SECTION: SUBHEAD
To Own A Ski Hill MAVERICK MOUNTAIN BY ALEX SAKARIASSEN
A FEW SKI SEASONS PAST, ERIK BORGE FOUND HIMSELF PATCHING TOGETHER A BROKEN GROOMING MACHINE ON THE SLOPES OF MAVERICK MOUNTAIN ABOUT 40 MILES WEST OF DILLON, MONTANA. It was well after midnight, the temperature was in the neighborhood of 40-below, and Borge had already driven the three-hour round trip to Butte twice—once to buy a replacement hydraulic hose, and once to get the hose remade when it wouldn’t fit. Borge says a side of him wanted to give up, to announce to the ski area’s guests that there’d be no groomed snow today. But with a youth ski race slated for the following day, the internal debate was short lived. “I literally didn’t have a choice,” he says. The job got done that night, as so many have in the five years since Borge and his wife, Big Sky native Kristi Borge, sold their lives in Bozeman for the prospect of owning a ski area. They were 29 and 27, respectively, when they purchased Maverick Mountain. On paper, the couple’s story sounds like the Hollywood version of a skier’s fantasy: A chance mention by a friend of a for-sale ski area during a dip in the Boiling River; a new home put back on the market to raise capital; months of uncertainty culminating in a purchase on theeve of the next ski season. As Borge’s frigid night of groomer maintenance attests, reality was—and is—vastly different.
70 / M T O U T L AW. C O M PHOTOS MOUNTAIN COURTESY OF RYAN WELTY, POLARISPHOTOLAB.COM
“I think the general concept is you buy a mountain, you ski, you do a little bit of people management, you answer a couple emails, and then in the spring you shut it down and you go on vacation,” Borge says. “That’s not even close.” Nowadays Borge smacks of that reality, from the top of his worn beanie to the hems of his grease-soaked coveralls. He kicks back inside Maverick’s lodge on a blustery early-October afternoon, sipping a bottle of Bud Light and cracking jokes about windblown shingles with the frank, easy-going manner of ranch hand. Kristi is down valley at Polaris’ one-room schoolhouse, where she got a job as a teacher before they’d closed the deal on the mountain. The couple’s new pup BB chases flies against a window that looks out on the steep snowless pitch of the ski trail Remely, where during a 2001 demonstration, former pro mogul skier C.J. “Turbo” Turner hit nearly 90 mph on a rocket-propelled monoski. Replacing the lodge roof would be nice, Borge says after another strong gust. It’s currently on his list of dream projects.