9 minute read
FUN
American Life in Poetry
BY KWAME DAWES
More and more, poets, like everyone else, are confronted with the news and physical evidence of change in our weather patterns and landscapes, and we find ourselves trying to find language for this unsettling sense that the world is changing rapidly. Khadijah Queen, in her poem, “Undoing,” has a haunting sense while driving through a snowstorm, that somehow our machines and our voracious appetite for fuel have something to do with this “undoing” of our world. Like many of us, she is arrested by this knowing. Poetry does not always give us answers, instead, it helps us meditate on the questions, and this, sometimes, is enough.
Undoing
BY KHADIJAH QUEEN
In winter traffic, fog of midday shoves toward our machines—snow eclipses the mountainscapes I drive toward, keeping time against the urge to quit moving. I refuse to not know how not to, wrestling out loud to music, as hovering me—automatic engine, watching miles of sky on the fall—loves such undoing, secretly, adding fuel to what undoes the ozone, the endless nothing manifested as sinkholes under permafrost. Refusal, indecision—an arctic undoing of us, interrupting cascades— icy existences. I cannot drive through.
Corner Corner Quote Quote
– Albert Camus BIG SKY BEATS
Songs of Resilience
BY TUCKER HARRIS
The sixth annual Big Sky Ideas Festival will feature a live performance by musicians Bruce Anfinson and Monique Benabou on Friday, Jan. 28 at The Independent at 6 p.m. The two musicians will also perform at the TEDxBigSky event on Jan. 29 and 30, closing out two nights of moving talks centered around this year’s theme, resilience.
Anfinson’s music paints intimate pictures of the Montana way of life; the people, landscapes and history we love so much. Benabou describes her music as transformational, powerful and vulnerable, and a culmination of her own breakthroughs and rock bottoms.
Explore Big Sky has put together a playlist featuring both of the artists’ music for you to enjoy before heading over to the Independent on Friday, Jan. 28 or to the TEDx event at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center on Saturday, Jan. 29 and Sunday, Jan. 30 to hear them perform live.
1. “Home is where Montana is” by Bruce Anfinson 2. “Under Pressure” by Monique Benabou 3. "Throwing Horseshoes at the Moon” by Bruce Anfinson 4. “Mr. Know it All – The Voice Performance” by Monique Benabou 5. “Handmade Saddle” by Bruce Anfinson 6. “Just Breathe” by Monique Benabou 7. “Fresh Bread” by Bruce Anfinson 8. “Goin’ nowhere” by Monique Benabou 9. “Ballad of Minnie and Pearl” by Bruce Anfinson 10. “Is That Too Much” by Monique Benabou
For Explore Big Sky, the Back 40 is a resource: a place where we can delve into subjects and ask experts to share their knowledge. Here, we highlight stories from our flagship sister publication Mountain Outlaw magazine.
Noun: wild or rough terrain adjacent to a developed area Origin: shortened form of “back 40 acres”
Report: Maverick Mountain owners find reality in a skier’s dream
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 forsale 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 the eve of the next ski season. As Borge’s frigid night of groomer maintenance attests, reality was—and is—vastly different.
“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 a 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.
To get to that list, though, the Borges first have to check off the essentials, a task which starts the moment Maverick’s single chairlift closes down for the season at the beginning of April. There are chairlift components to repair or
remake, a lift terminal to lubricate, safety systems to check, firewood to stock up on, equipment to pull apart and put back together. Borge says he’s lucky just to stay on top of the many things a ski area needs to survive another season. And the work only gets tougher when the snow starts flying. Borge estimates he gets between four and five hours of sleep a night during the winter. The couple spent their first few seasons living in an RV in the ski area parking lot, before moving to a cabin at nearby Elkhorn Hot Springs, which they and their fellow collegebuddy Maverick investors purchased about two years ago. On the eve of the couple’s fifth season helming Maverick, Borge has yet to pay himself in anything other than a ski pass and beer.
“There’s dream things that you wish you could do, but you just have to do the best you can with what you got,” Borge says. “Nobody that buys a ski area is going to make it rich.”
For the Borges, Maverick has quickly become a labor of love. Love, in part, for the sport they grew up with. Both were competitive ski racers as children, and actually met as ski instructors at Big Sky Resort in 2009. Neither had skied Maverick as adults, but Kristi still recalls racing there during elementary school and her parents, Marjorie and J.C. Knaub, himself a former ski patroller at Big Sky, still live in the area.
“The fact that [skiing] was a huge part of our lives is a big reason why it happened,” she says of the Maverick purchase.
Looming equally large in their decision, however, was a desire to return to their rural roots. Borge was raised in a small town near Oregon’s iconic Timberline Lodge ski area. Kristi spent her childhood in a Big Sky still relatively untouched by the past decade of development, and was inspired to become a teacher by her years attending Ophir Elementary. Prior to the name “Maverick Mountain” entering their lives, the Borges had discussed a move to the countryside and commutes into Bozeman.
Stepping inside the lodge to join Borge for a beer, longtime local skier Dave Miller confesses the Polaris community was apprehensive when the couple first arrived. But their willingness to buckle down quickly and keep the mountain operating proved what both the Borges claim: that neither sees themselves as Maverick’s owners, rather as caretakers of a place belonging to the town. “I think you’d have a hard time finding anybody that’d complain,” Miller says, before heading back out to pick up his son from Kristi’s classroom.
Life has a funny way of coming full circle. After making such a drastic and unexpected life change five years ago, Kristi’s primary role at Maverick is now as coach of the new youth ski racing team. The team skied 36 kids from the greater Dillon area last season, she says, and her long-term goal is for the mountain to host a U.S. Ski and Snowboard Northern Division race once again.
“I have pictures of myself racing at Maverick when I’m 10 years old, and that really puts it in perspective,” she says. “I’m wearing the same racing bibs, these cloth bibs, that we still have in the lodge. That’s kind of wild to see.”
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