skiing for one day requires “a crazy amount of money,” he said. “We’re the ones that are creating future skiers for the big mountains.”

Maverick offers extensive school programming to the youth of Beaverhead County, teaching roughly 350 kids each year how to ski. And this season, to further increase the accessibility of the sport for beginners, Borge hopes to offer a free pass for their new Sun Kit Conveyor.

Rather than competing with larger resorts, Borge actually feels that the big conglomerates are “strengthening the small ski market.” As the big ski corporations continue to grow, he says, “people often find themselves seeking out small ski areas, mom-and-pop type of operations.”

This trend can be seen in the clientele that visits Maverick each winter. Borge explains how today’s Maverick skiers are a mix of local community members from Beaverhead County, and visitors from regional areas such as Bozeman, Butte, Missoula and Helena. “There’s definitely an influx of people that are coming because they wanna go back in time and go skiing how it used to be. They don’t wanna fight in lines. They don’t wanna pay crazy amounts of money for tickets, or they can’t pay crazy amounts of money for tickets.”

But despite the important role these small hills play in addressing access barriers for beginner and low-income patrons, mountains like Maverick face big challenges to keep their lifts open and operating. One example is how expensive the insurance is, despite being a small hill. Erik shared that this year his insurance quote came in five times the amount as last year, for the same coverage. “Every time another ski area gets bought up, they get pulled out of the insurance pool, so there’s less and less ski areas needing insurance. It’s definitely been affecting rates,” he said.

Another harsh reality is operating in an industry inherently reliant on snow in the face of climate change.

“I think we can all agree that the weather’s changing and that is definitely a hurdle or a worry for the future,” Erik said. “I hope that we have snow for our kids to ski and their kids to ski, for generations to come.”

Throughout our conversation, I was struck by Erik’s optimism and sense of resilience, and I realized that maybe that’s just what it takes. A true ski bum at heart, it seems that Erik is working toward a definition of success that is otherwise unconventional by today’s standards. I consider the definition of the word maverick: an unorthodox or independent-minded person.

“There’s a number of different ways that success looks like for me. In one of the simplest forms, when I come to the lodge on any given day and I see a whole bunch of people with smiling faces talking about how great the skiing is; to me, that’s success,” he said. “I’m not gonna get rich doing this. I never will. I’ve accepted that. But I didn’t come for money. I’ve never really placed a lot of value on a dollar. Certainly, there’s things that are nice, but for me, being able to live the lifestyle that I get to live and raise my family in the lifestyle that we’re living is success to me too.”

In today’s world, I can’t think of a better sentiment to embody the spirit of a maverick.

Born and raised in Bozeman, Montana, Sami Bierman found her passion for playing in the outdoors and exploring wild spaces at an early age. As a wilderness guide, artist, and writer, she is interested in exploring topics of access, equity, and connection with the natural world.

Top: Two happy guests get ready to hop off a lift at Maverick Mountain to enjoy the slopes. Photo courtesy of Maverick Mountain Above: Skiers are backdropped by the BeaverheadDeerlodge National Forest at Maverick Mountain. Photo courtesy of Maverick Mountain

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A horse, rider and skier trio rip toward the finish line at the 2023 Big Sky Skijoring event.

Photo by Jed Sanford

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Skijoring fuses emblems of the West

By Bella Butler

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omething sort of magical happens at a skijoring event. In the same way that big wildfires create their own weather, the energy of the arena constructs a world of its own, and time is measured in the 30-second intervals of each run. First comes the horse, starting the trance-inducing song with the da-da, da-da, da-da of galloping, followed by the sheer whishhh of the skier flying by. The full weight of hoof on frozen ground, snow spraying in the air and the tension of skis gliding across the track alchemize into something that didn’t exist before. Then, the horse, rider and skier cross the finish line, the crowd erupts in one final burst and the spell is broken—until the next run.

There’s magic outside of that moment, too. If you take a step back from the spectacle of the sport, you’ll find yourself at the intersection of the Venn diagram of Western cultures. The skier stands shoulder to shoulder with the cowboy, joined by the pure celebration of winter. I can’t think of something more Montanan than that.

It’s funny then, how the story of skijoring starts far from Montana, or any other Western state for that matter; the first account of a person being pulled on wooden planks by an animal was recorded hundreds of years ago by a Persian historian in Central Asia’s Altai Mountains, according to Skijor International.

Fast forward to the 20th century, when skijoring (translated to “ski driving”) became popular in Scandinavian countries and eventually North America, finding its footing first in places like Lake Placid, New York, and Hanover, New Hampshire.

Naturally, Western mountain towns like Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and Jackson, Wyoming, picked up the sport, but races really took hold after World War II. It's a story Scotty C. Ping, founder and editor of Skijoring Magazine, offers to tell me on the second day of the 2023 Big Sky Skijoring event.

“The Seventh Infantry over in the Second World War were up in the Alps, and they were skiing, you know, and fighting the Germans,” Ping said. “… A lot of them came back to Colorado, and they ended up dragging behind horses in order to go skiing. And so that's how really it started, and the Western equestrian skijoring started with the Seventh Infantry.”

In his tall black cowboy hat and custom black Skijoring Magazine jacket with his name across the chest, I’ve clocked Ping as one of the event’s resident experts, which is important. For how big the competitive circuit has gotten in the U.S., coverage of it only goes so far. Ping wears dark glasses the whole weekend and I never see his eyes, but even without the windows to the soul I can tell he loves this sport— and even more so, its adjacent community—with everything in him. It’s why he founded this magazine four years ago, and why he himself raced for so long.

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He and every other skijoring junkie will tell you there’s nothing else like it, and Ping knew it the first time he saw it.

“The very first skijoring race that I went to, there was a cowboy out there with chaps and everything, cowboy hat, old timer, you know, he had chew in his mouth, and he's talking to a guy with purple hair.

And he’s saying ‘If you take the gate like this…” They were working together, and I'm going ‘That’s really unique,’” Ping said. He stopped riding after his horse died a few years ago (“because I don’t think I’ll ever get another guy like him”), but he’s done what he can to stay in the sport. Ping and his wife, Francesca Reda, live in Whitefish, but during the winter they travel to the races every weekend.

Big Sky’s race has become one of the larger productions in the state, especially compared to little towns like Wisdom, where the track runs right through town and its 130-some residents gather on the sidelines for a weekend of relief from the bitterest part of a Northern Rockies winter. Montana has become a big stop on the circuit, with nine total events, from the capital in Helena and bigger hubs like Bozeman, to other mountain towns like Red Lodge, West Yellowstone, Big Sky and Ping’s home in Whitefish, among others.

Even one of skijoring’s darlings, Colin Cook, hails from Missoula, where he grew up ski racing with his brother. Now in his 30s, he lives in Bozeman and owns a contracting business, but come skijoring season, he’s better recognized as the stud with multiple championship belt buckles wearing orange ski boots with jeans tucked into them. He’s also the brains behind some of Big Sky’s especially entertaining courses. At the 2023 event, murmurs about whether or not Cook would debut his hot tub idea traveled like gossip between event organizers and staff, but I got the sense nobody actually thought he’d do it. Until he did.

Cook’s “hot tub idea” included putting a hot tub full of people underneath the clearing of the course’s biggest jump. A group of eager volunteers shed their clothes to hop in the tub with White Claws and beers in hand, and the competitive skiers in the open category took turns careening over the partiers as flames shot into the air beside them. It was a show, to say the least.

Whether there are shooting flames or hot tubs or snowmobilers jumping 30 feet above the course (yes, this also happened in Big Sky), or the sport takes its simplest form, free of frills and still bringing people to their feet as horses and skiers fly through the gut of small towns in rural Montana, that magic is undeniable, and the full-embodied spirit of the West is something lived, and something shared.

Bella Butler is the managing editor of Mountain Outlaw.

Skijorers in training bring the crowd to their feet at 2023 Big Sky Skijoring.

Photo by Jed Sanford

Two young cowgirls present the American and Montana flags at the start of 2023 Big Sky Skijoring.

Photo by Jed Sanford

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Left: A trio of riders horse around near the start line as gentle snow falls at the 2023 Big Sky Skijoring. Photo by Josh King Below left: The 2023 Big Sky Skijoring Rodeo Clown hams it up for the camera. Photo by Jed Sanford Below: Skijoring is as much a show as it is a sport.

In the 2023 Big Sky Skijoring event, course designers placed a hot tub under the clearing of a jump. Photo by Jed Sanford

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Todd Johnson and his German Shorthaired Pointer, Winnie, tune-up for the upland season with an early morning training session. Photo by Chloe Nostrant

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The OTO Ranch's lodge 4 backdrops an informational sign. The OTO is Montana's oldest dude ranch. Photo by Mark Bedor / True Ranch Collection

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OTO Ranch Rides Again Montana’s oldest dude ranch temporarily came back to life. Now its fate hangs in the balance.

By Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan

F

ive minutes into our second ride of the day, it was clear my 5-year-old had moved beyond pony rides. We were picking our way up a trail through sagebrush hills just north of the OTO Ranch, Sam sitting comfortably in the saddle on a gentle brown horse named Ginger.

“Whoa,” he said when she got too close to the horse in front of her, then, delightedly, “Gee,” a command he must have heard on TV. What a change from this morning, when Sam hesitantly climbed up on Ginger for his first-ever ride on a full-size horse. I could tell he was nervous, and so could the wranglers. “Let’s stick to the road for a bit,” one of them said, peeling us off from the rest of the group. We walked along the dirt road, practicing reining in and spurring on in the shadow of the Absaroka Mountains. He was smiling by the end of the session. Would he like to do the afternoon ride, too? “Oh, yeah!”

Then the thunderstorm that had been threatening since we left the corral made true on its promise, pelting us with cold drops and spraying lightning across the high country. “Sam, you doing alright?” I yelled.

He turned around, beaming. This was excellent. This was adventure. “Mom! We’re riding horses! In the rain!”

Guests enjoy the living room of the OTO Ranch in the early 20th century. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service

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A guest of True Ranch's 2023 OTO pop-up dude ranch casts a line into a nearby creek. Photo by Scott T. Baxter

Watching Sam’s newfound confidence on horseback carry him through the rest of the wet, blustery ride, I wondered how many other kids, over how many decades, have had the same experience right here on these trails. And how many more will?

OTO Ranch, a newly revived dude ranch a dozen miles north of Yellowstone National Park in the Custer Gallatin National Forest, faces a turning point. Shuttered for more than eight decades, the 126-year-old property has long been a quiet hiking destination for history buffs and a seasonal corridor for elk and grizzly bears. Some think it should stay that way. Others dream of bringing life back to the creaky buildings and horses back to the stables.

Sam and I visited last July as part of a two-year “pop-up ranch” experiment run by an historic dude ranch company, and its executives are hoping for a permit that will open the OTO to guests again for the long term. If the Forest Service nixes that plan, then Sam and I will be among only a handful of people in living memory to have eaten bacon and eggs in the lodge’s dining room and slept in its simple cabins.

A green light, however, would spur a new era at OTO Ranch. What’s clear is that everyone involved wants the best for this unique slice of Montana history. What’s not so clear is exactly what “the best” actually means.

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A century before we hopped into the saddle at OTO Ranch, packs of Stetson-wearing travelers flocked here every summer to do the same. Dick and Dora Randall bought the property in 1898, making it Montana’s oldest dude ranch operation. What began with guided wilderness trips out of their homestead in the hills along Cedar Creek evolved into an official dude ranch in 1912—that is, a destination for vacationers to experience Western ranch life—with the addition of a bunkhouse, wall tents and cabins. For decades, the Randalls treated travelers (many of whom arrived from the East on the Northern Pacific Railroad) to chuckwagon dinners, ranch rodeos, fly fishing, bear hunting, and above all, horseback rides. Guests pitched in with branding, milking and gardening chores; galvanized steel tubs hung on the tent walls for bathing in creek water.

The Randalls retired in the early 1930s, and the dude ranch business sputtered to an end by 1939. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, a Missoula-based nonprofit, eventually bought the OTO and promptly transferred it to the U.S. Forest Service in 1991, upon which time the ranch’s story took a 30-year pause. Custer Gallatin National Forest officials completed some basic maintenance on the buildings over the years, and the property entered the National Register of Historic Places. The Forest Service installed a few interpretive signs. But the ranch’s remains—a stately main lodge, a smattering of log cabins, and some outbuildings—were mostly left to the bats and mice. OTO had effectively become its own ghost town.

Enter the True Ranch Collection. The dude ranch company, which operates five historic guest ranches in Arizona and Montana, sensed an opportunity with OTO. Jaye Wells, managing partner for the brand’s historic preservation arm, met with Custer Gallatin National Forest District Ranger Mike Thom for a tour in December 2021. “I walked in, and I was just floored,” Wells said in a September 2023 interview. “Here’s a ranch that’s basically the same way it was in 1939. That’s remarkable.” During the tour, Thom asked how True Ranch Collection could help. “I said, ‘I don’t know, but we’re in.’” Wells recalled with a laugh.

The two of them came up with the pop-up idea: True Ranch Collection would spruce up the place on its own dime, and the Forest Service would issue, in return, a temporary event permit. True Ranch also kicked in a 15-percent fee from each guest as a donation back to the OTO. Thom’s attitude was, “Let’s see what it looks like, and what we learn,” he said. “We’ve had this property on behalf of the public for 30-plus years now. What do we do with it?”

On check-in day last July, I took a hard left off U.S. Highway 89 in the Paradise Valley and bumped up a dirt road to the Cedar Creek Trailhead. A True Ranch Collection van arrived less than 10 minutes later to shuttle Sam and me the rest of the way to the ranch. We traced Cedar Creek through a seam between hillsides, passing the stables before coming up to the stone-and-log lodge. Inside, a taxidermied moose head hung on a log crossbeam; a wolf pelt had been tacked up on one wall. Antique-looking couches flanked a grand stone fireplace, decked, of course,

with more antlers. The ranch’s original billiard table, newly restored, anchored the open bar room down the hall. The whole thing was meant to evoke the OTO’s dude ranch heyday, and—to my eyes, anyway—it worked.

Our one-room cabin felt equally rustic—simple beds, a water jug on the dresser and Navajo rugs on the walls. But extension cords snaked through a hole in the logs to power a couple of dim lamps, and I doubt original guests had bear spray and headlamps waiting in their cabins. In a huge upgrade from galvanized bathtubs on the wall, we had a private bathroom “pod” complete with a flush toilet and hot shower out back. A sign sternly warned us not to leave the strawberry-scented shampoo in the pod, lest we attract bears that regularly roam around these parts.

The Yellowstone Pop-Up Ranch (as True Ranch Collection called it) featured a few other modern touches.

Staff ferried guests on field trips like whitewater rafting the nearby Yellowstone River and soaking in Yellowstone Hot Springs, and satellite wi-fi let us give my husband a video tour of the place. But in other ways, the experience was remarkably like how I imagine the OTO Ranch of old.

We told stories around the campfire with the wranglers, gathered for three group meals a day (dining on the likes of pheasant sausage and strawberry cheesecake), practiced archery and saddled up for mountain trail rides.

True Ranch Collection spent $317,000 getting the ranch back up to hospitality standards, including the cost of building the pod bathrooms. “We weren’t allowed to do anything beyond putting it back to how it should have been,” Wells said, citing historic preservation rules. That meant fixing broken windows, chinking gaps between logs and deep cleaning buildings that had been home to untold generations of critters.

Employees installed a spring box treatment system in the creek to supply water, and trucked in furniture, décor and all those taxidermied animal heads to match old photos of OTO. It all felt like stepping into the past, just a bit cleaner and more convenient—even if I did catch a bold mouse raiding our cabin’s garbage can each night.

The Yellowstone Pop-Up Ranch experiment started slowly, with just 27 guests in the summer of 2022—far fewer than expected, due to historic flooding in the national park that shut down Yellowstone’s North Entrance for months and shook up the

tourism season for the whole region. But the ranch galloped through a busy nine-week season in 2023, serving 115 guests, plus hosting a specialty camp from Wisconsin for one week and a group of biology students from Montana State University for another. Come September, True Ranch Collection hauled its décor, bathrooms, and infrastructure back out, leaving the ranch a cleaned-up version of what it was. Now, as the dust settles, the Forest Service faces a decision.

As of fall 2023, True Ranch Collection was preparing to submit a formal proposal to the Forest Service requesting a short-term permit to continue running the dude ranch in the summers through its nonprofit arm, Ranch Preservation Foundation. Anything beyond a few years would likely require significant upgrades to the facilities, and a much longer-term special-use permit for any outfitter willing to make the investment. Various bureaucratic hurdles lie between now and a hypothetical then, so the earliest anything could begin at OTO would be the summer of 2025, according to Custer Gallatin ranger Thom.

“It’s really that question, ‘What do we do with it?’”

Thom told me in an August 2023 interview. “Do we just interpret it? Let it fall to the ground? Full-scale commercial operations? We know what True Ranch would like to do up there, but is their goal the best goal for the agency on the behalf of the public?” Dude ranches on public lands aren’t exactly rare, but those outfits have generally been grandfathered in for years, Wells says. A new one would be a different story.

For one thing, even a seasonal operation would be a marked departure from the recent status quo. “It’s a quiet place,” Thom said, “and the dude ranch has changed that, with traffic, and guests doing trail rides and shooting .22s.” And with visitors come additional disturbances, like weekly food deliveries and sewage truck visits. Others have raised eyebrows at the idea of an exclusive commercial business taking over a public amenity. Though the pop-up was hardly a ritzy resort, costs for the all-inclusive stay ranged from $1,635 per person for three nights to $3,975 per person for six nights.

Above left: The revived lodge billiard room at the OTO Ranch.

Photo by Scott T. Baxter Left: The interior of a cabin at the 2023 OTO pop-up dude ranch.

Photo by Scott T. Baxter

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“ This is within elk winte r range. A lot of them pour through the re. That ’s anothe r reason we want to limit the scope and scale [of u se at OT O].

It ’s sur rounded by public land on all sides, but sometimes securing that little piece of private land to allow elk to move bet ween summe r and winte r range is vital .”

–Josh Hemenway, Custer Gallatin wildlife program manager

Cow elk group together just inside the North Entrance of Yellowstone National Park, not far from the OTO Ranch. Photo by Diane Renkin

The Forest Service would also have to take a hard look at how a more permanent dude ranch would affect area wildlife, especially the endangered grizzly bear. “Grizzly bears do occupy the area,” said Josh Hemenway, wildlife program manager for the Custer Gallatin. “One of the primary concerns [with guests at OTO] is attractant storage and managing food to minimize potential for a grizzly to be lured in and receive any kind of food reward, thereby habituating that bear.”

Hemenway and other Forest Service biologists worked closely with True Ranch Collection to ensure proper food storage during the pop-up, even erecting an electric fence around the lodge kitchen. Still, after the 2022 season, a grizzly got into unsecured garbage at the ranch; rangers suspect it was the same bear that later had to be euthanized for breaking into cabins in the region. Hemenway adds that displacing bears from their habitat is another concern, noting that the Forest Service already limits overnight use at the OTO site in spring and fall, when grizzlies are more likely to seek food in the area. Given grizzlies’ federally protected status, any dude ranch proposal would have to pass muster with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as well as the Forest Service.

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Increased traffic at the OTO could also affect the Northern Yellowstone elk herd, which migrates through the Cedar Creek zone—indeed, that’s why the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation bought the land in the first place.

“This is within elk winter range,” Hemenway said. “A lot of them pour through there. That’s another reason we want to limit the scope and scale [of use at OTO]. It’s surrounded by public land on all sides, but sometimes securing that little piece of private land to allow elk to move between summer and winter range is vital.”

Any new programs at OTO Ranch would have to line up with the latest Custer Gallatin Forest Management Plan, which spells out the agency’s priorities for the site: seeking partnerships “to provide a venue for conservation education, stewardship, and innovative opportunities,” as well as preserving its historic value. “Education is really a driver for the agency’s desires up there,” Thom said. “And how do we get that environmental piece in there, that stewardship?”

True Ranch Collection has a few ideas. In Wells’ vision for a revived OTO dude ranch, guests would get a lot more than a classic Western vacation. Suppose the ranch houses scientific researchers too, who would then present their work to recreational guests over chili. A naturalist could

Guests of the 2023 OTO pop-up dude ranch enjoy horseback riding. Photo by Mark Bedor / True Ranch Collection

teach visitors how to identify native wildflowers on the trails.

Specialists in anthropology or history could give public lectures on-site. “We envision it as being the OTO Ranch and Research Station,” Wells said. “It’s not just shooting a gun, not just riding a horse. That educational part of it is something people want to see.”

One thing everyone seems to agree on is how special OTO Ranch is—and the desire to keep this relic of Montana history in decent shape. Trouble is, the Forest Service acknowledges how difficult that would be without outside help. “We don’t have the time and resources to put the effort into OTO,” Thom said. “We need a partner out there who can help paint that picture.”

A private partner is one way of bringing in critical funding.

Wells estimates that True Ranch Collection has already donated almost $90,000 worth of TLC to the ranch, which is in addition to the roughly $42,300 in donations generated through guest fees. “The work they have done to that place for just maintenance, it’s amazing,” Thom said. “It’s stuff we surely couldn’t do ourselves. We can replace shingles on roofs. But [maintaining OTO] for another 100 years—it’s going to take a huge investment to do that.”

The Forest Service commissioned an engineering analysis in 2018, which estimated it would take $2 million to complete historically appropriate foundation work and roof stabilization on the lodge. More extensive renovation—like adding electrical, plumbing and fire safety systems, as True Ranch Collection would propose to do for any long-term

permit—would cost significantly more. “We think it’s a $5 million project,” Wells said. It’s hard to imagine the Forest Service handling that level of financial lift on its own.

-I can’t say our OTO visit was completely in line with its historic nature—Sam did get to play some games on our tablet so I could shower in peace. But mostly, we kept things unplugged. We explored the trails and practiced roping a fake steer and played round after round of Connect 4 in the lodge. At sunset, we read Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator snuggled up on our cabin’s porch. “My favorite part about the ranch was the rustic part,” Sam later said. “It makes you feel good. That’s just part of how it used to be.”

How the OTO will be in the future, however, is still a question unanswered, a fate that will involve public opinion, informally and perhaps even through an official public comment period. Wells remains excited about the prospect of resurrecting the dude ranch, but in his mind, his company has already done some good. “People are talking about the future of the OTO,” Wells said. “Let’s get the conversation started. If this is all we ever did, what a treat.”

Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan is a Montana-based writer and editor who focuses on climate solutions, sustainability and public lands.

She is only slightly more skilled on horseback than a 5-year-old.

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A University of Montana Grizzly defender lunges for a Montana State Bobcat in the 2022 Brawl of the Wild.

Photo by Jack Reaney

THE LAST BEST RIVALRY IN THE WEST

By Jack Marshall III

I

t’s a crisp November day in Bozeman, the kind that usually draws attention to the snow-dusted peaks and last golden leaves of autumn, but not today. Today’s spectacle is concentrated on Montana State University’s campus, where ESPN’s College GameDay, college football’s premier game-day show, is broadcasting one of the oldest rivalries west of the Mississippi, between the Montana State Bobcats and the University of Montana Grizzlies.

Lee Corse, Kirk Herbstriet, Reece Davis, Pat Macafe, Desmond Howard and other college football celebrities are in Big Sky Country. “Today nothing matters more than taking Montana to the train station,” Davis bellows.

A brackish sea of maroon knit hats and blue-and-gold jackets floods the area around Montana State’s Bobcat Stadium. The excitement of any football Saturday is ballooned by not only the intense rivalry but also that it will be showcased on national TV for three hours. The heat of the competition is as palpable as the near-zero-degree temps; it’s the coldest College GameDay on record. A crowd of more than 22,000 exhausted every last ounce of spirit in the stands, seeing the Bobcats to a 55-21 victory against the Grizzlies, a game that will be remembered for years.

What nearly 2.2 million people nationwide saw during that 2022 College GameDay broadcast is something that Montanans have long honored, from the sparsely populated rural farm towns to the bustling streets of the Bobcats and Grizzlies home dens in Bozeman and Missoula. It’s the Brawl of the Wild—the last-best rivalry in the West.

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The rivalry dates back to 1897, less than 10 years after Montana became a state. At that point in time, the forward pass wasn’t even allowed in football. For more than two decades the annual football game was played in Butte in an event known as the Copper Bowl, but since 1952, the two schools have alternated hosting the brawl. While each school’s stadiums have grown over the years, the game regularly sets attendance records; when the teams play in Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula, it becomes the seventh largest town in the state.

Scott Hirschi is a lifelong Montana fan who witnessed much of the rivals’ story, including when his beloved Grizzlies won 16 games in a row against “the neighbors,” as he calls the Bobcats. During that streak in the late ’90s, Hirschi was a radio host in Missoula and he devised a song known as “The Bobcats Suck Polka,” which he distributed via CDs. Eventually he led the University of Montana marching band in a live performance of the jingle.

“Why’s there a cow at every Bobcat wedding ceremony?” the polka jokes. “To keep the flies off the bride.”

“I think it’s one of the best,” Hirschi said of the rivalry.

“My theory is that all the best rivalries are based on hatred.”

The physical manifestation of the Cat/Griz (or Griz/Cat if you’re petty enough) rivalry is the glorious Great Divide Trophy. Modeled after Bear Mountain on Homestake pass, it was introduced in 2001 and is proudly housed on the campus of the winning school until the next game.

This only adds to the already robust bragging rights, as

the winning school can parade it around whenever it wants, including using it for recruiting photo shoots and fan photo opportunities. As if the symbolic weight of the trophy isn’t enough, this thing is massive. Montana football players weighed it in 2022, revealing the prize at a

WHILE EACH SCHOOL’S STADIUMS HAVE GROWN OVER THE YEARS, THE GAME REGULARLY SETS ATTENDANCE RECORDS; WHEN THE TEAMS PLAY IN WASHINGTON-GRIZZLY STADIUM IN MISSOULA, IT BECOMES THE SEVENTH LARGEST TOWN IN THE STATE.

the game still has to kick off at noon so fans can drive home safely, some traveling several hours across the sagebrush land and mountain passes that Montana boasts. Don’t be fooled though—the spirit of the rivalry isn’t just contained to the November football game.

University of Montana Grizzlies hoist The Great Divide trophy in celebration after winning the 2023 Brawl of the Wild in Missoula. Photo by Bella Butler

whopping 306 pounds. The trophy is usually brought into the stadium for each brawl in the bed of a truck, and upon victory, the linemen are often the team members parading it triumphantly. It’s meant to take up space, emblematic of the spirit of Montana.

Also true to Montana is the small-town camaraderie that keeps the rivalry fun amongst fans, players and coaches.

Perhaps such culture is instilled by home state players like Bobcat tight end Treyton Pickering, who played six-man football in the (way) northern Montana farming town of Sunburst, or Griz lineman Sloan McPherson, who hails from the beet-growing town of Savage along the Yellowstone River. In these towns, which are closer to Canada and North Dakota, respectively, than they are to either Bozeman or Missoula, family and community members still celebrate Saturdays in the fall getting decked out in Cat or Griz gear.

“These are local kids playing for local colleges and I think you know, win or lose, the winners get to say ‘I made the right choice’,” said Bozeman resident Dale Palmer, a Bobcat season ticket holder of 20-plus years and religious tailgater.

Cat and Griz players may also count themselves lucky for signing on to Division I institutions still bound to their traditions, while other famous rivalries in the West take new forms. Oregon and Washington just abandoned their in-state rivals in the PAC-12 to go play in the Big 10. Now the only option for those once-beloved rival games is in the early fall. There’s no more snowstorm Apple Cup that will determine a bowl game, or an Oregon rivalry that gives bragging rights heading into the postseason.

But in Montana, the Brawl of the Wild is still a pedestal game, the last of the season without exception. Every year,

“Everybody focuses on the football game, but you talk to volleyball players, you talk to basketball players, they want to beat the Griz or Cats just as much as the football team does,” Palmer said.

Both men and women Cats and Griz face off on the basketball court twice each season, usually yielding the most attended games of the season. The duel plays out in track, cross country, tennis and just about any other match-up between the two schools you can imagine.

Similar to the Great Divide trophy in football, the Main Line trophy in volleyball is yet another physical manifestation of the brawl. In the last two seasons, both Montana State and Montana have set individual school volleyball attendance records, and during the 2022 season, MSU set the Big Sky Conference volleyball attendance record in the rivalry match.

College sports are increasingly changing, but the Brawl of the Wild is steadfast. That’s what makes Montana and its flagship rivalry special. As long as the sun sets over the Treasure State, Montanans will always tune in to the last best rivalry in the West.

Jack Marshall is a born and raised Montanan who grew up skiing at Bridger Bowl and watching Bobcat football games. He attended the University of Montana and now works as a sports reporter in the state.

Watch: Mountain Outlaw goes inside this year's Brawl of the Wild at Washington-Grizzly Stadium

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Let My People Heal Sarah Comeau, author of Let My People Heal, poses with her sage and eagle wing in Montana's Paradise Valley on Oct. 31, 2023. Photo by Chloe Nosrant

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A reflection on cultural appropriation and Native resilience Words and Graphic Designs by Sarah Comeau

I

I was 16 years old when the creator gave me my first dream.

I’m riding in the back of a truck bed zig zagging down a gravel road on the ranch where I was born; the land where I rode my bike, ponied alongside my parents as they moved cows, played in the tree house by the creek, and swam with my cousins in the muddy Grand River.

The truck parks at the edge of what used to be our hayfield. I jump out and see rows of white folding chairs with a single aisle bisecting them, as if in a theater. Beyond the chairs is an old road, recognizable only by the still existing mound covered with prairie grass. Suddenly, I’m standing in the aisle. The chairs to my left are filled with Native people, and all the chairs to the right are filled with white people. I wonder why I’m the only person standing in the middle until a voice speaks to me: “You must choose what side you belong to,” it says.

As I contemplate what this means, a long line of wanagis (spirits) walk single-file toward me on the old road. At first, it’s all women dressed in buckskins and elk tooth robes; then come the warriors; then chiefs wearing full regalia and headdresses.

They’re followed by a single-file line of buffalo stretching as far as the eye can see. The last man in line speaks aloud, urging us to never forget our people and to always honor the land. A white boy walks up to the old man, mocks him, and then pushes him. Upon this affront, the wanagis turn to leave, walking away from me until they’re gone forever. I’m left with a broken heart and I begin to cry.

In another moment of angst, the voice returns. “What side are you going to choose?” it asks again. “Whatever side you choose now is how you will believe.”

I wipe the tears from my face and sit in an empty chair on the left side of the aisle. It is done, and I wake from my dream.

I’m 45 now, and though I am of mixed blood, both white and Native American, I identify with my Native side, Hunkpapa Lakota from Standing Rock, the place where I grew up. My Lakota name is Wanbli Wiyaka Waste Mani Win (Walks With A Pretty Eagle Feather Woman), given to me in ceremony by Sundance leader, Felix Kidder.

This is my story, a small effort to rehumanize Native 111

Americans to the world. We are what is left after generational attempts to eradicate and suppress us. My parents, grandparents and great-grandparents had to survive, and now it is my work to heal my ancestors. It is my work to raise my children to thrive in a society that has historically displaced their people as human beings.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION I am from South Dakota, but today I live with my family in Livingston. One day last winter, I was on my way to a small mountain town in Montana when I passed by a fenced-in lot of tipis. One tipi donned a symbol of a sun associated with the Pueblo people of the Southwest who do not use tipis for their lodges or ceremonies. I could tell these tipis were probably not painted by Natives. Sure, tipis are used all over the world, but this is not about the tipis. It is not about the dreamcatchers people hang from their car mirrors, or the pipes people buy off the internet. It is not only about the actual things; it’s about something bigger that these things represent. It’s about something called cultural appropriation.

I kept driving and forgot about the tipis, but I’m reminded again the next time I drive by. I pass them again and again and again, each time feeling something inside of me move, each time feeling more unsettled. I thought about this place without drawing any conclusions until I have another experience.

Not long after I first saw those tipis, an acquaintance of mine from a local tribe told me she was also bothered by them and had wanted to say something to the business owner of the tipi lot but didn’t know how or what to say. That is when I knew I had to write to the boutique tipi owner. “Boutique tipi hotel” is the description the business has pasted to its website. My intent in writing to the business was not to scold them, or to get them in trouble, but rather to gather information and offer recommendations on how they could employ clear ethical actions. The owner of the business immediately responded. I can only hope my suggestions will be acted on with gracious intent for our people.

Appropriation is when individuals of

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a dominant culture take elements from an oppressed culture for profit or power.

Those actively appropriating are only taking a portion of the specific element, leaving behind the whole meaning of what is being shared. This creates misrepresentation and minimization of

...this is not about the tipis. It is not about the dreamcatchers people hang from their car mirrors, or the pipes people buy off the internet. It is not only about the actual things; it’s about something bigger that these things represent.

It’s about something called cultural appropriation. the oppressed culture. The damaging effect of cultural appropriation is impeding us in holding our rightful place in this world as whole and complete beings.

CRYING FOR MY PEOPLE Cultural appropriation can present in many different ways. It can take the form of tipis and other Native symbols and objects, but it can also take the form of people. I attended a local community event where there were several informational booths. I hadn’t yet made it to many booths when I came upon a woman presenting a flier advertising Lakota sweat lodges and Lakota ceremony song lessons. I asked the woman who was running the ceremonies and teaching ceremony songs. It was her husband, she replied, and continued to tell me about her non-Native husband running inipi (sweat lodge) and scheduling people to partake in hanbleceya (vision quests) here in the local area. How did he come about this work, I asked. She told me elders from South Dakota, whom he has known for years, granted him permission. I wondered exactly which elders. Maybe I knew them, or maybe they were relatives from South Dakota.

I tried to turn a blind eye and pay no mind. I attempted to keep strolling but I could not move. I convinced myself to tell this white woman that I am not okay with this. She responded with a shooing hand motion and said, “That’s ok.” I felt completely disregarded and invisible.

Quite frankly, I was angry and my body was trembling. I started to doubt my feelings. What gives me the right to have these feelings? Are they justified? Why am I angry? I started to doubt myself.

Having a hard time settling my feelings in that space, I left the event. I went home and cried. I wiped the tears from my face and thought of my close friend, a Lakota holy man. He tells me of his dreams, what he sees and hears, how the spirits are always around him. Not many know of the sacrifice he gives in order to help the people. Not many know how he cures people of their sickness, or of the medicine he carries. He lives extremely humbly because of his focus on prayer. He gave flesh for me, and if my love for him had any monetary value he would be a rich man. I told him about my experience at the event.

“Probably best not to go around anything like that,” he responded. “This way is really hard for me and I will

always sacrifice. I always think if guys like that really knew what it is like, they would run the other way.”

These sacred ways were given to us by the Creator. We become medicine people through birth, and it is a path shown to us in our dreams. What others think they know of this work is like a grain of sand to what true Lakota medicine people know and experience on the daily.

Just then, I received a text message from a Pueblo friend asking me how my day was. I couldn’t help but message him back what I was experiencing, telling him I just wanted to cry. He immediately called and told me to let it out because I was crying for my people. Native Americans were beaten for speaking their language, killed for practicing their ceremonies, their sacred ceremony objects raided and their identities taken only to be replaced with foreign ones.

I mentioned my experience to my 17-year-old daughter. Her mouth dropped and eyebrows lifted, an indication this behavior was wrong in her eyes. I want my daughter to have the confidence to address similar situations in a compassionate and educational manner.

Not only that, but I want her to know our ways are not negotiable.

LET MY PEOPLE HEAL With a good heart, I offer some recommendations. First, please acknowledge the human being standing in front of you when they say they are not okay with what you are doing. Hear my voice and ask me why I am not okay with non-Natives who do not carry true Lakota medicine teaching our ways to other non-Natives. Ask me why it is not okay to create a boutique tipi hotel with an obvious Native American theme as currency for your own gain.

Second, be an ally. Our traditional ways can connect so many people together in a meaningful way, and our Above right: Comeau holds an eagle wing she found. In Comeau's Lakota culture, the eagle wing is a symbol of what is highest, bravest, strongest and holiest. In her essay, Comeau offers readers a window into her experience of cultural appropriation of Native symbols, practices and people. Photo

by Chloe Nosrant Right: Comeau's deer hide moccasins rest on the frozen ground of the Paradise Valley on a cold day. Photo by Chloe Nosrant

ways are meant to be shared—but we are the ones who should dictate how this is done. When we as Natives start negotiating to accommodate you, then we no longer belong to ourselves. We as Native people must set boundaries.

Finally, let my people heal. It is inevitable that appropriation, appreciation and exchange will happen with globalization, but I caution against misrepresenting traditional or sacred elements of a culture that have profound meaning for its members. The contract of exchange should not be negotiable at this time. Our people have been made to feel powerless and helpless for centuries and appropriation is another form of oppression. It is not simply a social issue; it is an injustice and it continues to string along the ugliness of oppression. We are taking back what our ancestors died trying so hard to keep close to them. We must have this time to take our culture back and determine what should be shared to the masses—and how. We are deep in the healing process and we cannot fully heal when non-Natives are teaching our sacred Lakota ceremonies, and our art is being misrepresented in the name of self-profit.

In my first dream from the Creator, I saw my people and the buffalo walking away with heavy hearts, as if to never return. I felt their pain deep inside me. I felt their heartache. It felt like my own heart was being ripped from my chest.

Cultural appropriation feels like this, like our hearts are being ripped from our chests. Over the last century and a half, Natives all over this land have struggled to live in a society that is not their own.

We are now discovering how to be whole again. We are recognizing our power once again and are in a time of healing.

When people and organizations continue to partake in cultural appropriation or deter us from fully taking back our ways, then our healing is being blocked. Let my people heal.

Sarah Comeau was born and raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas and comes from a long line of horsemen and cattle ranchers. She is very active with her traditional Lakota ceremonies. Comeau now makes her home in Livingston, Montana working as a nurse and healthcare consultant and is a mother of three awesome kids.

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Photography By Emily Jean Russell

B a n g ta i l www.Rockiesrebels.com

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This is a Montana Story A Bozeman woman and her children survive an active shooting. Connection has become the key to unlocking her family’s healing.

By Dr. Holcomb Johnston and Dr. Katey T. Franklin

HOLCOMB | The Mother No one I loved died that night last October which is the only reason I can write this story. Unlike many mothers across our country, I did not lose my then 6- and 9-year-old daughters to the drunken man aimlessly shooting and screaming 10 feet outside our cabin window. A dear friend and her 18-monthold son also walked out alive. Miraculous. I am not sure why the gunman only partially lost control, sparing us all despite the arsenal of weapons the police later found in his room and the nearly two and a half hours of pure terror he created.

My children awoke when their bodies hit the floor mid-sleep; it was 1:03 a.m. and I threw them off the bed, desperate to keep them alive as shots rang out feet away. They moaned out in confusion.

We had all been in peaceful slumber after a long hot springs soak on a girls’ weekend in southwest

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Montana. I pressed my body over my daughters, begged them to stay silent, and called my friend in the next room, then 911. Somehow through my sleep, I had registered the shots and intuitively responded, as though subconsciously I’d been waiting for this moment. In a strange way, in this country, I guess I had been. As a white woman of relative privilege, gun violence is often framed as a distant problem, something that happens to others elsewhere. In reality, statistics say in a lifetime nearly everyone in the United States will know someone involved in a gun-related incident.

On the phone, the 911 responder instructed me to barricade ourselves in the bathroom so we would have one more door between us and the gunshots outside should someone burst into the room. I dragged two half-asleep and confused bodies into the stall still wet from our bedtime shower. Our breath stopped for fear of him hearing; we kept

all lights off desperately trying to keep any sign of life undetectable. The flimsy window in the tiny bathroom opened directly toward the shooter, who wandered and shouted wildly just feet away. My family owns guns for hunting. I knew enough to understand the bullets would pass through the thin wall as though through paper. My children’s only hope was me—my physical mass, my physical body.

I pressed my small daughters against the walls and positioned my torso to cover my youngest and my bent knees for part of my oldest. My head tracked hers; I matched her movements so that a bullet would hit my brain first.

For more than two hours, we were there, huddled, waiting motionless—for death, for more terror to burst through the door, for light, for life. My older daughter sweetly wrapped her arm around my youngest as her tiny body continuously vomited all over me from fear. Primal responses. That display of sisterly love and bravery still brings me to tears—the 9-year-old having to comfort the 6-year-old as a man shot bullets and screamed murderous words into the dark night. No child should have that experience. Ever. My friend and I stayed on the phone between my calls to 911, silent, breathing together, confirming life to each other.

We whispered only if absolutely needed. “Are you there? Are you alive? Are you ok?” She kept her son from crying by breastfeeding him for nearly two hours. Moms are nothing less than superheroes.

Around forty minutes in, I risked the light of my phone screen to shakily text my husband who was, ironically, on a hunting trip in a remote area near Yellowstone for rifle season opening. “… There’s an active shooting going on,” I wrote. “I have my body over the girls. If this ends badly I love you more than words. Please tell everyone else so too.” This was all I could eek out amidst tremoring hands and knowing each second of light could possibly mean the end. I had assumed he had no service but, miraculously, he was not sleeping due to the excitement of the early morning hunt. “Oh my god I just got this! Are you ok??” I didn’t respond. Couldn’t respond. “I love you so much please be ok?! Hello?” It would be another 20 minutes before I risked it again.

During our hours sheltering in place, between the shots fired and the incessant screaming of the shooter, I would occasionally risk dialing 911 in hopes of an update. “Are we going to live?” SWAT teams from the nearby towns of Dillon and Wisdom were on their way—it would take awhile. Did I know where he was now? What was I hearing?

Were there other shooters involved? Could I tell his location? I tried my best to give helpful tidbits at a whisper: “He’s gone from the back of the building to the front. He has fired six shots so far. He is wailing some guy’s name. He is out front now by my truck and our dog and the road. There may be others but a lonesome car just peeled out into the darkness … I don’t know. Do you? You are 911.”

Then, finally, the sound of a different gun, one that had more power, one with a silencer. I’m still not sure why I could discern this difference. And then a pause. Nothing. We were still there, covered in bodily fluids, pressed against the shower, frozen and shaking at the same time, awaiting the end.

Then, for what felt like forever, silence.

Finally, tracks of lights hit the white wall above us. Flash … flash … flash. Some were blue, some faster and brighter. Rays of hope—literally. But after hours of trauma, the psyche changes: Who could I trust and did they have him, them, whoever was out there a part of this drama we didn’t ask for.

Just after 3 a.m., I called 911 again. “How will I know the person knocking is safe?” I gave dispatch our names and, not long after, someone who knew our information pounded on the door. But trust during a moment like that feels fleeting, fake, part

A screenshot shows texts Holcomb Johnston exchanged with her husband in the middle of the night in October 2022 while an active shooter posed a threat to her and her daughters just outside the cabin where they were staying.

Photo courtesy of Holcomb Johnston

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Left: Johnston's active shooter experience occurred while on a weekend trip to Jackson, Montana. Gun violence is prevalent in Montana, with 209 gun deaths recorded in 2019—that's an average of four a week.

Photo courtesy of Holcomb Johnston Right: A hole in the glass tells the story of the bullets Johnston successfully protected her family from in the fall of 2022. Photo courtesy of Holcomb Johnston

of a death wish.

“Girls, don’t move. I love you no matter what.

Stay here, I’m going to the door.” Dressed only in a t-shirt and covered in my youngest’s regurgitated dinner, I opened the door to three men dressed in tactical gear assuring me we were going to live.

I have never been happier to see a cop in my life.

Ever. The rest of the night unraveled like a dream.

In posttrauma shock, I gathered my babies and brought them to see the policemen.

“We are safe, girls. We are alive. These men saved us.” The girls stared at the men’s uniforms and huge rifles backlit by the emergency vehicles. I spoke with a young-looking cop. It was his first active shooting too. His voice was awed and shaking. Not long ago he was a kid from a ranch who had grown up with cows and horses and ideals about freedom.

I wished this active shooter would be his last. Then, after I texted my friend to let her know we were all safe, the cops, my girls and I knocked on my friend’s door.

“Hi. I love you. We made it. Oh my god. Oh my god. What just happened?” We showered in her room because ours was filled with vomit, then my girls crawled into their king bed and pressed their bodies against my friend and her baby. Warm.

Safe. I hesitantly walked to the parking lot amidst flashing lights, police vehicles and men, calling out “Hello?” so I wouldn’t startle anyone and kept my hands in the air so they would know I didn’t have a weapon. I found my dog in the back of our

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truck, covered in diarrhea. He, too, had faced death.

Finally, we all cuddled in together, children in the middle; my friend and I using our somatic trauma training to help the kids fall asleep, somehow finding rest until the sun came up.

I have learned that after trauma routine is important for the developing child. On the way home, we stopped at a pumpkin patch and wandered among other families gleefully celebrating the season. We have pictures but it feels like a dream.

We made a detour to another primitive hot springs in hopes that the waters would wash away what had happened. As we got dressed, shots rang out from the other side of the river—hunting season was in full swing. I ducked and pushed my girls against the truck. Today, nearly a year later, it still takes everything I have not to cover their bodies when I hear a gun. Occasionally, when a man reaches into his pocket in a grocery store, I abandon my cart and flee outside in a panic. These are preconscious reflexes now. My responses make me think of my best friend from high school whose father had survived Vietnam. When fireworks went off, he had jumped on her, pushing her body into the sandy beach. I simply cannot imagine what people from wars have endured. One night was too much. I wish for them all the same healing we have found.

To be clear, an event like this is not something you just “get over.” Healing is a process and looks different for my children than it does for me. I was able to respond so quickly that night because

a year-to-the day my father had dropped due to hemorrhaging in his brain. It had been an incredibly hard year, and that night I was in some dream-time talking to him. “Dad, I miss you. Are you there?”

Then, the shots. After awaiting my own death and surviving, what truly matters in life has clarified.

Like many who survive, positive changes since then feel clandestine. A new gratitude for even the most mundane tasks remains. I embrace parenthood more; have changed my work demands to allow for more presence with my family. Friendships have clarified and rearranged. My previous study of trauma and the nervous system now feels more poignant. I am able to better prioritize that which brings joy and growth. Horses have returned after a decade without. The knowledge that the veil is thin and life is short now feels truer than ever. Our mental health and our healing are now a priority.

Amazing people have held us and helped heal us.

My heart goes out to those who have been in gun violence and have experienced much worse.

To all the people who do not escape these mindless acts, I send so much love. One day, as a doctor, I hope to do more with people who are survivors.

The message I receive is that it is still too soon but one day, yes. It is paramount to continue to heal myself before I can help others with their trauma.

Ultimately, I hope to go into schools and teach communities that barricading behind a hollow door is futile. I hope my story and the countless others will land on ears that are currently deaf. Our future generations depend on change. I still walk the line between wanting a firearm on me at all times and wanting to never see or hear one again. Friends have

reached out, offering to teach me; I think now I may be ready. While traveling in this country, I hope to never again have my body as the only option for defense. This statement breaks my peaceful heart.

Other than providing yummy elk to our table, I am not convinced guns do the world much good.

KATEY | The Counselor Holcomb first told me about the shooting a few months after it happened. It was May, and we were at the end-of-school-year celebration for our daughters, who had just graduated first grade. The two girls gleefully attempted to dislodge an errant tasseled ball from a tree, their shrieks of laughter filling the warm spring day with delight as they sprinted back to their classmates, the rogue ball liberated from the tree. I moved closer to Holcomb as she spoke, the sun warming my hair as my skin rippled with gooseflesh. I listened as everything I am: friend, mother, counselor, professor, Montanan.

As a licensed counselor and professor in the counseling department at Montana State University, I understand that the experience of trauma is pervasive. I understand that even the threat of experiencing trauma by gun violence has a systemic impact on the state of Montana. According data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 209 gun deaths in Montana in 2019: 17 of those deaths were children and teens, 11 percent were homicide and 82 percent were suicide with guns as the means of death. That is an average of four deaths by gun each week in Montana.

In 2021, the Montana Department of Health and

There were 209 GUN DEATHS IN MONTANA in 2019

17

WERE CHILDREN AND TEENS

11%

WERE HOMICIDE

82%

WERE SUICIDE

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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"From our perspective, the critical piece of healing from trauma is connection; the quality of how we are received by our family, partners, and communities when we disclose what has happened to us is foretelling of integration and healing."

–Dr. Katey T. Franklin Human Services reported that one Montanan dies because of a gun-related suicide every 50 hours, and Montana has had the second highest gun-related suicide rate nationwide for the past decade. While gun violence doesn’t often happen through drive-by shootings in Montana, it is prevalent. Death by gun violence in Montana happens by unintentional accidental death, death by suicide or homicide, and ready access to lethal means.

We also see the systemic impact of the threat of gun violence in the state’s public school systems with an increase in student resource officers, armed intruder and active shooter drills in K-12 schools, lockdowns and ongoing conversations about whether or not to arm Montana educators in school buildings.

As prevalent as gun violence is in Montana, so is the trauma it inflicts. Connection is the key to healing trauma, but this too can be challenging.

People’s normative response to hearing about trauma is often to dehumanize and distance it: “That doesn’t happen here,” or, “That would never happen to me or my family.” This is the process of “othering,” a natural ego-defense mechanism. The physical, emotional and psychological responses to trauma are normal human responses to threats of harm; while they can be uncomfortable and often frightening, they are not aberrant. These responses are biological and serve to protect our minds, bodies and hearts as we process trauma. It is the cognitive, emotional and behavioral trauma responses that, when suppressed, numbed, or hidden, may become

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pathological and negatively impact a person’s physical health and relationships.

These responses can have a secondary effect of isolating and shaming the person who experienced the trauma. It tells them, “I don’t want to hear about or see what happened to you,” and sends the message that the impacted person is damaged, and they must contain their hurt, pain and fear. When this societal messaging is on repeat, a traumatized person learns to shrink and hide their experiences behind a neutral face, numbing with substances and behaviors, and not understanding why their physical health is declining. Children act out in classes, and teachers worry about their misbehavior and lack of concentration.

This is the opposite of healing.

I leaned into Holcomb and her story that day; I had the courage to hear her story with compassion while navigating my own experience of fear. I empathically listened to her as a mother and a friend.

I stayed present with her and listened. We are all capable of this expression of empathy, and of this effort to connect. Connection can be this simple, and in this we can find hope.

From our perspective, the critical piece of healing from trauma is connection; the quality of how we are received by our family, partners, and communities when we disclose what has happened to us is foretelling of integration and healing.

When we are received by our people with empathy, acceptance and compassion, we are able to actively engage the courageous and vulnerable process of

trauma integration in a supported way. This is the opposite of “othering,” and suffering in isolation and silence. A traumatic experience does not define a person; rather, it is an aspect of their experience that may deeply impact them and their behaviors for a time. The human is still there, however hurt, and consciously or unconsciously needs connection to survive and heal. There are many paths to healing in Montana, be it counseling, nature, smudging, painting, horses, trail-running, church, hunting, ceremony, CrossFit, mending fence or beyond.

Regardless of the modality or approach to healing trauma, connection is paramount. Changing the conversation and statistics of gun violence in Montana is possible too. Through brave, honest and vulnerable connection, we can heal.

HOLCOMB | The Mother Out of hard times comes beauty and growth. I get to tie this story in a pretty bow because my children are still alive. It is that simple. Right now, my primary goal is to help my two young daughters heal and feel safe in the world again. We go to therapy and talk about that night when they bring it up. Thankfully, there is a federal victim’s compensation fund that will help with the costs; our health insurance has covered nothing, and we have spent thousands of dollars for our healing. I believe with enough time and support, that my brave girls will sleep in their own rooms again as they had for months before the shooting without a hitch. For weeks after the shooting, I had to wrestle my oldest down out of night terrors that threw her vertical out of sleep.

They still cling to each other, eyes wide like deer, when something feels amiss. I often have to leave the room at bedtime so they don’t see my sorrow.

Yet slowly, they are healing. No children should have to go through what they did—my oldest telling me she now knows to shield her head so she doesn’t die. Or my youngest now confused about the “active shooter drill.” No sweetie, that wasn’t a drill. That was real life.

One week after the incident, I contacted the jail and tried to anonymously send the shooter a note along with some books on healing trauma and male depression. I do not wish for this man to suffer; I wish for him to grow and change and find healing amidst this broken system. “I don’t know why you didn’t kill us all. Thank you for that. I hope you understand you have forever changed the lives of many in profound and disturbing ways, including

Johnston sits in a hot springs after a violent night.

"We made a detour to another primitive hot springs in hopes that the waters would wash away what had happened," she writes. Photo courtesy of Holcomb Johnston

my two previously fearless daughters. May you heal and become a better person in this world.”

The jail said no.

Dr. Holcomb Johnston is a trauma-informed physician, business owner, lover of mountains and mother of two radiant children. She believes strongly in the power of story, community and sense-of-place to heal and connect.

Dr. Katey Franklin is an assistant professor of counseling and the director of the Center for Mental Health Research & Recovery at Montana State University.

She is the mother of three children, and enjoys an active life with her family in southwestern Montana.

If you are in immediate danger, please dial 9-1-1

Suicide Resources 24-Hour Suicide and Crisis Lifeline Dial 9-8-8 or text MT to 741741

Victim Resources The Help Center | Crisis Counseling bozemanhelpcenter.org Community Resource Line Dial 2-1-1

Montana Office for Victims of Crime Visit ovc.ojp.gov/contact

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A conceptual rendering of the One&Only Main and West Lodge

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C R E AT I V E HU MOR : GL ACIER A N D Y ELLOWSTON E PEOPLE // 126 RECIPE: BISON SHORT RIBS // 130 F IC T ION: SLOUGH CREEK // 134 POET RY: GOD SIGHT I NG I N W E ST Y ELLOWSTON E // 140

A lone skier and her dog break trail through a blank slate of snow in Montana.

Photo by Kirby Grubaugh

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■ Humor

Are You a Glacier Person or a Yellowstone Person?

Words by Ednor Therriault | Illustration by Madeline Thunder

W

e love Glacier National Park. Intrepid outdoors enthusiasts swarm the park each year to ride their bikes up the plowed section of Going-to-theSun Road in the spring, or hike endless miles in the steep backcountry to spend a summer night in the spartan alpine lodges reachable only on foot or horseback. But it’s getting mighty crowded out there. Post-pandemic visitor numbers have swelled to the point where an entrance ticket to Glacier must be purchased months in advance in an online lottery, and the moment they’re released, those tickets are snapped up in less time than it takes to put a buffalo calf into the back of your Jeep Cherokee.

That infamous incident happened a couple of years ago in Yellowstone National Park, and the recent rash of tourist misbehavior has threatened to overshadow the park’s incredible natural bounty. Like Glacier, Yellowstone boasts its share of grandeur: stunning peaks, towering waterfalls, rugged wilderness and roaming megafauna. But the differences between the two parks seem to have created two disparate demographics of visitors. Recently, a friend was recalling some of his experiences at Sperry Lodge, Glacier’s iconic wilderness chalet. He recounted with great fondness his several trips with friends to the gorgeous wood and rock structure perched on a glacial cirque at the end of a demanding 6.7-mile hike. I asked him if he had a similar spot in Yellowstone. He looked at me as if I’d broken wind in the buffet line.

“We’re not Yellowstone people,” he said.

Yellowstone people. Glacier people. Is this a thing?

After spending a couple decades visiting both places, I started searching my own memories for examples of tourist characteristics that might be distinctly associated with either park. As a writer, I’m not given to broad generalizations about people. As a humorist, though, I’ll jump on a juicy stereotype

faster than you can say “wool socks and Birkenstocks.”

At first glance it would seem obvious: Glacier is a hiker’s park, Yellowstone is for motor touring. Yellowstone’s Grand Loop Road is a carefully planned, 142-mile figure-eight that links most of its major attractions. In total, the park has 370 miles of paved roads. By some estimates, 95 percent of Yellowstone visitors never venture more than 100 feet from the asphalt, barely far enough to try and ride a buffalo. Think about that: 95 percent of Yellowstone’s visitors use 5 percent of the park.

Glacier, by comparison, has more footprints than tire tracks.

It has barely 100 miles of paved roads, and only Going-to-theSun Road transects the park. Compare that with 700 miles of hiking trails, and you’ll get an idea why you see more hiking footwear than flip-flops among Glacier’s visiting hordes. It’s worth noting, though, that Yellowstone actually has more trails—900 miles—and, at 2.2 million acres, is also more than twice the size of Glacier.

So, with all this hiking versus driving, what kind of visitors are packing the parks in these post-pandemic booms? One indicator I can provide from personal observation is hats. My wife and I sat in the lobby of Many Glacier Hotel one August morning, lacing up our boots while clusters of over-caffeinated hikers chattered around us.

One woman was inspecting the contents of her teenage daughter’s backpack. “No, honey, I said ‘bear spray,’ not ‘hairspray.’”

“I hear there’s a moose family at Lake Josephine,” said an excited young boy sporting a pair of fresh-out-of-the-box Merrells.

“Kuinka kaukana on Grinnell Glacier?” asked a blonde, middleaged man. He was Finnish.

As the hikers began to filter out of the lobby, I noticed that nearly everyone who wore headgear was sporting a version of 127

the same hat. You know the type: sometimes called a boonie hat, it’s a wide-brimmed, floppy fabric job with a chin cord that always seems to find its way into your mouth. It may have a mesh insert around the crown, and there is a snap on either side of the brim so you can bend one side up, Australian-style, like the machine gunner in “Rat Patrol.”

In Yellowstone earlier that summer, the hat styles I saw were all over the place. There were a few “Rat Patrol” hats, but also ball caps and trucker hats in an array of colors. There were visors, cloth fedoras with tiny brims, knit watch caps, and a couple of long-billed fishing hats with sun skirts draped from the back. And these were just the hats lying in the bottom of the Excelsior Geyser Crater near Grand Prismatic Spring, where the stiff afternoon wind yanks the lids off dozens of boardwalk-tromping tourists every day. I saw one fellow along the walkway who had managed to keep his camouflage bucket hat clamped to his head. He was also wearing a fluorescent lime-green windbreaker. I had to wonder, does this guy want to be seen, or not be seen?

Glacier Park, especially along its higher trails and Logan Pass on Going-to-the-Sun Road, is susceptible to sudden storms pretty much any time of year, sometimes bringing sleet or snow even in August. Its outdoorsy aficionados tend to be prepared for this, and dress accordingly in layers. Gloves, boots, and a warm hat are de rigueur if you’re hiking in the backcountry. The garb you see in Yellowstone, by comparison, covers a wider spectrum. The park has its share of no-nonsense hikers, with sturdy boots, hydro backpacks, trekking poles and extra layers, but the boardwalks and visitor centers are also churning with folks wearing basketball shorts and tank tops, skateboard sneakers, shower slides and river sandals. There are always a few women who seem to be hiking to some mystery wilderness nightclub, wearing leather pants or short dresses and stylish heels, carrying nothing but a phone.

Online these days, it’s easy to find sites that feature tourists behaving badly (“tourons”), and Yellowstone seems to be the touron epicenter. As some of us in the Rocky Mountain West look for the first crocus of the spring poking up through the snow, many Yellowstone locals anticipate the first goring of the season when some knucklehead boldly approaches a bison as if they’re protected by a pair of buffalo-proof underpants. Glacier also sees a few run-ins between wildlife and visitors each year.

The internet is full of videos showing people trotting along a Glacier Park road toward a bear or moose, usually sending the animals running (“Let’s go, cubs! We don’t want to get any of the stupid on us!”).

Many of us Yellowstone buffs have found that it’s not hard to get away from the teeming hordes to enjoy the other 95 percent of the park. It’s full of astonishing geology and plant life, and truly thrilling sightings of bears, wolves, elk, bighorn sheep, and, yes, bison, outside the circus atmosphere of traffic jams and overflowing parking lots. By the same token, Glacier isn’t just for hardcore hikers. It offers many easily accessible, short hikes that can take you to its magical cedar stands, seemingly endless wilderness, roaring waterfalls and panoramic viewpoints. By learning the best places and methods to discover the exciting natural features in both of these popular

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Just the facts.

Glacier National Park

Founded on May 11, 1910, making it the 10th national park in the US

Total Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,583 mi² Hiking trails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 700+ miles Paved Roadways . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 miles Visitors (in 2022) . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,908,458 FEATURES: Montana's pristine wilderness boasts stunning glacially-carved landscapes, including alpine lakes, rugged peaks, and diverse wildlife like grizzly bears and mountain goats, perfect for outdoor enthusiasts.

Glacier National Park Yellowstone National Park Yellowstone National Park

Founded on March 1, 1872, making it the first national park in the US

Total Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,471 mi² Hiking trails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 900+ miles Paved Roadways . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370 miles Visitors (in 2022) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,290,242 FEATURES: Geothermal wonders, from erupting geysers to bubbling hot springs, coexist with diverse wildlife like bison, wolves, and bears, scenic canyons, and pristine wilderness, making it an outdoor paradise.

national parks, I’ve found that it’s entirely possible to be both a Yellowstone person and a Glacier person.

Ednor Therriault is a Missoula writer and musician, and has published eight books about Montana and Yellowstone National Park. Under his stage name, Bob Wire, he has released eight full-length albums.

Madeline Thunder is a freelance artist based in Bozeman, Montana.

When she is not creating, she can usually be found playing outside.

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Taste of Montana Winter recipes to keep you cozy this season Presented by The Gourmet Gals Food is so much more than sustenance. It connects us to time and place; it connects us to the changing seasons and the changing land; it connects us to each other. It’s why I’ve shaped my life around cooking. Fifteen years ago I began nourishing the locals and visitors of Big Sky alike with my business, The Gourmet Gals, but my relationship with seasonal cooking dates back many more decades to when I was 20 years old and living in a small village in Australia.

I planted my first-ever vegetable garden. I bartered for eggs with the British neighbor down the road. There was no such thing as buying ingredients to make a recipe; there was only an abundance of seasonal ingredients and the desire to turn

them into something magical. I moved to Montana 25 years ago and have been delighted to find opportunities to cook with the seasons here just as I learned to across the world in Australia. My now-grown children grew up toddling down rows of vegetables and fruit trees on farms throughout the Gallatin Valley. They flourished on hand-plucked huckleberries and locally harvested wild game. This season, I offer you one of their favorite winter meals, paired with a local favorite cocktail. Enjoy!

Nancy Radick Butler is a longtime Big Sky local and the owner of The Gourmet Gals.

Huckleberry Mule A great meal brings guests to the table, but a great drink keeps them talking about it long after the evening is over. Mules are a consistently popular request among my clients, and best of all, they’re versatile; a Montana mule with bourbon is perfect for a long winter evening, but tequila, the traditional vodka or even gin, are all great substitutes. This is also a great choice to serve as a spirit-free mocktail. Seasonal cooking in harsh Montana winters many times means preserving, which is sometimes as easy as saving a summer treat in the freezer. Huckleberries are the most spectacular combination of sweet and tart and are available frozen locally year-round.

Other seasonal options might include pear with clove, or perhaps cranberry, but to me nothing says Montana like a huckleberry mule!

Ingredients

Directions

· 2 ounces of vodka (try a spirit from a Montana disitillery.

I like the Quicksilver vodka from Missoula’s Montgomery Distillery.)

1. Prepare your cup with ice. Copper mugs are the traditional way to serve this drink, but I’m all about doing with what you’ve got. A nice glass low ball or other cocktail vessel of your choice will do just fine.

· ½ ounce of freshsqueezed lime juice (add more based on your preference)

2. Add vodka, lime juice, ginger beer and simple syrup. Stir.

· ½ ounce of huckleberry simple syrup* (add more based on your preference) · ½ cup of ginger beer (I prefer Fever Tree) · Lime wedge or round for garnish

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3. Garnish with your lime and serve. Enjoy! *To make your own huckleberry simple syrup, boil equal parts water, sugar and huckleberries for three minutes on the stove, mashing huckleberries a bit as they cook. Let the syrup cool for at least an hour and store in a mason jar in the fridge for 1-2 weeks.

■ Recipes

Bison Short Ribs Montana winter nights arrive early—and sometimes stay past their welcome. A comforting meal at the end of a long adventuring day on the mountain or a grueling eight hours of work helps turn those long, dark hours into something to look forward to. Bison is a natural choice to use both for its mild deliciousness and as a healthier alternative to beef.

And better yet, in Montana, we’re lucky to have an abundance of local options. Short ribs are particularly succulent and easy to prepare ahead of time. They are excellent braised in the oven as this recipe calls for, or even in a crock pot or Instant Pot®. Cut the cooking time in half and throw the partially braised short ribs on the grill, basting with the cooking liquid or barbecue sauce. Leftover short ribs? A treat! Shred the meat for tacos and chili, toss with mac and cheese or top a baked potato for a quick meal.

Ingredients (serves 6)

Directions

· 1 tablespoon neutral oil, such as canola or vegetable

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

· 6 pounds bison short ribs · 3 cups chopped onion · 3 cups chopped celery

2. Heat a large Dutch-oven style pan on the stove on medium-high heat for 1 minute.

3. Add oil and short ribs, searing to a golden crust on each side.

Remove the short ribs from the pan to rest.

· 2 whole garlic cloves, crushed

4. In the same pan, add onion, carrot and celery and cook for 3-4 minutes. Add garlic, bay leaf and Herbes de Provence, stirring all together until fragrant, about another minute.

· 2 tablespoons good quality Herbes de Provence (I highly recommend Victoria Taylor’s which is easiest to find online)

5. Add port, scraping bits off of the bottom and reducing the liquid by half. Return the short ribs to the pan and add 1 cup of V-8 and up to 3 cups of chicken stock.

· 1 cup port or any rich red wine on hand

6. Cover with a tight-fitting lid and cook at 350 degrees for 4-plus hours. Serve over mashed potatoes, crusty bread or polenta and enjoy!

· 3 cups baby carrots

· 1 cup V-8 · 3 cups chicken stock, preferably low sodium · Pepper to taste Note: There is an absence of salt in the recipe – V-8 and chicken stock are generally pretty salty, but add more if you prefer!

7. Feeling fancy? Strain the liquid from the short ribs, skim the fat off the top and reduce further in a skillet on medium heat. Spoon the reduced sauce over the top of the short ribs.

8. Feeling fancier? Make a quick gremolata—equal parts fresh finely minced garlic, lemon zest and parsley—to sprinkle over the top at serving. This adds so much bright flavor, and the acid helps cut the richness of the short ribs.

–Nancy Radick Butler

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Slough Creek

By Toby Thompson

E

lk lay herded across the Mammoth Hot Springs parade grounds, their antlers flecked with snow but their muzzles steaming, dark as hot chocolate. The stone bears flanking the post office steps wore their pink and orange scarves jauntily. It was after New Year’s and Davis thought, ‘The snow’s not important, it’s a shower.’ The ochre terraces of the upper hot springs were visible from his truck, parked on Officers Row. The compound’s Victorian cottages—quarters from the army’s presence during the 1890s—still held Christmas decorations. Davis would ski into the backcountry. His mind was set.

The pistol he carried was regulation (firearms were permitted in Yellowstone National Park), though he doubted he’d use it. Grizzlies were hibernating and cougars moved too quickly. He would not shoot a wolf, would not need to.

He liked to say that the last human a wolf threatened was Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. His pistol was a 1908-model Luger, a weapon his father had liberated from Frankfurt in 1945.

Davis had driven to Mammoth up the old stagecoach trail, paved and widened since June’s flooding, but forbiddingly steep. He’d misgauged a turn and had slid into a guard rail. His left fenders were compressed but his tires were intact.

That was what he cared about.

He’d spent New Year’s morning at an I-90 truck stop—its café the only restaurant available. He’d expected

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hungover cooks and tired long haulers, but the room proved cheerful, with sun spotlighting the snow-raked Absarokas, mule deer in the fields, and couples gorging on waffles or pancakes.

A waitress in a red skirt said, “What you want, darlin’? Coffee? Alka-Seltzer?”

“Coffee,” Davis said, and smiled.

Despite his age, his teeth were startlingly white.

“Whoa,” the waitress said, “don’t blind me.”

A trucker jostled her and said, “You been kissed yet this year, Edie?’ She laughed. “No, but it’s on my list.” ======== The road between Undine Falls and Tower was icy and he negotiated its hills with caution. They flattened for a stretch past Blacktail Creek and he hit the gas.

Snow was thickening. He had limited visibility, but skiing would be possible.

He crossed the Yellowstone River, passed by Specimen Ridge, and slid into the parking nook at Slough Creek. The pavement held eight inches of powder, its top layer newly fallen. He shut off his truck, inspected the damage, and urinated in the snow. Light shimmered through flurries from the south. No one was about.

He broke trail past the lot’s gate and kick-glided through sagebrush a hundred yards to the road’s first hill. It was precipitous and he paused at its crest.

He was not a good skier, but the snow

■ Fiction

was sufficiently deep to slow his descent.

He slipped down competently, then stood at the hill’s base before striding toward Slough Creek’s campground.

Besides the Luger, he carried a British Commando knife his father had given him as a boy. It was a black dagger with its blade sharpened on both sides below a corrugated steel handle. The Brit who’d presented it to his father said he’d dispatched seven Germans with it. Why his father passed it to Davis, augmented with its bloody pedigree, he could not fathom. When he was twelve he’d thrown it at a stump and broken the tip off its blade. It was one of several bequeathments from his father about which he felt guilt.

Dr. Edwards had died twenty-seven years ago. It had been an excruciating illness—cancer of the spine—but in the weeks before the worst of it, Davis had spoken with him at length. Their talks were mostly about family. The Edwards were Washingtonians, in the city since 1856, the men—except Davis—physicians. They discussed this legacy, but Davis, a journalist/historian, was most interested in what it had been like to practice medicine during the postwar years.

“Patients were the same,” Dr. Edwards had said. “But everything else shifted: antibiotics, technological advancements, the infrequency of house calls, the rise of political correctness.” He’d bent the rules, had been censured, but remained

a hard charger. He’d euthanized patients, long before that practice’s acceptability. Suicide was a reliable topic of conversation. He’d said, “If you are old Washington and want to kill yourself, you jump off the Calvert Street Bridge, not the Connecticut Avenue.

The Connecticut is for parvenus.” Davis had taken this remark in good humor, as he’d heard it since he was a boy. It had come with additional advice: “If you shoot yourself, place the barrel in your mouth, not at your temple. Otherwise, you’ll walk around forever with your penis in your hand.” Dr. Edwards had arranged for a nurse he trusted to euthanize him when his pain became unbearable. She did that, with fifty milligrams of morphine. But not before he begged Davis for a shotgun to kill himself, screaming, “Shoot me, if I can’t.

For God’s sake, shoot me.” ======== Bison stood in pods beside the road, their great heads covered in snow, their figures unmoving in the cold, their demeanor stoic and resolute. To pass this close in October would have been dangerous, but the cold had inured them to any threat but that of wolves. At the Slough Creek trailhead Davis thought he saw bear tracks, but they were halffilled with powder and he couldn’t be sure. It was possible for a grizzly to have left its den in January, a certainty if it smelled a carcass. Davis skied on.

Sun shines through morning fog, illuminating a lone tree in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Jacob W. Frank / NPS

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At the large shed that served park rangers as a stable, Davis unfastened his skis and rested out of the wind. He looked over the creek and its valley to the nearest mountains. The snow had lessened for a moment, and he could see beyond Specimen Ridge to Mirror Plateau. As a youngster, he’d backpacked through that country and into Yellowstone Canyon.

But no more. At his age, the preference was for day hikes and car camping. Wilderness beckoned, but he took it only by skis.

He unzipped his pack, dug for a peanut bar, and felt the pistol’s grip. He raised the gun, released its safety, and pointed it at a distant crow. The weapon fired, its report in the silence astounding. Had he pressed its trigger? The crow flew at the sound, unwounded. Davis’s hand shook. He placed the weapon in his bag.

Moving north a quarter mile, he reached the campground at Slough Creek. It met another stream there, and Davis moved toward the confluence. Campsites with their fire pits and bear canisters looked archaic in the snow, prehistoric.

The deserted campground reminded Davis of Coney Island in winter, its rides barren, its sand patched with white.

His father had taken him there one fall. It was after the 1960 World Series, which they’d attended at Yankee Stadium. They’d slept at the Harvard Club, at a patient’s invitation. Next morning, Dr. Edwards suggested Coney Island and they’d ridden the subway out.

“I brought your mother here,” he’d said. “Just after the war.”

Davis had loved the boardwalk’s raffishness, its sideshows and hot dog stands, the beach’s width and its whiteness. They’d ridden the Cyclone, and at its height, his father’s arm gripping his shoulders, he’d looked across the white expanse of sand and imagined himself on a vast and peopleless sea. ======== Snowfall was heavier at the campground, and he retreated purposefully toward his truck. It was a two-mile ski and he’d dallied. He passed the Slough Creek trailhead and rode the path’s dips

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and slight ascents through scattered bison when the wind picked up. Snow blew thickly and it was in his face. He glanced at a bison thirty feet to his right and it disappeared. He looked to his left and there were no hills or mountains. His skis disappeared.

The snow swirling at his feet met that of the air and he saw nothing but white. He felt vertiginous, then adrift, losing his balance. He hit the compressed snow with a thud.

He lay there, shuddering. I’m dying, he thought.

This is what it is: nausea, disorientation, and a smothering whiteness. He released his poles and hugged his pack to his stomach. He felt the steel of the Luger.

His mother had died two weeks after his father, so Dr. Edwards hadn’t managed to kill her. He’d tried throughout Davis’s youth. In rages, he’d slammed her against walls, into doorjambs, and once, when Davis was eleven, swayed before her in urine-soaked pajamas and flicked snot onto her face.

One February afternoon, she’d interrupted Davis’s studies and said, “He tried to strangle me.” Davis had said nothing, just looked out to his father’s Jeep spinning tires in the driveway’s snow. Dr. Edwards quit alcohol after that, but as Y2K approached, he’d said, “If I live to New Year’s, 2000, I might just take a drink.” His mother had said coldly, “I hope you don’t.”

The blizzard at Slough Creek persisted. But Davis had remembered his compass. This can’t last, he thought. I have a way out. He dug into his pack for the instrument. He knew he must ski south.

Perhaps southwest. The creek was to his right, a mountain to his left. He’d find his balance and ski out.

The wind lessened and presently he could see.

Nearby stood a bison. Davis looked left and there stood another. He watched the pair, impassive, motionless, their horns to the wind. He saw the snow part like a curtain. There were his tracks.

Barely visible, but certainly there. Minutes passed before he found the resolve to rise. But he did, lifting his skis, tucking his knees to his chest, rolling, and then standing.

========

The truck’s thermometer read fifteen degrees.

He drove into the Lamar Valley as sun caromed off the river’s surface and painted the rangers’ Buffalo Ranch in shades of delicious tan. Everything was luscious—no, luminous. He passed a coyote jogging atop the pavement, and before Pebble Creek stopped to let a pair of bighorn sheep pass.

Coursing by Barronette Peak, he descended into Icebox Canyon, then was free of the park at Silver Gate, its Range Riders Inn and log tourist cabins like props in a Christmas play. At Cooke City, he parked before Clarks Fork Tavern, the whine of snowmobiles on the wind.

At its bar—in a windowed space facing Mount Republic—he sat with his pack before the wooden counter. A Native fellow wearing a striped eye patch took his order. The room was empty but for five snowmobilers drinking at a window table. They were heavyset, unshaven, and wore black-bibbed coveralls. A television flickered overhead, and the group studied it. Intently, Davis thought. He swiveled toward the screen and saw that a conflagration was afoot. Before what looked like the Justice Department in Washington, a correspondent stood among demonstrators who rocked a steel riot fence, as if to topple it. Police in visored helmets stood between it and the building.

“Could you turn that up?” Davis asked. The barkeep obliged. A roar from the set filled the space.

“That city,” a snowmobiler said. “They ought to burn it.”

Davis did not respond.

“Look,” another said. “They’re around that barricade.”

They were, and Davis watched with dread as rioters fought police across Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a quarter he knew well. He’d watched parades there as a boy and had covered its dignitaries as a journalist. But what he recalled vividly at this moment was an expanse of grass, five blocks distant, on the south lawn of the White House. His father had caretaken it during medical school. “We’d start mowing at the far side of the president’s yard, and by the time we finished, it was time to cut the near.

We did it by hand.”

The snowmobilers were shouting now. “Moving closer,” a bearded one said. “They’re going inside.”

It seemed as if they might. Davis watched as the rioters—in camouflage hoodies and full-face respirators—moved toward Justice’s twenty-foothigh doors. CS gas enveloped them. A helicopter thudded above. They fought, undeterred, near the front portico.

“Get that attorney bastard,” the bearded man said.

“Hang him, like they didn’t old Mike.”

Davis turned. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What?” said the bearded man. Another spat, “The hell you say?”

Davis was livid. “You know nothing. You’re ignorant, beer-drunk peckerwoods. You don’t know what honest dissent is about. Especially in the city of Washington.”

“D.C.’s a pussy pantry,” the bearded man said.

“That’s one thing.”

“You,” said another, “look pussified yourself.”

Davis reached for the pack at his feet and withdrew the Luger. He slammed it onto the countertop.

The snowmobilers slid back in their chairs.

“Idiots,” Davis said. He placed a ten on the bar, anchoring it with the pistol. “Lock it and load it,” he said. “And keep the change.” He walked to his vehicle.

Driving west through the park, he felt elevated, weightless. The knife’s scabbard was at his hip, but that was all. A red-raw sunset painted Mount Hornaday and near the Buffalo Ranch, before a half dozen tourists, a snowclad pack of wolves was frisking.

Toby Thompson is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Positively Main Street, his biography of Bob Dylan, and Riding the Rough String: Reflections on the American West. He has written for publications as varied as Esquire, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Outside and Men’s Journal. He is a part-time resident of Livingston, Montana, and teaches nonfiction writing at Penn State.

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139

God–sighting in West Yellowstone

By Yetta Rose Stein

Bright, tender bison were born again this year right around Mother’s Day, hallowed copper resurgence speckling verdant hills.

We stopped our car to swallow the rite: callow tottering calves hopping behind matriarch mammoths caddisflies landing on brown tanned hunched backs.

Reminisced what we could not see: endless grass oceans marbled with penny-colored beasts.

We yearned for witness and quiet. We were too late.

When we drove the 113 miles home, we prayed: in the end times, we’ll lose.

Make me weeds under hoof.

A bison group is on the move at sunrise in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley. Photo by Jacob W. Frank / NPS

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■ Poetry

Yetta Rose Stein reads and writes in Livingston, Montana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Another Chicago Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of the Mug Club, the assistant managing editor of Hunger Mountain Review, and a board member of the Intermountain Opera. She is a graduate of Hellgate High School and is pursuing her MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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14 4

HISTORY BIG SK Y RE SORT: 50 Y EA R S // 147 T HE DI A RY OF NORTON PEA RL // 160 RED LIGHT MON TA NA // 166 MON TA NA GOV ER NOR S // 174

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Big Sky Resort: 50 YEARS

Stories by Jack Reaney

I

n March of 1974, The New York Times published an article by a cantankerous writer who was displeased with his stay at the brand-new Big Sky Resort. He’d arrived just before the new ski area’s official opening, which he wrote was hastily scheduled so that Big Sky’s ailing founder, Chet Huntley, could attend before his death—which he did not. This writer, James P. Sterba, questioned his own critique, given that it was the resort’s debut year. “It may be too early to judge Big Sky because not all of it is really completed,” Sterba penned.

Sterba might have eaten his own words today when, just weeks before Big Sky Resort's opening for its celebratory 50th season, Vogue published a piece titled “Why Big Sky, Montana Is the Hottest Coldest Ski Resort to Visit This Winter.”

“So now, at 50 years young, Big Sky Resort is fully equipped to not

only outlast, but outshine its competitors as one of America’s hottest ski spots,” the article concludes. It’s safe to say Sterba was right—it was too early to judge. Fifty years after a meager handful of articles chronicled Big Sky Resort’s launch, a Google search yields multiple pages of headlines commenting on this anniversary, recognizing it as the industry giant it has become. At our Big Sky-based magazine, we’re excited to celebrate half a century of Big Sky Resort with our own collection of stories told through the voices of a few of the many people who love it, the people who’ve seen it grow, and the people who have worked to make it what it is today.

Enjoy this work, composed by Outlaw Partners Associate Editor Jack Reaney, and join us in celebrating 50 years of Big Sky Resort.

—The Editors

Lone Mountain, the crown jewel of Big Sky, glows in the sun on a beautiful day in 2022.

Photo by Michael Ruebusch

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BIG SKY RESORT: 50 YEARS

Timeline Big Sky Resort’s grand opening includes four chairlifts: Rams Head, Explorer, Lone Peak Triple and Gondola 1.

Big Sky Resort visionary and founder Chet Huntley dies from lung cancer on the spring equinox of the resort’s opening year.

Everett Kircher of Boyne Resorts purchases Big Sky Resort.

Mad Wolf double chair opens, expands northeastfacing terrain on Andesite Mountain.

1978

1976

The first Dirtbag Ball takes place at Buck’s T-4, raising funds for the Big Sky Ski Patrol and birthing a longlived community.

1979

1974

1973

Powder Seeker 6 replaces the old triple chair in The Bowl, complete with the first “weatherproof Big Sky Blue Bubbles” now featured on three chairlifts.

The new Mountain to Meadow bike trail connects Big Sky Base Area to Town Center.

Big Sky Resort acquires the Moonlight Basin ski area, following Moonlight’s chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009 and lingering financial troubles.

Dakota triple chair extends Lone Mountain’s southfacing terrain.

2007 2013 2015

2016

Ramcharger 8, the first eight-seat lift in North America and the world’s first energy efficient D-line Direct Drive, becomes the continent’s most technologically advanced lift, according Big Sky Resort.

Big Sky Resort joins Ikon Pass, spurring local controversy due to an influx of crowds.

2018

Lone Mountain dons November snow in preparation of opening day for the 2023-2024 winter ski season. Photo by Jack Reaney

Pond skim wraps up ski season, but disappears from season-end tradition in subsequent years.

2019 2018

2018

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Big Sky Ski Education Foundation hosts Masters FIS World Criterium, a 21-plus world championship held in the U.S. only once every five years.

Taylor Middleton, current president and COO, begins his Big Sky Resort career.

Challenger double chair adds highalpine, expert terrain.

Lone Peak Tram opens in tandem with the Shedhorn double chair to expand south-facing terrain off the summit of Lone Mountain.

Swift Current replaces Gondola II, bringing a third high-speed quad to Big Sky.

1996

1995 1988

1981

Moonlight Basin opens a public ski area on the north side of Lone Mountain.

Yellowstone Club opens a private ski area adjacent to Big Sky Resort.

Patrol triggers a large avalanche, destroying the Shedhorn chairlift and leaving scars still visible in that area.

Big Sky Resort opens for lift-accessed mountain biking.

1996 1990s 2000

2003

On March 15, Big Sky Resort suspends operations due to COVID-19.

Big Sky Resort begins charging a daily addon fee to ride Lone Peak Tram, helping mitigate crowds.

Certain passholders have unlimited access.

2021

Swift Current 6 replaces the Swift Current high-speed quad from 1996.

2021

John Kircher, the man behind the Lone Peak Tram and beloved former resort GM, dies from cancer.

2023

Lone Peak Tram replaces the original tram from 1995, increasing maximum capacity five-fold.

2023

2020

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BIG SKY RESORT: 50 YEARS

Big Sky Forum Telling the story of 50 years of Big Sky through the people who love it

A

reporting job landed me in Big Sky last year, and with it, my first address west of the Mississippi. I’ve been intrigued by opportunities to learn the history of this unique mountain town—not only from news archives and file cabinets, but by hearing memories from the people living here.

To visitors, there can be an illusion of paradise in a resort community; the reasons are obvious, and in many ways, probably true. But from the inside, there’s a day-to-day realness with true challenges. To spend a chunk of one’s lifetime in a place like Big Sky is not easy. I think it requires something deep.

In my quest to capture the meaning of Big Sky Resort’s 50 years, I spoke with a swath of established community members—some young, and others raising eyebrows with their Name: Julie Towle (Dirtbag Queen, 2003)

Name: Scott “Curly” Shea (Dirtbag King, 1987)

Community role: “I am a mother, I am a skier, I am a Lone Peak Big Horn superfan, I am a server, and I am a soon-to-be nursing student.”

Community role: “Probably [known for] my longevity in my restaurant. First, it was The First Place, down in the meadow, and now it’s The Cabin.”

Skiing Lone Mountain since: “I moved here in 1999.”

Favorite trail or zone: “I like all of the Lone Peak Tram.

Gullies, Marx, Lenin and the Dictators, or Liberty Bowl. Or the [Big] Couloir. Or the North Summit Snowfield.”

Favorite memory: “It’s just tram laps. Be it solo, or with friends, on powder days or on super gnarly, non-vis days when nobody is there except for your friends. And you’re just lapping and it’s totally insane, and you’ve got the mountain to yourself, just going skiing.”

Grateful for: “I’m definitely grateful for the Big Sky Ski Patrol. Just watching them‚ I’ve seen a lot of them grow up from their 20s into their 50s. They’ve always remained so true to the safety and skiing aspect of Big Sky. They’ve been so true to the locals, helping us, dropping ropes for us, telling us on the first lap whether to go to Marx or to Lenin. Helping us stay safe, and they’re just good people.

And they’ve gotten better and better every year.”

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ageless living.

I asked six questions: What’s your name (this quickly evolved to include nicknames and any relevant title within the legendary Big Sky Dirtbag monarchy); What are you known for in the community; When did you first ski Lone Mountain; What’s your favorite trail or zone; What’s a favorite memory from time spent on the mountain; Tell me why you’re grateful for Big Sky Resort.

Most of these interviews would end with, ‘Well, have you talked to so-and-so? You should really talk to so-and-so.’'

Unfortunately, Mountain Outlaw could only fit so many so-and-sos from five decades, and we recognize these tales offer just a taste of how much Big Sky Resort means to its deeprooted and widespread community.

Skiing Lone Mountain since: “Well, the very first time was in December of ’77. I actually hiked up ‘Mr. K’ and skied down the headwall for my very first run at Big Sky.” Favorite trail or zone: “Used to be what’s called Little Tree. It’s on Challenger, but before there was a Challenger lift ... We would hike around this edge on the Pinnacles, and if you got first run on Little Tree ... It was just a super, super cool run to do if you were the first one to hit it.”

Favorite memory: “Skiing the North Summit Snowfield in the summertime. I went up there with a buddy of mine, Chris Nash, and his dog, Strider. We slept on the peak and skied the snowfield a couple times ... We brought sleeping bags and firewood on the dog and had a campfire and cookout up there.”

Grateful for: “I feel kind of blessed to be able to live in Big Sky, raise a family, and I’ve had a viable business for years ... It added to the community, and it added to the growth of Big Sky.”

Name: Queen Jean Palmer (Dirtbag Queen, 1999) Community role: “I was gonna say ambassador. But no, I’m gonna say Queen, because everyone knows my name.”

Skiing Lone Mountain since: “I skied Big Sky the first year it was open, in 1974. I took the train from St. Paul, Minnesota. It took me two years to get back—I first came to live here in 1976.”

Favorite trail or zone: “[It] was Killefer, which is also known as Mr. K. It was called Killefer when it was first there. [In 1974] I stopped mid-trail and turned uphill, and there was Lone Mountain in all its virgin glory. It was just the most beautiful thing I ever saw, and I still remember it to this day. It was unbelievable.”

Favorite memory: “My favorite memory is when The Dugout burned down and they put up a wall tent for the rest of the season ... Where [Everett’s 8800] is right now, ski patrol had a shack and it was a place to get burgers and beers in the afternoon. ... It burned to the ground.

And it was still burgers and beers, and it was a hot place to go to.”

Grateful for: “I’m very grateful to the resort. It’s like a family. People think that it’s a corporation, but in the scheme of things, Big Sky Resort was taking care of all of us as a family should.”

Name: Holden Samuels Community role: Lifelong community member, professional competitive freeride snowboarder Skiing Lone Mountain since: “I think I learned to ski on Lone Mountain when I was 3 or 4 years old. So, 2003, 2004. I learned to snowboard on the mountain in 2008, so 20 years.”

Favorite trail or zone: “Definitely the Headwaters is my favorite zone ... Hell’s Half-Acre and Third Fork.”

Favorite memory: “I have a lot of good memories. I think one of the most fun was when I was 13 or 14, I was on the Big Sky Freeride Team. It was closing weekend and we were lapping the tram all day—there was no line. We brought cookies for the lifties at the tram to bake for us, ’cause they have an oven in there. They had a new batch of cookies for us after every run.”

Name: Jeremy “JJ” Harder Community role: “I’ve been in the school district for 24 years.

From there, I’ve taken on some community service roles ...

Facilitator of social events ... In a town like this, it’s hard to hide under a rock.”

Skiing Lone Mountain since: “It would be the winter of 2000. I was a snowboarder ... At the time, [teachers] were getting free ski passes from the resort. I was in my late 20s, and on the weekends and holidays from school, that’s what I did. Four or five years into it, I transitioned into telemark skiing ... I haven’t turned back since.”

Favorite trail or zone: “For a while there, I spent a lot of time on the Moonlight side. I think some of my favorite runs are the first couple of laps on Silver Knife, when it’s fresh groomed with [powder] … Bavarian Forest on a morning with fresh snow, everyone is lapping through the trees. You’re with people, but you’re not. You’re guided by the sound of whoops and hollers.”

Favorite memory: “Taking the kids up what we used to call Ski Fridays ... We’d load the whole school, like 80-something students and under 10 staff. We’d get on a bus or two, go up and spend a Friday afternoon [skiing] ...

What a great way to spend a couple Fridays. I think we did it four Fridays of January ... A lot of that is the way Big Sky [Resort] has developed this town to promote adventure.”

Grateful for: “Just their continued support of the school district ... As the town grows, the school grows, the resort grows. Big Sky—keeping the youth of Big Sky in the mirror still. And I hope that doesn’t go away. I hope they still find ways to make it happen, where they ski for free ... It’s nice to see [the resort] being the sustainable role model in town. Hopefully other places around the West and around the world can use them as a model.”

Read more of Mountain Outlaw's Big Sky Resort: 50 Years content online.

Grateful for: “The terrain they have there. It’s so unique; the lifts go all the way up to an actual peak. And I’m grateful for the ski patrollers who are able to get that terrain open all the time ... I’m grateful for the ski patrol and all that they do.”

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BIG SKY RESORT: 50 YEARS

Learning and Growing From ‘Old School’ A decades-long patroller reflects on the evolution of Big Sky Ski Patrol

Ryan Ayres, one of Big Sky’s longest-serving ski patrollers, overlooks the famous Big Couloir on an early morning snow safety route. Photo Courtesy of Ryan Ayres

R

yan Ayres looks out the grand window of Big Sky Resort’s Vista Hall toward Lone Mountain.

The sun is losing its fight against swarming clouds. An October snowstorm is blowing in, and Ayres and his fellow ski patrollers have been preparing the mountain for another long winter. Ayres will spend his 25th with Big Sky Ski Patrol.

“I’ve always been really proud of our mountain,” he says, his eyes still scanning the 11,166-foot rock, where the new Lone Peak Tram is finishing its two-year construction process. “And I don’t know that I would ever be able to find a mountain as unique as this. So, when it comes to [Big Sky’s] growth and whatnot, it’s hard for me to get upset about it. Because why wouldn’t people want to come and check this out? It’s something that I’m proud of, and always wanted to share with people. This amazing mountain.

“So that’s kind of the backdrop for all of us, on any given day,” he says. “And it’s pretty unique.”

Ayres would know. Big Sky Resort’s 50th season will mark 152

his own milestone of 25 seasons with the Big Sky Ski Patrol.

He’s been the director for the past four, but stepped down after last winter. He’ll spend more time supporting his wife, who owns Cinnamon Lodge and Events near Big Sky, while patrolling three to four days a week.

Recounting patrol’s evolution through the 21st century, Ayres’ tone, grin and thoughtful choice of words match his observation that the crew is perhaps less tight-knit and wild, but better off in many ways.

Camaraderie remains, built between ski boot fatigue and wind-chilled fingers and toes. The Big Sky Ski Patrol has a unique ability to suffer, he says, and he’s not sure the skiing public realizes how hard the job really is.

“We ‘embrace the suck,’” Ayres says—it’s an unofficial mantra.

“When it sucks out there, we’re like, ‘Eh, this is what we’re all here for.’”

Such an attitude is a rite of passage.

“To be able to suffer without complaining, and laughing in the face of adversity, I think, gains a lot of respect … The people that work hard, put their head down and get it done, gain probably the most respect.”

Ayres is quick to name those that have earned his respect.

“Jon Ueland, ‘Yunce,’ I mean ... he’s gotta be pushing 65, he’s

a smokejumper and he’s still the first one out the door, out there in adverse conditions and lookin’ down the barrel of the ‘Apple Core’ in the ‘Little [Couloir],’” Ayres says.

And of Cindy Dixon—Big Sky’s longest-tenured ski patrol director, formerly known as Bob—Ayres says, “She’s out there.

Did the director job for 30-some years, and now out there acting as a mentor to the younger patrollers.”

From the plethora of specialized climbers and mountaineers, to EMTs and medical professionals, Ayres said he respects a lot of different patrollers for a lot of different reasons. Ayres himself earned respect the old-fashioned way. When the Wyoming native and Montana State University studentturned-ski-bum joined patrol as a volunteer in 1998, old-school ways layered another test on an already harsh job.

“You know, when I started, it was very—cowboy. Rough.

You had to be thick-skinned; you had to be willing to take criticism and whatnot,” he recalls. “And some of the people I looked up to were some of the ones that were most critical, and most thick-skinned, and some of the hardest to get on their good side.”

That suited Ayres’ style, he says, but even through his own thick skin, he carried the heavy weight of fear while working.

And that pressure doesn’t work for everybody, he says.

“If you do it wrong, you’re gonna hear about it from this group of people,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to let those people down.

And at the time, when you messed up, you had to buy beer—I couldn’t afford to buy the beer. And so that style actually suited me well.”

He pauses.

“We do not promote that style of learning anymore,” Ayres assures, laughing.

Now more than ever, the Big Sky Ski Patrol follows a skillsbased mentorship model. Older or more experienced patrollers are expected to pass on as much of their skillset as they possibly can and are rewarded for doing so.

“I talk about how hard the work is,” he says. “But there’s a lot of down time, and a lot of shack time. And that’s a lot of stories ... trying to keep the oral tradition alive to a certain extent.”

It’s a formalized skill-sharing process, with an informal element of preserving the well-aging parts of a 50-year-old tradition.

“We’ve worked hard on our culture, over the years,” he says.

They’ve adopted three pillars: teamwork, accountability and humility. Any personnel issue, Ayres says, can usually be solved by addressing at least one pillar. He notes that humility has been a big catalyst for improvement.

“Some people might see us as kind of arrogant or egotistical,” Ayres says. “But the reality of it is ... We have a specific skill set, but there’s other people out there that have other skill sets that are really valuable as well.”

Big Sky’s patrollers weren’t always so empathetic toward other departments on the mountain, Ayres admits. But now, with humility in mind, patrollers are encouraged to consider the challenges, possibly invisible, that others may face.

“If our lift operators aren’t there on time, or our road crew didn’t get the road plowed on time ... It’s like, you don’t know what happened with those people,” Ayres says. “So, you know, they’re doing their job to the best of their ability. What we can do is do our job to the best of our ability ... We have to do it in a respectful way.”

UNLESS ACTED UPON BY AN OUTSIDE FORCE Ayres can point to one specific moment that challenged—and ultimately improved—the culture of Big Sky Ski Patrol. In 2013, Big Sky Resort merged with Moonlight Basin, an adjacent ski area with its own ski patrol. Ayres says each culture brought their differences.

“That was probably the biggest cultural challenge we had, ever,” Ayres says. “They had their way of doing things over there, and we had our way of doing things over here.” The Moonlight team brought it to patrol’s attention that Big Sky could be better, Ayres recalls, but it took a few years to raise the bar in unity.

Ayres reflects back to around 2018, when current Big Sky Ski Patrol Director Nancy Sheil helped steer things in a better direction. Ski patrol leadership came together, challenged with identifying their values and creating a shared vision. They identified guiding principles in teamwork, accountability and humility. Once a culture of, “You’re an idiot, you blew it, go buy beer,” Ayres says, he saw a shift to a culture where feedback can be delivered up and down the chain, and with mutual respect.

He’s proud that his team bought into the “easily understood values” and chose to follow their leaders.

“That’s where I think it was a win for us on the culture ... I’ll be honest with you, it wasn’t that hard,” he says. “Because

Ayres spent eight years handling Dayna, a Big Sky avalanche rescue dog, before Dayna’s retirement in 2021. Photo by Kate Middleton

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At one of North America’s most unique ski areas, the Big Sky Ski Patrol manages roughly 270 degrees of high-alpine avalanche terrain on Lone Mountain—not to mention the demanding safety operations across all of Big Sky Resort’s 5,850 in-bounds acres. Photo Courtesy of Ryan Ayres

people were on board.” Ayres’ personal growth has followed the same curve as the patrol’s shifting culture.

“I think I’ve grown to understand that you don’t have to be that super salty, off-putting hard, harsh person in order to be successful. I can be vulnerable, I can show that side of myself. I know that I can ask for help. I know that I don’t have to go out and do it on my own.”

Alongside the patrol which he eventually led, Ayres adapted from the “old-school patroller mentality” to more of a professional one.

Improvements notwithstanding, Ayres hesitates to call it the tight-knit family unit he remembers. He wrestles with that; it’s still a family, but the sheer number of patrollers has grown.

Ayres joined the patrol more than two decades into its growth. Even then, he remembers Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners at each other’s homes. Patrollers’ kids grew up together.

Today, the team runs 120 deep, plus volunteers. Ayres suggested that he might not see some patrollers between November and April.

“I do see it as an incredible support system and the camaraderie is still very tight ... We refer to it as a patrol family.

But it’s just big—it’s just much bigger now than it once was.”

One clear benefit has emerged: especially in the past three years, a peer-resiliency group has taken leadership on mental health and emotional support needs.

“That probably has gotten better. Because in some ways, it’s more professional. And less, like, ‘Oh, we just had something happen, we’re gonna all get together and drink together.’”

Now, peers reach out to a comrade in need, perhaps cooking some food as a gesture of care.

“So we’ve grown up,” Ayres says, nodding. “We’ve grown up in the way we support each other. We’ve gotten better.”

Another shift has helped retention since the ’90s. In Ayres’ early days, very few patrollers had a spouse or children. He married in 2001.

“At that point, the cards started falling, people started to get married, started having kids. Seeing that there was a path forward with a family was a big deal for me,” he recalls. He 154

could envision a career. “‘I can have a family, I can do this, and I can make it work,’” Ayres recognized. And he did make it work, patrolling Lone Mountain for half his life while raising a kid.

The identity of a Big Sky ski patroller is shifting. Once a badass gig for any ski bum with their EMT certification, it’s now becoming a career path with a culture accessible and sustainable to a wider range of personalities.

The operation has grown significantly—Ayres estimates 50 patrollers per day now, versus 20 when he started. Summer work was once limited to a small crew taking initiative without too much guidance. Now there are full-time summer jobs for patrollers in the lift-served bike park.

And in the winter of 2020-21, the Big Sky Ski Patrol voted to unionize. It was a painful and emotional time for Ayres—as director, he felt responsible for keeping his team happy and engaged but had to sit across the table from them in the collective bargaining process. He’s glad both parties agreed to a deal in about nine months, much faster than some industry peers, and he sees both sides being proud of the outcome: better wages and benefits, especially for seasonal workers, which the resort soon moved toward matching company-wide.

“I think the straw that broke the back was COVID,” Ayres recalls. “The cost of living in this area ... People feeling like there was not a clear path for a career as a ski patroller.” He’s seen growing trust, transparency and normalcy in the two winters since negotiations began.

The job has changed, and some patrollers bailed. But that’s Big Sky. The resort and the greater Big Sky community have spent 50 years growing into a place where more people could work and live year-round. Growing pains abound, but Big Sky is probably more fertile than ever to young, career-oriented folks like Ayres was in 1998.

Today, those folks are rookies. When Big Sky Resort celebrates another quarter-century in 2048, the Big Sky Ski Patrol will have shape-shifted again, and today’s rookies might gaze out toward Lone Mountain in search of the right words for own their story.

Patrol performs daily terrain inspection and mitigation along the Headwaters, a thrilling-yet-consequential bootpack hike—notice the hand-rope anchored to the rock—with outlets for extreme skiing on either side of the ridge. To the left (pictured), the A-Z chutes. To the right, the Headwaters. Photo Courtesy of Ryan Ayres

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BIG SKY RESORT: 50 YEARS

Your Ski Instructor’s Instructor Q&A: VP of Mountain Sports Christine Baker

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hen Christine Baker thinks about her first visit to Big Sky Resort 41 years ago as a child, it’s the unique experiences and people she most recalls rather than any particular run down the slopes. It seems like a fitting anecdote, considering Baker’s nearly 30 years as a resort employee have mostly centered on creating experiences for others. Starting as a ski instructor in the late ’90s—and teaching people to ski that still remember her decades later—Baker has become one of the most recognized faces on the mountain and an influential force behind the scenes. Now serving as Big Sky Resort’s VP of mountain sports, managing winter and summer activities, she is a vessel for the resort’s future as much as she is its past.

Christine Baker has shared the joy of Big Sky skiing with students since the 1990s. Pictured here, she brings a young student down one of Big Sky Resort’s iconic groomed trails, Upper Morningstar.

Photo by Tom Cohen

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Mountain Outlaw: What’s special about skiing in Big Sky, Montana?

Christine Baker: Big Sky is vast and majestic. That we can ski an iconic peak like Lone Peak, where you can travel from one side to the other, almost 360 degrees, is truly special. The sheer amount of all types of terrain, from beginner to high-alpine expert, means that people of all experience levels can explore to their heart’s content.

M.O.: You work in ski education.

What does it mean to have shared the art of skiing with so many people in this special place?

C.B.: It means that I am a very fortunate person. Each year I hear from guests who I started skiing with 20-plus years ago. It is very clear that Big Sky holds a special place for them, one they will never forget. The stories we hear of instructors who have connected guests with this mountain [are] incredible.

Seemingly small things like the right dinner choice, to life-changing interactions where the guest has written a book about the experience. Each interaction with instructor, guest and the mountain has the potential to be the start of a lifelong relationship.

M.O.: Tell me about one of your earliest memories from skiing Big Sky Resort.

C.B.: My first visit to Big Sky Resort was around 1982. My parents had been here the year before and taken lessons.

At that point, most of the instructors were Austrian and participated in a traditional Austrian show, complete with lederhosen, Edelweiss wrung out on bells, and a wood-chopping dance where Ski School Director Robert Kirchlager entered hanging upside down from a lodgepole pine.

The performance accompanied dinner in the Huntley Dining Room. During the wood-chopping dance, a large piece of wood went flying out, and my mom’s instructor, Gerhart, picked it up and later gave it to me with the inscription: “Dearest Christine, in remembrance of your first trip to Big Sky.” I know that I had a great time skiing that week, but the off-snow thoughtfulness is the thing that I most clearly remember.

Baker speaks with a group of instructors training for the PSIA-AASI National Team. Photo by Eliza Kuntz

M.O.: How has the ski resort and surrounding community evolved since your early days in Big Sky? C.B.: The evolution has been about as vast as the mountain itself. From 10 instructors to over 400, from a handful of restaurants that were open for short seasons to a large variety that are open year-round.

When I started working full-time in the late ’90s, this was still a relatively small ski town. Now we are a full-fledged community that is working hard to have all the supporting infrastructure and resources that its members need.

M.O.: We often talk about the growth of skiing here, but tell me about the story of mountain biking at Big Sky Resort, and your role in it.

C.B.: My first experience mountain biking at Big Sky was in the summer of 1999. My friend Courtney and I borrowed bikes, rode up the gondola and rode down Moose Tracks ... This was my first time on a mountain bike. I was wearing tennis shoes, and I definitely went over the handlebars. Immediately, I became hooked on mountain biking.

Big Sky [Resort] has offered downhill, lift-assisted mountain biking and rental bikes since 1996 or 1997. Taylor Middleton and Glenniss Indreland were some of the people out there marking out our first trails. The resort developed

a few trails ... many other trails were rider-built. In 2008, I remember that the ‘easiest’ trail we had for folks was to ride down ‘Pacifier,’ and if you’ve ever tried riding downhill on a gravel road, you know how inviting that is.

Over the past decade or so, we’ve really transformed our trail system. We’ve created a progression for an individual or a family to learn the sport and be able to participate in it multiple days in a row, just like they do skiing or snowboarding in the winter ... We need to show our guests the potential for them with mountain biking.

M.O.: What lessons from the first 50 years of Big Sky Resort do you hope will inform the way the resort approaches the future?

C.B.: I’ve heard our General Manager, Troy Nedved, say that we want to be the best employer in the industry and I consistently feel that sentiment around me. I like that momentum and am excited for it to continue. We are looking from a holistic point of view—when we add this lift, what impacts does it have, and how do we work and appropriate adjustments into the plan.

M.O.: Most people would say you’re living the dream. Do you have any regrets?

C.B.: We can always look back and see how we could do things differently, but no regrets here. I know I am lucky.

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BIG SKY RESORT: 50 YEARS

I am Explorer What would Big Sky’s oldest original lift tell us if it could speak?

The Explorer chairlift, built in 1973, will be replaced in 2025 by a gondola designed to significantly increase uphill capacity in the mountain’s primary ski school area.

The new gondola will connect the resort’s base area to the bottom terminal of the new Lone Peak Tram. Photo by Jack Reaney

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Editor’s Note: The Explorer chairlift is the last remaining of four original chairlifts constructed for Big Sky Resort’s opening in 1973.

As Big Sky Resort celebrates its 50-year anniversary, the Explorer chairlift is one of the oldest remaining historical artifacts from the early days of skiing in Big Sky, but its days are numbered. Mountain Outlaw Assistant Editor Jack Reaney wondered what this relic might say if it could talk. Here’s his version.

I

am weary. I am slow, old, creaky, old and slow. I’m on my last legs, but it’s been a good run.

I’m a fixed-grip Heron Poma two-seater from 1973, and I haven’t changed much from my original Robert Heron design.

One chairlift expert calls me “a workhorse,” one of few remaining Heron chairlifts scattered across the American West. I’m told he’ll gush about my mechanical simplicity—an underground motor, very few electronics and a haul rope still tensioned by counterweight—and how I’ve “stood the test of time” through five reliable decades.

These days, I’m among Lone Mountain’s slowest peoplemovers and I won’t take you far. I climb 622 vertical feet, some 250 fewer than my typical peer, and I reach terrain that’s mostly tame and green.

But even so, I have a role here. I watched Lone Mountain become your beloved winter playground. While the world moves faster and faster around me, please hear my slow, mechanical hum, my 10-minute story of crawling along. Have a seat.

Being a so-called beginner lift, I’ve given the first chairlift ride to many skiers and snowboarders, young and old. Many kept with it and moved on to steeper slopes.

All kinds of skis have dangled from my chairs. In the late ’90s, they became shaped, and then they fattened. But while styles came and went, I haven’t changed much since 1973, nor did the snowflakes, the rocks and trees of my Lone Mountain.

I never expected to carry bikes; that summer retrofit wasn’t part of my contract. But it gave me something important to do when the snow melted away. And I wasn’t quite 10 years old before I carried an awkward sort of sideways, two-footed, one-planked ski. I thought, there’s no way this “snowboard” will catch on.

Those riders sat crooked; many struggled at the top and I watched some nasty toe-side slams on the groomed trail below—not to mention their miserable hop-shuffling in the flats. But I was wrong; they make up almost half the beginners nowadays. I’m used to it. And if a half-century in Big Sky taught me anything, you can only try to keep up with whatever’s next. That doesn’t mean you change. I’ve hardly changed and I’ve had one hell of a run. But sure, change surrounds my stubborn build.

So I’m old, yes, but pretty as ever. I make a damned good foreground for Lone Mountain. My antique simplicity calls back to a simpler time, a well-preserved snapshot of Chet’s vision as I climb the first steps toward the peak. But even so my days are numbered. I’m told I’ll retire after two more winters.

Have you heard of this new two-stage gondola taking my

place? Have you seen that design? I hear this gondola will drop beginners at a mid-station near where I currently end, but get this—it will continue climbing from there, all the way to the base of the new Lone Peak Tram. Spectacular.

Question is, when you step boot into that fast-moving, black and blue idol of modern skiing, will you remember who stood here first?

I’m not soured by what’s taking my place, mind you. I just hope I’m not forgotten.

I’ve had my time, and I know the truth: the experience of skiing here has become unparalleled. Back in ’73, it was me and three other lifts carrying a few dozen friendly skiers, or so it felt. American skiing flourished in Colorado, California and Utah, and history was rich across New England slopes. Unless they liked to visit Bridger Bowl, this part of Montana wasn’t a destination for most destination skiers. That’s what changed between 1973 and today. Big Sky realized its potential and became some sort of household name.

It wasn’t all at once, mind you. Every few years, something new and attractive would come along to join me. There were new lifts and fresh innovations—Challenger raised the bar and the Lone Peak Tram raised it higher, and snow sports accelerated with the advent of “high-speed” detachable lifts.

Our early ski maps diagrammed four chairlifts and about a dozen trails. Four decades later, we added Moonlight Basin and by acres, we had a stint as “The Biggest Skiing in America.”

Then the IKON Pass packaged our lift tickets with the far-reaching likes of Aspen, Jackson Hole, Snowbird, Palisades Tahoe, Sugarbush and Sugarloaf, and the skiing world noticed this place.

And these new chairlifts, my goodness. Quad chairs were a novelty in my day—could you even imagine an eight-pack with a windshield and heated seats in 1973? That kind of engineer was putting astronauts on the moon while the rest of them designed me and my contemporaries. I am dwarfed by the speed, volume and grace of 21st-century chairlifts—I’ve been made mediocre by all that is grand around me.

It’s been seven years since I lost my last remaining companion: a Heron Poma triple chair in the bowl, designed like me only wider, tough as nails but worn down by exposure to Montana’s winter wind. That, and the need for speed that didn’t concern Big Sky in 1973.

I’ve watched most things change since then, and I’m next in line.

I am history. I am 50 years old and called “Explorer.” Among the zings of these new lifts, I hope you’ll still join me for a 10-minute ride, approaching Lone Mountain at my reflective pace. Put me to work while I’m still around; send those new skiers—and yes, snowboarders—up my line, so I can watch their glowing faces as they descend my slopes for the first time.

Or perhaps you’ve long outgrown the bunny hill, and you’re waiting with baited breath for your first ride in that glorious new tram. But know I’ll be here for that end-of-day last lap, when you need a reminder of those early days, those first-ever runs. Please, have a seat.

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The Diary

of Norton Pearl The preserved 1913 account of an intrepid Glacier ranger’s winter survival

By Michael Ober

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e would not have known what happened to Glacier National Park ranger Norton Pearl in 1913 during his grueling snowshoe trips patrolling the park if not for a diary. We would not have known of the hundreds of miles he trudged through unforgiving conditions, the moments of relief he found in the distant but promising light of a cabin; nor would we know the circumstances of a fellow ranger’s ghastly death.

But records of these events, among others, are contained in a journal discovered in a barn by Pearl’s granddaughter, the tales supplemented with black and white films from a Kodak vest camera. With a gnarled pencil stub, Pearl had written an everyday account of his patrols during his two years there, including two grinding cross-country snowshoe trips across the snow-encased northern tier of the park in January and February of 1913.

At that time, Glacier National Park was just three years old, an unknown smudge on the maps of northwest Montana with most of its iconic peaks yet unnamed by white men. Only the most rudimentary of road, trail and bridge access existed, and all were drifted in and impassable in winter.

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What served as pathways through its impenetrable forests were mostly game trails.

In those first years, the park mostly encompassed tortured terrain peopled with an odd collection of trappers, settlers, former miners, homesteaders and Great Northern Railway construction crews starting to build the park’s first trails, roads, hotels and chalets. Into this mix dropped the park’s first official ranger staff who were deployed to the far-flung corners and drainages as the first imprint of federal authority. They built what passed as crude ranger stations, little more than a log cabins, barns and woodsheds. It all worked surprisingly well, this strange stew of private and federal inhabitants.

They all seemed to know each other despite the huge distances of separation, as noted frequently in Pearl’s diaries. He often “bunked in” or “overnighted” with numerous settlers on his lengthy patrols throughout the park. The homesteaders were a hardscrabble bunch, barely making subsistence livings against poor odds. Their scattered farmsteads in and around the park made for timely stopping-off places for overland travelers like Pearl and other field rangers.

Pearl’s first winter patrol assignment

was straightforward enough: to conduct a lengthy circumnavigation of the northern tier of the park bumping between patrol cabins and ranger stations along the way and connecting with the rangers assigned there. But the first of two circuitous trips that winter would not go entirely as planned.

The ranger gig was rigorous; many chief rangers required field rangers to submit a minimum of 300 miles of patrol logs each month. They were charged with recording wildlife observations and poaching violations, maintaining a string of small patrol cabins, watching for timber depredation and cattle trespass, suppressing wildfires, and establishing amiable relations with private inholders within the park’s boundaries. It was equal amounts demanding and lonely, and Pearl was a good fit.

He was 34 when he accepted a ranger position in Glacier in 1912, and a specimen of uncommon fitness, a man of no half measures who demanded no less of others. Pearl was built for speed and endurance. Writing about winter travel, he said: “Carry as little as possible, as every pound retards speed … I provide myself with a medium weight jersey sweater to put on between over and undershirts when making camp and for sleeping. If one is to make

Left: “It was some snowed up.” Pearl breaks trail up Browns Pass, February 1913. Photo from Backcountry Ranger: The Diaries and Photographs of Norton Pearl. Above: A hiker stands in deep snow below the Mount Brown Fire Lookout under cloudy skies in Glacier. This scene is not unlike one that Norton Pearl might've existed in during his 1913 treks.

Glacier National Park Photo

one-night camps a blanket or tent is mere excess baggage. The three most important things are grub, matches and an axe. For provisions, sugar, flour, bacon and coffee will get a man anywhere.”

For hand protection Pearl wore wool gloves encased in canvas mittens. On his feet he wore the traditional “rubbers,” high-top lace-up leather boots with rubber bottoms, and one pair of wool socks. His entries centered on cryptic notes about fighting the relentless winds common to the east side of Glacier Park. “It’s drill, drill and push. Drill, drill.” When asking the residents in the adjacent Blackfeet Reservation about winter patrols, Pearl recorded, “Every native in the country has many stories to tell of the blizzards a man can’t live in & how when & where men didn’t live in em.”

Various fellow rangers accompanied Pearl during his two 1913 winter trips: Horace Brewster, Bill Cavanaugh, Bill

Burns, Joe Prince, James Galen, Cy Bellah and his personal friend Dick Kirby. Pearl was not above boasting of his trail endurance. Leaving with ranger Cy Bellah for Babb on Jan. 28, he wrote, “We made it in two hours & bucked some wind. Cy is lame from the last two days. I am sure in some condition for hiking. I could have come down 50% faster but even at the gait I took Cy could not keep up at times.”

Another time, Jan. 7, his diary records, “I could have made it three times as fast time alone. Some day maybe I’ll run on to someone who can hold me even on wind mountains, & thick brushy woods. In brushy woods no one I have ever found has been anywhere or coming down mts, especially.” That same day, Pearl set forth from his Two Medicine Ranger Station accompanied by fellow ranger Joe Prince and Glacier Park Superintendent James Galen. Their route took them up and over a low ridge, parallel to

the park boundary and then on to the Blackfeet Reservation with Galen on his Cooks Inlet snowshoes and Pearl and Prince on their Bearpaws taking turns breaking trail.

There were frequent stops to take the snowshoes off where the relentless wind had scoured the snow from scree fields, ridgelines and other open terrain. “It howled!, oh how it howled!” Pearl wrote, complaining of being peppered with stones and pebbles. Prince kept falling behind. Though he was the oldest of the trio, his stamina was well known as he had lived and traveled these parts for 14 years before signing on as a park ranger when Glacier was carved out of the region in 1910. Eventually, with Prince trailing somewhere behind them, Galen and Pearl struck the drifted-in road leading to the St. Mary Ranger Station, counted the telegraph poles alongside to gauge their pace and distance and 161

The written record of Glacier National Park's history is preserved not only in formal government records, but in accounts by park rangers, fire lookouts, and other park staff like Norton Pearl. These logbooks and diaries are part of the park’s archival collection. Glacier National Park Photo

arrived after dark at 9 p.m. They had traveled 14 miles. “Wow! But we were hungry & had a good feed & pipe & now waiting for Prince,” Pearl wrote.

When Pearl and Galen backtracked the next morning, they found Prince propped against his rucksack, “ frozen and cold in the snow.” Prince had removed his hat and leather mittens, propped his snowshoes in the snow to one side and had laid his sheep skin shoes to the other side as if preparing to swap footgear. His boots were still on. Next to him was his ash-filled pipe and an unopened can of sardines. His eyes were frozen open in a blank stare at the all-white ridge above Divide Creek. “He cashed in last night,” Pearl wrote simply.

With little else to do, Galen and Pearl snowshoed back to St. Mary and secured some boards from a Great Northern road crew and an oilskin gunny sack, which they used to fashion a crude sled before trudging the 6 miles back to retrieve “Poor Ole Prince.” Back at St. Mary, they transported him by wagon to Browning, Montana, where he was buried. The inquest there concluded that he died of exposure. He was 57.

Pearl and Galen might be forgiven for forging ahead and leaving Prince out alone on the ridgeline overlooking the

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St. Mary Valley. They both speculated that he would “siwash it” by constructing a quick shelter in a wooded thicket, building a fire and making a bed of boughs to weather the night. Every ranger of the day carried a small axe, waterproof metal match box and grub.

Still, it must have haunted Pearl, though his diary entry the day following the death revealed little in the way of grief or guilt. No doubt, Pearl did some hard thinking about Prince’s death, but his feelings about the affair were either suppressed or wholly dismissed. Prince is never mentioned again in Pearl’s diary after Jan. 9.

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hree weeks later, Pearl was on the trail again, leaving St. Mary and continuing his cross-park patrol assignment, this time by himself and bent on making it to Waterton Lakes National Park, a Canadian park bordering Glacier, and finding shelter with legendary Canadian ranger Kootenai Brown. There he hoped to receive guidance on a route over the Continental Divide and a return to Glacier, aiming to continue south along its western boundary.

In Pearl’s day, his navigation depended on a compass, barometer, a monocular,

pedometer, and thermometer—plus a keen sense of dead reckoning. While snowshoeing through Waterton on Feb. 8 and in search of Brown’s ranger station, Pearl spotted the faint light of his cabin in a valley as darkness fell. He lined up his bearing with the light of a star and plunged into a tree line of “quakin’ asp.”

An hour later, he emerged adjacent to the cabin. “Yes & I hit it within 25 yards,” he wrote.

Alone, with no map and in Canadian lands he had never seen before, Pearl set forth from Brown’s cabin the following day to navigate his way east to west across Waterton, crossing the Continental Divide at Akamina Pass or South Pass (his journal never makes it clear). He wrote,“You are taken out of yourself even tho you have been crunch crunching the whiteness for hours until your physical self is an automatic machine, grinding and grinding the human distances to chaff. You are living in the mental.”

He finally stopped at a trapper’s cabin on Kishenehn Creek just south of the international boundary after 22 miles in another 40-below-zero day. “It’s a welcome place you find at 7:30 with beans & booyaw & man made bread to make your tummy glad.”

Pearl “paced off ” another 25 miles the

Left: Pearl at Glacier National Park, 1910. Photo from Backcountry Ranger: The Diaries and Photographs of Norton Pear. Right: Pearl in a hut while staying along Iceberg Lake, August, 1910. Photo from Backcountry Ranger: The Diaries and Photographs of Norton Pearl

“Death on the Trail” Reynolds, fell ill next day when the temperature rose and had to be taken to nearby Pincher to -25 degrees. To avoid tedium, he Creek, Alberta, where he died of gall often counted his pedometer strides measured with time to calculate distance. stone inflammation. Park officials feared that settlers would possibly plunder his When he reached the North Fork of the ranger cabins and make off with his Flathead River, he “halloowed” to a small belongings and government gear, and cabin across the river and was greeted that a local timber company would try to by a shout from rancher Matt Brill who reclaim the buildings. Years before, the launched a crude raft and fetched him to timber company had allowed Reynolds the west shore. “Big venison steaks with to occupy them as his ranger station onions brot up in pockets to keep em from while disputed lumber claims within freezing. Spuds with capital letter, beans the boundaries of the new park could be butter. Some place when you’re planning adjudicated. on 8 mi more after an all day walk & you Accordingly, Pearl was directed, in really have 12 stareing you in the face.”

Thanking Brill, he pushed off in the early view of Reynold’s untimely death, to conduct a grueling detour to his morning darkness for another 14 miles ranger station on Waterton Lake to the following day. He stopped for shelter inventory and secure the contents of and food at Polebridge and Logging his ranger cabins. This time, Pearl ranger stations and at Adair’s homestead was accompanied by Dick Kirby, an on the final leg of his January trip back old childhood friend from Michigan to Park Headquarters in Belton (West and a traveler up to Pearl’s rigorous Glacier) for a tally of another 59 miles. pace. They embarked from Pearl’s Two Medicine Ranger Station on Feb. 19 he following month, he was at and found shelter in various snowshoe it again. cabins, abandoned miner’s shacks and On its face, Pearl’s February 1913 ranger stations along the way, arriving winter trip around Glacier seemed at Reynold’s ranger station on Feb. 26, routine enough but with a different twist logging nearly 60 miles. than the month before. On Feb. 8, word For three days, they feasted on had come to Park Headquarters that Reynold’s food cache “of spuds and frozen legendary Waterton Lake ranger, Albert

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deer hanging in the woodshed” while they rummaged through the contents of his cabin and outbuildings for his family members, with a sharp eye to recovering his prized barometer at the special request of his sister.

Then, in one monster day on March 1, Pearl and Kirby rose at 4 a.m. and “started sometime before six & tied more than 3 miles on behind before daylight.”

Pearl recorded the morning temperature at 30 below zero “filled with ice crystals.”

They snowshoed over broken avalanche debris and downed trees for 40 miles, crossing the Continental Divide at Brown’s Pass, and made good time by jogging with their snowshoes the length of Bowman Lake, reaching the foot in the dark, still 6 miles from the nearest ranch alongside the North Fork of the Flathead River. “That’s some crooked trail & in some scattered dead timber,” Pearl wrote. “We followed it by feeling with our feet & sometimes lost it & made a polouser (coffee can with a candle poked through a hole for a lantern) … & twas fine from there on.” They arrived well after dark at Bill Cavanaugh’s Polebridge Ranger Station having stopped only once for Hershey bars in 18 hours.“Had a good feed from Bill’s Grub Stake & then pulled in for a fine snooze.” The next two days were

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spent visiting North Fork homesteaders at Adair’s home and store and staying with ranger Horace Brewster at Logging Ranger Station, resting up for the final push on to Belton (West Glacier). In a brief call to civility, Pearl and Kirby were invited to the all night “Winter Ball” at Hansen’s Homestead and caught a ride on a horse-drawn sledge hauling a clutch of neighbors to the ball where Pearl “… tried with difficulty to dance the reel all night in my clunky boots.”

Pearl and Kirby completed the final leg of the march by snowshoeing south on the North Fork Road once again and on to park headquarters, arriving on March 5. There, they caught the “No 1” eastbound Great Northern train to Midvale (East Glacier) and Pearl’s home base at Two Medicine Ranger Station.

They had been gone 15 days, traversed the Continental Divide, and traveled nearly 200 miles. Recalling the events of the past two months, Pearl wrote, “…having made a complete trip around Glacier National Park…twice, [by his

calculations, including extra side trips”] …” it makes between 500 and 600 miles that I covered.” Pearl was an exemplary ranger with a hopeful future, as acknowledged by his peers and superintendents. But there would be no future in Glacier for Pearl, nor would he replicate his 1913 winter journeys again. He left his job rather abruptly on Dec. 16, 1913, tidbits from his diary the only clues as to why.

Excerpts from his writing hint at poor investments, first with a corrupt timber harvesting company and next with shares purchased in an emerging private camping company, “Camp Fires,” promising a partnership as a guide.

There were also compelling thoughts about returning to his home state of Michigan to assist his ailing father, who died in 1914. He was dogged by letters from home urging him to send money back to his family members. Pearl fell into a funk, restless and brooding. He wrote often about only working for “day wages” and saw no way out of his financial distress. He had little success

RF 10-20mm f/4 L IS STM

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finding acreage where he dreamed of building a small dude ranch for park tourists. He spent his final months in Glacier supervising a private contract crew constructing a bridge over Cut Bank Creek, a task he found unfulfilling.

Closing out his ranger station, he made a diary entry that told of his despondency: “I am not satisfied here nor contented either.

It’s good by little cabin good bye.”

He never returned to Glacier. Norton Pearl died at 82 in 1960.

Four generations deep in Montana’s history and culture, Michael Ober is a recently retired professor emeritus from Flathead Valley Community College in Kalispell, Montana. During his 40-year career as Director of Library Services, he also taught English and Montana history. He also worked for 44 years as a seasonal ranger and wildland firefighter in Glacier National Park, and his freelance and professional writing has appeared in numerous regional and national publications.

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1262 Stoneridge Drive Bozeman, MT 59718 164

406-586-8300

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RED LIGHT MONTANA Reviving the state’s oft-forgotten brothel chapter

By Sophie Brett Tsairis

A circa 1891 photo shows the view of the north side of Main Street in Bozeman between Rouse and Bozeman avenues. Photo courtesy of the Gallatin History Museum

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A A photo taken from the northeast side of Bozeman shows an elevated view of Bozeman, looking southwest toward Main Street. The Bozeman Hotel is seen on the left side in the background. Mendenhall Street and the red light district can be seen just to the right of the Bozeman Hotel. Photo courtesy of the Gallatin History Museum

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alk downstairs to the basement level of 233 E. Main Street in Bozeman, and you’ll be transported back more than a century, to the year the town was founded.

Reminiscent of an upscale saloon, est. 1864 Noir Bar and Restaurant is windowless and dimly lit, its character best illuminated by remnants of the original brick building built in 1882 and destroyed by a gas leak in 2009. Despite the low lighting—or perhaps because of it—the space is inviting— alluring, even.

It has likely been a long time since anyone galloped a horse down Main Street, and even longer since the now-boutique block between N. Bozeman and N. Rouse was known for its women of the evening, significant characters in the founding chapters of Bozeman’s story. But as the lives of such folk fade further into the past, this basement Noir bar is recasting them in the spotlight.

The establishment’s executive chef, Allison Fasano, and general manager, Blake MacKie, opened the restaurant together just this year. The cuisine is influenced by their hometowns and lived cities of New York, Las Vegas, Austin, and Hanoi, Vietnam. Though a blend of cultures and creativity inspires the food, the name, branding and ambiance pay unmistakable homage to Bozeman’s colorful history.

Allison and Blake met a few years ago while working at another Bozeman restaurant after moving from bigger cities in the fall of 2021. Last winter, they joined forces to build their shared vision of exceptional food and drinks, Montana history and support for the local community. Portraits of characters from Bozeman’s earliest days border the top of the bar and

adorn the walls, while dimmed lighting with glowing red accents pays tribute to the notorious red-light district that once encompassed this block of Main Street.

It’s October, and MacKie sits across from me at a table in one of the two private dining rooms in the restaurant. Deep red curtains frame the room’s entrance, and the stoic eyes of Bozeman’s historic enterprising characters watch us from the walls.

“Montana’s history is so dark and unforgiving, valiant and gorgeous; it’s both fascinating and haunting,” MacKie says as he pens his way down a list of cocktails he serves up to patrons from behind the bar. “There’s the Story’s Sipper, named after Nelson Story Sr.; the Sliver of Liver, named after Liver Eating Johnson, a notorious outlaw in this region; and the Plenty Coups, a famous chief for the Crow Nation, among others.”

A Sanborn Fire Insurance map from 1904 annotates at least eight “female boarding” houses, the map company’s euphemism for brothels, between N. Bozeman and N. Rouse avenues, one of which still stands directly behind est. 1864.

The two-story stucco house, now home to the Extreme History Project, was built in 1891 by early settler and wealthy businessman Joseph Lindley. Lindley acquired the property when Frankie Buttner, one of Bozeman’s first madams, died, intending to rent it as a brothel. Lindley later mortgaged the house to Nelson Story, who rented it to several prominent madams of the era, including Libbie Hayes, who remained the head of the household for more than a decade.

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From the time of the Montana Gold Rush in the 1860s, prostitution was a lucrative business, though not without sacrifice for the women who entered into it. These women often also worked as nurses and cooks for miners in the early days. It wasn’t until families began moving into mining towns that prostitutes were pushed out of “civilized” society and into restricted districts.

From the 1890s through much of the 20th century, Montana’s Wild West of outlaws and mining boomtowns became home to red-light districts that rivaled those in much larger cities like San Francisco and New Orleans.

MADAM ENTERPRISE

While history books recall men flocking westward during the mining booms of the 20th century, less remembered is the movement of women, who were among the early entrepreneurs; madams employed the largest population of women on the frontier and set up businesses throughout Montana in burgeoning towns across the state. They provided housing for thousands of women who would likely have otherwise lived on the streets, and played a prominent economic role in developing cities across Montana.

A Billings Gazette article dated November 1993 noted that the town of Billings received $25,000 a year in fines from the red-light district. As recorded by the Gazette, brothel owners paid property, school and county taxes, as well as license fees, and often filled the pockets of city officials and police officers.

Throughout Montana, brothels were largely run by women, many of whom gained significant wealth, matching that of the powerful bankers, ranchers and capitalists in their communities.

In Bozeman, there is no evidence of pimps—men running brothels and making the most significant cut of profits; women essentially ran the industry. But the profession was not without plight; most women—madams and their working girls—notably died young of disease, drug overdose or the effects of alcoholism.

The consensus amongst Victorian townsfolk of the time was that

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prostitution was “an unavoidable evil,” wrote Derek Strahn, former city historic preservation officer. Women of the evening were a common sight throughout frontier Montana, most partaking in sexual commerce out of economic necessity or in search of financial freedom.

Ellen Baumler, an interpretive historian for the Montana Society for 26 years, became fascinated with the subject

embellished stories passed down over the years. “There are a lot of ‘facts’ and stories that people have made up about these women,” Baumler said. “The truth is, we just don’t know much about their lives, and many of them wanted it that way.”

‘WOMEN OF THE EVENING’

Stories of Montana’s ladies of the night abound, though not all can be corroborated. A few women who notched their place in history did so by gaining significant fame and financial success in their time.

One such woman is Louisa Couselle, “These women changed who, having achieved impressive wealth as a brothel owner in Helena, relocated their names like they to Bozeman, where the competition for prostitutes was nearly non-existent changed their clothes. at the time. By 1875, “Mrs. Lou” had They are so difficult to purchased at least 15 lots and extended mortgages to other residents, including trace because many were Roberta Warn, aka Kitty Warren.

Under Couselle’s mentorship, Warren totally anonymous; they purchased multiple properties and made a lasting name for herself. wanted to be anonymous.”

By 1878, Couselle was wealthier than roughly 95 percent of Bozeman’s citizens, –Ellen Baumler, former Montana and the Avant Courier Annual Almanac Society interpretive historian listed her as one of the 59 “heavy taxpayers of Gallatin County.” The two women died within a year of one another, Warren at the age of 25 in 1885, leaving an impressive estate valued at $20,000, of Montana’s brothels around 1995 and Couselle in 1886 at 54. The two while writing a plaque for the Dumas madams are remembered for having Hotel in Butte. Through her research laid the foundation for the flourishing reviewing Sanborn Fire Insurance maps red-light district that would thrive for and city censuses, she has continued many more decades. learning what she can about these elusive, In 1898, Bozeman’s first mayor, John enterprising women of history.

“Vesuvius” Bogert, sought to tame the “These women changed their names town by collecting monthly fines from as like they changed their clothes,” many as 18 local prostitutes and madams, Baumler said. “They are so difficult including Lizzie Woods, who ran a large to trace because many were totally brothel on E. Mendenhall Street. The anonymous; they wanted to be price to stay in business was $10 a month. anonymous. They didn’t want their This city revenue helped justify the families to know what they were doing continuation of the red-light district into or for people to look down on them. the 1900s.

Many of them entered prostitution While Bozeman’s madams were for only a short time—most wanted to sewing their pseudonyms into the fabric marry and become respectable members of Montana’s history, the madams in of society.”

Butte were building what would be the Accounts of such history are pieced largest and most notorious red-light together through old newspapers, district in the state. Between 1878, when censuses, obituaries and often its first brothel house opened, and 1917,

The interior of Bozeman's new restaurant, est. 1864, is designed to evoke a sense of the historic Bozeman and the old red light district it pays homage to. Photo by Rocío Guerrero Parra

A bartender slings drinks at est. 1864. Photo by Rocío Guerrero Parra

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est. 1846 owners Allison Fasano (left) and Blake MacKie, pose for a photo on the restaurant's opening night. Photo by Rocío Guerrero Parra

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The cocktail list at est. 1864 tells the story of Bozeman's past, with many named after notable characters like Liver Eating Johnson and Nelson Story Sr. Photo by Rocío Guerrero Parra

when the city shut down the red-light district, Butte was home to hundreds, if not thousands, of prostitutes. The Dumas Hotel, the longest-running brothel in the country, was built by the Nadeau Brothers, Joseph and Arthur, and was active from 1890 through 1982.

Madam Lillian Walden purchased it in the 1940s, and it stayed in the hands of madams thereafter. The hotel highlights the class segregation of the times, with tunnels running from the Butte mine to the basement of the hotel. While laborers entered the hotel through the basement via these tunnels, the main floor was designated for the middle class, and the second floor was reserved for the wealthiest of society.

The arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1883 ignited Missoula’s own raucous red-light district. For decades, the houses along West Front Street produced thousands of dollars in taxes and fees for the city treasury. The Line, also known as Midway Plaisance, the Bad Lands or the Restricted District, referred to all of West Front Street and most of West Main Street, which were lined with houses of ill repute, namely immigrant communities and sex workers.

As restricted areas formed across Montana cities, Chinese communities also took root. “Both were marginalized communities, and they had an important relationship with one another,” Baumler said. “Women relied on the Chinese doctors who would give them remedies they couldn’t get from Western doctors.”

Missoula’s “Madam of Front Street,” Mary Gleim, operated eight brothels, but her claim to fame is having attempted to blow up the residence of her competitor, Bobby Burns. She is remembered for smuggling lace, opium, diamonds and Chinese railroad workers; a conviction for attempted murder; and prison time in Deer Lodge. When she died in 1914, she left an estate of $100,000 and instructions for her tombstone to face the railroad tracks so she could bid farewell to the railroad men who were her customers.

In 1914, women in Montana won the right to vote six years before the passage of the 19th Amendment.

With this milestone came moral reform, including prohibition and

anti-prostitution laws. City officials across the state cracked down on the red-light districts, increasing the arrests of madams and their working girls. In 1917, Montana Attorney General Sam Ford officially criminalized prostitution statewide. Restricted districts faded into the shadows, leaving very few records of what occurred there. “But, it never ceased completely,” Baumler said. “Prostitutes went underground and

“Montana has a long-

standing culture which

we highly respect, and we

just want to be a part of it.

We're not coming here to

change everything. That's

why we named it 1864—to pay homage to everything Montana was and is.”

–Blake MacKie, est. 1864 co-owner and general manager

continued working.” They continued to operate through the 20th century away from the public eye.

HONORING HISTORY, EMBRACING THE TIMES

Underground in contemporary Bozeman, MacKie gestures to a black and white framed portrait of Louisa Couselle hanging above the long wooden bar that he and Fasano built themselves.

“In old towns like this, [prostitution] was a major segment of what took place,” MacKie says. “It is what it is… maybe some people say it’s distasteful, but this was a reality and a big piece of the

economy here—Couselle was that first silent business partner in Bozeman.

Nelson Story Sr. financially supported the brothels and took care of the ladies involved. We want to share those stories.”

On any given night, locals and out-of-towners alike gather at the noir bar to enjoy Fasano’s unique twists on age-old dishes like “Baked Montana,” a spin-off of Baked Alaska, or one of her favorite pasta meals that reminds her of Sunday dinners growing up in Brooklyn. “I source as much of the meat and produce locally as possible,” Fasano says. “I always cook like a Nonna; my background is Italian, and I went to [culinary] school in Italy; I love food that tells a story.”

From Fasano’s house-made pasta, to the dimmed ambiance and antique lighting fixtures, Fasano and MacKie have created an experiential narrative, braiding strands of their own stories with those of this block of Main Street.

“Montana has a long-standing culture which we highly respect, and we just want to be a part of it,” MacKie says.

“We’re not coming here to change everything. That’s why we named it 1864 — to pay homage to everything Montana was and is.”

That’s 1864, as in the year Bozeman was established. And the tribute runs deeper. The font of their logo is in the handwriting of William Alderson, who wrote the original document signing Bozeman into official jurisdiction of the United States, and the number 4 in est. 1864 is colored red, a nod to the red-light district that flourished in this very location.

Behind the bar, MacKie is quick to tell a story about the drink you choose, many of which he named after Montana madams or another one of Bozeman’s historical figures. Sure, this town is nothing like it was 100, 50, or even five years ago, but here, in its infamous red-light district reimagined, patrons get a taste and a sip of one piece of Montana’s often-forgotten history.

Sophie Brett Tsairis is a freelance writer in Bozeman, Montana. Storytelling is her way of sharing the human experience and keeping curiosity alive.

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The Montana Governorship A love for the land and its people

By Taylor Owens

T

he story of the Montana governorship began in 1889 Bullock, a Democrat, served from 2014-2020 before making a when Gov. Joseph K. Toole, a Democrat from Helena, short bid for president and eventually losing a tight race for one led Montana through its first years of statehood. The of Montana’s U.S. Senate seats. “I was pleasantly surprised by Montana Toole governed was one marked by the extermination the willingness of Montanans to come together, regardless of of the buffalo, tens of thousands of cattle and sheep grazing open political affiliations, to address common challenges we faced. range, and multiple railroads connecting the state to the larger While certainly things could get political, Montanans recognized nation. Imagine the Gilded Age meets the outback, a state on the that it need not always be that way.” Bullock’s tenure was also brink of transformation. punctuated by his leadership of the state through the first year After fighting for Montana’s admission to the Union and of the pandemic. More broadly, Bullock is recounted as uniting subsequently serving as its first leader, Toole returned again as the Montanans and transcending political boundaries, a hallmark of state’s fourth governor, winning handily even as Republicans were Montana politics. gaining momentum at the turn of the century. Toole set the stage “I was raised here,” Bullock said. “I delivered newspapers to in those early years for what would become the Governor’s Mansion as a kid. I went the long-lived and nonpartisan backbone to public school and got to hike and hunt of the Montana governorship: compassion and fish on our public lands. Montana “They took pride in for Montana’s people. challenged me to make sure any kid being Throughout his tenure, Toole achieved raised here has the same support and that as well, thinking notable success by garnering support for opportunities I had growing up and more.” about Montana a constitutional amendment enabling Of its 24 governors, Montana has the direct election of U.S. senators. He been led by nine Republicans and 15 issues and Montana also played a pivotal role in passing Democrats. Montana has had one female legislation dedicated to enhancing mine governor, Judy Martz, a Republican from solutions for Montana safety and safeguarding mineworkers, Big Timber who served from 2001-2005 issues. They might empowering county treasurers to collect and also acted as chair of the Western taxes on personal property, instituting a Governor’s Association in 2003. have different takes workable road law and dismantling the Like Martz, other Montana governors prevailing monopoly that favored specific have held prominent leadership positions on that, but they were contractors in the production of public beyond Helena. Mark Racicot, a all trying to build school textbooks. Despite facing setbacks, Republican from Missoula and Helena Toole ardently advocated for constitutional who served two consecutive terms before on that.” amendments supporting women’s Martz, and Montana attorney general suffrage and direct primary elections. His before that, went on to become the –Jeremy Johnson, department continuous support of the wellbeing and chairman of the Republican National chair of political science interests of Montana’s citizens was always Committee.

Racicot was also the subject of and national relations at at the fore. political drama in February of 2023 when Carroll College “I would say that many of the governors, the Montana Republican Party Executive both Republican and Democratic, were Committee rebuked him, disqualifying very tied to local issues for the longest time,” him from calling himself a Republican. said Jeremy Johnson, department chair of political science and The party cited Racicot’s endorsement of left-leaning candidates national relations at Carroll College. “They took pride in that as including Supreme Court Justice Ingrid Gustafson and Democrat well, thinking about Montana issues and Montana solutions for Monica Tranel in the 2020 election, as well as President Joe Biden Montana issues. They might have different takes on that, but they over President Donald Trump. were all trying to build on that.” Past governors agree.

In his letter responding to the rebuking, Racicot opened with “One of the most inspiring aspects of serving was the incredible this: “It’s not that the Constitution does not contemplate dynamic sense of community and unity that often existed throughout our tension precipitated by differences of view. It is that it also, state,” said Gov. Steve Bullock in a statement to Mountain Outlaw. simultaneously, calls for self-restraint, sincere consideration of 174

contrary views, a willingness to compromise, a mutual promise to serve the common good, opposition without oppression, rivalry without vilification, and disagreement without contempt.”

Racicot’s letter does what many governors have done throughout the history of the state—uphold state interests over party affiliation. Gov. Brian Schweitzer, for example, who served two terms between 2005-2013, emphasized Montana’s uniqueness as the “last best place.” His gubernatorial legacy is marked by a focus on priorities such as promoting alternative energy production through incentives, achieving a historic surge in public education spending while maintaining a balanced budget without imposing new taxes, and bolstering the safeguarding of public lands for activities like hunting, fishing and camping.

“Many of them took pride in finding certain policy areas or certain issues where they felt they could make a proactive advancement, and that goes back a long time,” Johnson said.

Gov. John Hugo Aronson, originally from Sweden, was a Republican who eventually settled in Sunburst and became established in the oil rigging business. Known as “the Galloping Swede,” Aronson restructured the state forestry office, implemented a gasoline tax to fund the highway department, instituted prison reforms, and founded a legislative council during his tenure.

Gov. Ted Schwinden, who served during the ’80s, was also widely liked for his closeness to the people and his efforts to improve Montana. He is remembered for leading the state through challenging economic times and for the 56-county tours he called “Capitol for a Day” events held in communities throughout the state. Committed to transparency, his personal phone number was publicly available.

“It’s a big state in land, but it’s a small state in population. So traditionally, governors go to the Fourth of July parades in small towns, they meet with small numbers of voters,” Johnson said.

Governors that fostered close connections with Montanans tended to succeed during their campaigns. The distances candidates have to travel to speak with constituents is unique to this state because it is not common practice in states like New York, California or Pennsylvania.

“There aren’t large groups of people just living in one place. The biggest city is Billings, but it’s not a big city compared to most cities in the country. And then you have a lot of people scattered in small towns and in rural areas with different interests and different concerns. But it was often thought governors who were closest to the people did the best,” Johnson said.

M

ontana’s political landscape is blurring with that of the rest of the country, and state-specific issues are overshadowed by national ones. Politicians and citizens alike describe a palpable fissure that feels foreign to Montana culture.

“We have a healthy distrust of government, which is good, yet we are respectful and concerned about one another, even those with whom we disagree. I fear we are losing that ‘caring about our neighbors,’ and polarization and national political bogeymen are infecting how we act as Montanans,” Bullock said. “If we will hold tight to the fact we share a lot more in common than what separates us, the opportunities for Montanans and our state are limitless.”

Republicans have gained dominance in recent years. Historically, Montana has seen a majority of Democratic governors—as well as some Republican governors—who have taken a moderate approach to working with Republican legislatures. This most visibly changed following the 2020 election, when Republicans swept every statewide office including its executive seat, which Gov. Greg Gianforte still fills, and maintained the majority in the Legislature. Then in the 2022 midterms, the Montana Republicans won their first bicameral supermajority in the history of the state’s modern constitution.

In previous years, Democrats could still win statewide offices much of the time by focusing on local issues, but the Democratic Party has had to reconstruct itself, not just in Montana, but in other states resembling Montana’s smaller, older, heavily white and heavily rural populations.

“There’s also a growing number of Native American voters in Montana who, 50 years ago, were not voting in as high of numbers,” Johnson said. “There’s an increase in Native American voters who have been historically Democratic. During the last election, a couple of precincts had a large number of Native American voters flip to being Republican.”

Voter trends in governor’s races show that rural precincts tend to vote overwhelmingly Republican with Democratic votes more concentrated in cities. The story of the Montana governorship is poised to add another chapter as another election cycle approaches.

Gianforte is expected to run for re-election but has yet to confirm his intent as of Mountain Outlaw press time. Democratic candidate Ryan Busse, Republican candidate Tanner Smith, and New Liberty Party candidate John Gibb have confirmed their intent to run.

Taylor Owens is a writer and videographer who spends her days running in the sun, playing in the snow, or on the hunt for the best breakfast across the West. She is based in Bozeman and is the content marketing lead at Outlaw Partners.

The Montana capitol building in 1918.

Photo by Edward M. Reinig/Montana Historical Society Research Center

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Montana’s three-term senator illustrates what it means to be a ‘real Montanan’

By Bella Butler

178

F E A T U R E D O U T L AW

U.S. Sen. Jon Tester leans over a wooden fence rail on his farm in Big Sandy, Montana. Photo Courtesy of Sen. Jon Tester

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Tester (right) introduces young hunter Even Truhalla during an Oct. 20, 2023 press conference near Billings, Montana, where the senator celebrated a recently passed bill protecting the use of federal resources for hunter education courses. Photo by Jack Reaney

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T

There’s nothing glamorous

longer than is normal. “I’m so proud to meet you,” he says.

They chat for a minute, mostly about Bradshaw’s shirt. “I just got it yesterday and haven’t taken it off yet,” he tells me. Tester thanks him for the support, ostensibly making Bradshaw’s day even better, and continues down the hall, leaving Bradshaw in a star-struck stupor.

Because of the conference there’s no school today and no other students in sight, but Bradshaw is here volunteering for the Yellowstone County Democrats booth, which is where he was when he got wind of the senator’s guest appearance.

“They said ‘Senator Tester’s out there’ and I literally jumped and ran out here,” he says. I don’t think he’s exaggerating—he’s still out of breath.

Freeze the frame on Bradshaw, because this is the point. In the less-than four hours I spent with the senator on this day, I witnessed more of these interactions than I could keep up with in my notebook. People are drawn to him, not in the way you might expect of a political figure, but in a deeply personal way, and more importantly, in a uniquely far-reaching way. This is made more intriguing by the fact that Montana’s political atmosphere—and subsequently, its culture—is shifting by anecdotal and statistical measures.

The state that has long been known for its affinity for locally rooted representatives has an extensive record of electing them based on issues and character more than party affiliation.

But the 2022 election revealed a break in the page, where forecasters were shaken by a statewide red wave in a place that often splits its ticket with the majority voting for a Republican

about the inside of Billings Skyview High School. The 1980s-style brick walls, rectangular fluorescent ceiling lights and beige tiled floors are more than anything a reflection of a John Hughes movie set, but as U.S. Sen. Jon Tester makes his way from one end of the school to the other, its main hallway becomes somewhat of a red carpet. The facility is hosting the 2023 educator conference for the Montana Federation of Public Employees (MFPE), so instead of unenthused teenagers with backpacks slung over one shoulder, the building is full of teachers and school administrators following the senator around in a magnetic cluster.

Tester isn’t wearing anything especially identifying; he just arrived last night from D.C. and quickly traded his suit coat and tie for a blue Carhartt button-up long sleeve and jeans. Yet he’s undeniably recognizable, especially thanks to the signature flat-top hairdo he’s sported at least since he first ran for federal office in 2006. It’s a little thinner on the top than it was back then, giving away his 67 years, but his pace yields nothing to age as he charges through another bell-to-bell workday with focus, presence and energy.

It’s not even 10 a.m. and I’m already wilting. But not the senator. By the time I met him at his Billings office at 8 a.m., he’d already made an early-morning appearance on Billings’ CBS affiliate, KQTV, and has done God knows what else since then. Though in the interview I got the feeling he would’ve regaled us all day with the personal stories and reflections on public office, his staff politely ushered him to his next obligation here at the educator conference by 9 a.m. Next comes the press conference at 11 a.m., and then finally his four-hour drive home to Big Sandy in northern Montana, where his wife, Sharla, and their farm await him, just as they do every weekend.

He’s almost made it to the end of the hallway at Skyview when a teenager comes running from the opposite direction. As he nears, I realize he’s wearing a Jon Tester shirt, and unsurprisingly, a googly-eyed expression. The senator is finishing a conversation with a principal-looking type, so the kid paces around them, anxiously awaiting his turn. Tester looks up and immediately acknowledges the young man and his shirt with an open-mouthed smile.

“Well I like you!” Tester says to him, laughing.

The boy, Gabe Bradshaw, a sweet and nervous 16-year-old from Lockwood, Tester (right) poses with 16-year-old Gabe Bradshaw, a high schooler from Montana, shakes Tester’s hand for a second Lockwood, Montana, and a Tester supporter. Photo courtesy of Gabe Bradshaw

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president but otherwise mostly favoring Democrats. Montana’s politics are becoming more and more nationalized, and fewer and farther between are the candidates that harness a bipartisan following painted with Montana values more so than blue or red. In this way, Tester arguably represents a dying breed of Montana politician. Recent news stories are calling Tester the exception to a trend of declining favorability ratings among other incumbent Democrats across the country running for contentious reelections. There’s something different about Montana’s three-term senator. This is what I set out to understand on this trip to Billings: The Tester appeal.

Tester’s Senate seat will be up for grabs in the 2024 election, and he’s among four candidates bidding for it. Though as of Mountain Outlaw press time no other Democrats have stepped forward to challenge Tester in the primary election this coming spring, he’s revving up the engine of his campaign.

I’ve received at least a dozen texts from his campaign since he announced he was running for re-election in February of 2023—mostly near fundraising deadlines—and his ads have started to pop up on my TV, phone and computer.

One of his most recent ads places him in his 605-person hometown of Big Sandy, driving a pickup truck on a road surrounded by golden farm fields and eventually down the town’s quaint main street. “Folks back in Washington and even some folks moving here don’t understand, or frankly don’t care, about what’s happening out here,” Tester says in the ad. “I’m defending our way of life with everything I’ve got.” Politico noted the comparatively early timing on the release in a story headlined, “The first Senate Democrat is going on the airwaves with a 2024 ad.” The subtitle: “Jon Tester touts his threegenerations-deep roots in Montana and bemoans rising costs and loss of access to public lands.” And therein lies a critical piece of the Tester appeal—the Montana effect.

Tester works on his farm in Big Sandy, where he grows peas, lentils and grain. Photo courtesy of Sen. Jon Tester

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Political battles in the state often come down to a grueling debate on one core issue: who’s more Montana? Candidates spar with their generational heritage, where three is better than two, and four is better than three. And sometimes, they call each other on a farce, like in the often quoted “all hat, no cattle” campaign Tester’s team ran against 2018 Republican challenger Matt Rosendale.

In Tester’s case, it’s hard to dispute his authenticity. Tester’s relationship with Montana begins with his grandfather, who made his way from North Dakota’s Red River Valley to Montana in 1912, when “the grass was as tall as the belly of a horse.”

“They broke the land with horses and tried to make a living,” as Tester tells the story. “And of course they had insects and drought, and everything else that happened over the next decade forced them back to North Dakota for a while. I mean, they were starving to death, they didn’t have any safety net programs, they didn’t have what we have today. If you couldn’t feed your family, your family went hungry.” That first generation of Montana Testers made it back to Montana from North Dakota in the ’20s, and eventually handed it down to the second generation when Tester’s parents took over the farm in the ’40s.

“They worked hard, they set up a butcher shop—well, they cut meat in their basement for a while—and then in the early ’60s they set up a butcher shop and got meat to add value to make their income work, to be able to send their kids to college and all that stuff. And then we were able to follow in that tradition,” Tester said. And so began the third chapter of the farming Testers.

Never mind that Tester studied music in Great Falls, or that he worked as a teacher; he sealed his fate in farming at an early age. “I was 8 years old when I decided to run the farm,” Tester recounts. “I told my folks I wanted to do this. My folks said ‘Ah yeah, yeah right,’ but the truth is that’s what I wanted to do.”

Tester farms grain, peas and lentils—yes, present tense.

With the help of his wife Sharla Tester, third generation farmer Tester repairs his cultivator on his 1,800 acre farm in Big Sandy, Montana on Thursday April 13, 2017.

Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Tester farms grain, peas and lentils—yes, present tense.

While working as a senator, he still tends to his farm.

Even after his busy day in Billings and a full week in Washington, he says he’s got to get home to unload and clean a bunch of peas. It’s who he is, he says.

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“I think [the Montana way of life is] where people work together. I think it’s where people understand the value of community. Where it’s not about me, it’s about we. Where it’s your word is your bond and a handshake means something. I think it’s seeing somebody on the street that you don’t know and have a smile and say ‘ hi.’ That’s the Montana I know.”

—Jon Tester

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An aerial photo shows Tester's home town of Big Sandy. Photo by Christopher Boyer

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Tester, chairman of the Senate's Veteran Affairs Committee, holds a press conference in Washington D.C. in February of 2023 to discuss his bill that would provide full military benefits to veterans injured in combat. Photo courtesy of Sen. Jon Tester

While working as a senator, he still tends to his farm. Even after his busy day in Billings and a full week in Washington, he says he’s got to get home to unload and clean a bunch of peas.

It’s who he is, he says. And he’s said it before.

“He told me that when he built his current house on the property, he oriented it at an angle so that the views would capture the limitless prairie encircling it, rather than a picturesque set of mountain peaks in the distance,” wrote Nicholas Fandos for The New York Times in 2018. “The prairie, he said, was what he’d come from and how he’d made his living.” To an outside viewer, Big Sandy’s greatest claim to fame might be Tester himself—a sign proudly boasts so upon entering town—but Tester thinks otherwise. To him, he’s just a part of a really important story that runs generations deep.

While he speaks fondly of his work in Congress, he asserts farming is the best job he’s ever had.

I ask him about the separation of these roles; how he parses out the senator from the farmer from the husband and the grandfather. His answer is quick and, in retrospect, obvious as the thread that holds together his identity.

“Well, I hope there isn’t any difference.”

When Tester leaves Skyview, a ripple of energy follows him.

Perhaps it was the way MTFPE President Amanda Curtis introduced him to a room of teachers as “Jon Fucking Tester,” or the way people whispered things like “I heard Jon Tester’s here,” as they passed in the hallway, but it feels like we’re leaving a concert where Bruce Springsteen just crowd surfed.

Our next stop with the senator is north on Montana Highway 3 near the Billings-Logan International Airport. My colleagues and I arrive at a house surrounded by rolling golden hills and backdropped by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway. The property is owned by Barbara Skelton and 186

Paul Gatzemeier, who founded a nonprofit that offers equine therapy to veterans. Skelton tells us her family homesteaded in the state a few decades before the Testers, and she too has long been involved in state politics, with a ballot appearance as the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor alongside Thomas Lee Judge in 1988. Today, she and Gatzemeier are loaning their land to Tester for a press conference. I suppose the senator keeps fitting company.

Tester arrives a while after us, as do a handful of reporters from various Montana outlets. Tester’s Montana press secretary hustles a mobile podium from his car out to the field while Tester speaks informally with Darrell Ehrlick, editor-in-chief of the Daily Montanan, about current events in Washington.

It’s Oct. 20, and the U.S. House of Representatives is paralyzed without a speaker of the house as the conflict between Israel and Hamas is brewing into what will undoubtedly be a merciless war. Tester greets everyone around him with the dutiful friendliness of a Montana neighbor, but he carries the weight of what he earlier described to me as “a particularly dangerous time.” He makes his way to the podium, and I watch a little bit more of that D.C. senator inhabit him before he turns it on.

“This is a beautiful day in the greatest state in the greatest country in the world, and we ought never take that for granted,” he begins. “So it’s Oct. 20. You know what that means?

Tomorrow starts [general deer and elk] hunting season.”

Yes, D.C. is in a fragile state, and yet another war is imminent, but Tester’s here today to talk about hunting. More specifically, he’s celebrating his bipartisan legislation protecting the use of federal funds for hunter safety and sport shooting classes, which President Joe Biden signed into law earlier in the month. The law was in response to the Department of Education’s interpretation of 2022’s gun safety law, which bans funding for “training in the use of a dangerous weapon.”

Tester invites his guests up to the mic to speak further on the

topic, including Montana Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Montanan and the president of the Montana Farmers Union, Board Member Jake Schwaller; and young Montana hunter Walter Schweitzer echoes Tester’s woes. “I used to be able to Even Trewhalla, who is dressed in his hunting attire. The whole go to community events, coffee shops, and have civil debates,” thing is a bit theatrical, with the prairie podium and camo-clad Schweitzer told me in a Nov. 1 interview. “I love debates teenager, but it conveys a clear point the senator is often trying and I think a good debate is when you learn something from to make: Amidst the echoes of national politics bouncing from the other person, and we’ve lost that civility. It’s like people headline to headline, Sen. Jon Tester has not forgotten about are having the debates with earmuffs on.” To him, Tester Montana. There’s no doubt he’s plugged in to broader issues represents the Montana he feels is slipping away. I asked at the Capitol—he brings up concern for Chinese President Schweitzer what he thought of the Tester appeal. Where does Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin more than it come from? once—but he’s deliberate in putting his identity as a Montanan “He’s a real Montanan,” he said. out in front of him at all times. He made the decision almost In the campaign battle for authenticity, I do my due diligence two decades ago, after serving two terms in the Montana as a reporter and consider whether it’s all real—the farm motifs Legislature and a lifetime of farming, that the best way to work and metaphors, the pictures of Sharla’s pies on his campaign on behalf of the state he loves so dearly was to take a job 2,000 Instagram, the TV ads showcasing his old pickup and the miles away. images of him elbow deep in machinery. What I keep coming “I knew fully well, because of my experience in the state back to is this moment at the end of our interview when I legislature, that I can do things on my farm that can make the asked him about his frequent claim of being a “defender of the world a better place. But I could do things in Helena that can Montana way of life.” What does “Montana way of life” mean? make the world [an even] better place, and a lot better place “Well, I think it’s where people work together,” he said, not in Washington, D.C. because whether people understand or missing a beat. “I think it’s where people understand the value not, just about everything we do in Washington, D.C. affects of community. Where it’s not about me, it’s about we. Where everybody in this country,” Tester said. it’s your word is your bond and a handshake means something.

Impact notwithstanding, he’s quick to admit that D.C. is I think it’s seeing somebody on the street that you don’t know a hell of a lot different than Montana. He repeats the word and have a smile and say ‘hi.’ That’s the Montana I know.” bipartisan until it plays like his theme song, and he hangs I think about the sureness in his voice when he said this and his head while lamenting the country’s—and the state’s— the silence in the room, and the farm stories and the pickup increasing polarization. Yet he attests that the Montana he truck and the Carhartt shirt give way to something else. Maybe knows has much to teach us. He talks about learning to work the Tester appeal isn’t any of those purported symbols of together in Washington in the same breath as he tells the “real Montana.” story of his grandfather building their barn with the help of Maybe the Tester appeal is the embodiment of the Montana his neighbors. we all want to believe in.

An old friend of Tester’s, a fellow third-generation Bella Butler is the managing editor for Mountain Outlaw.

Tester addresses a crowd gathered on the banks of the Gallatin River in October of 2020 while announcing his intention to sponsor the Montana Headwaters Legacy Act. Photo by Gabrielle Gasser

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