There are plenty of beautiful skiing photos in this book, but also alluring pictures of the towns and landscapes near the ski areas.
Montana: Skiing the Last Best Place, photographs by Craig W. Hergert, stories by Brian Hurlbut, Great Wide Open Publishing, 2013. 225 pages, $60.
If this were just a collection of photos of Montana ski resorts, it would still be a good book. There are enough gorgeous mountains here, enough spectacular runs and great fields of powder, to excite any skier—or even a person who used to ski some but is now too old and creaky.
But this book is much more than that. It is also an exploration of the state, an examination of out-of-the-way places and an explanation of what makes Montana, even now, an outlier in a heavily commercialized, corporatized world.
The big boys are featured here—Whitefish Mountain Resort, Big Sky Resort, and even the private Yellowstone Club—but nearly all of the other 15 featured Montana mountains (plus three nearby ski areas in northern Wyoming) are relatively small affairs.
Many of them have been run for decades by the same individuals or families, some are run by volunteers, and in some the “amenities” are almost nonexistent.
“Schilling bought the place after a short visit on the way home from the 1988 Olympics in Calgary,” we read. “He is still there every day, giddy when it’s snowing and wondering how the bills will be paid when it isn’t.”
Or take the Bear Paw Ski Bowl, located near Havre and one of only two ski areas in the country on an Indian reservation (the Rocky Boys Reservation). It gets less snow than any ski area in Montana and some years gets so little it doesn’t even open. When there is enough snow, it is open on weekends from January through March—for $20 a day. If that’s not the cheapest lift ticket in the United States, I’d like to know what is.
Stories like this abound. The photos are likewise discursive and often unexpected. As Hergert explains in an afterword, “I did not want to stage professional skiers ripping down the steepest slopes and cliffs depicting a world of what skiing should look like, but rather what it does look like. I simply wanted to go out to capture and enjoy the purity, character and feeling of each area with as little intrusion as possible, shooting what was available at the time, taking nothing but the moment.”
He complements these photos with spectacular aerial photos of some of the ski areas and the valleys in which they sit. One of the first photos in the book, of Discovery Basin, with the town of Philipsburg in the foreground and the Pintlar Range in the background, is literally breathtaking. He does the same with Red Lodge and the Rock Creek Valley, giving you a new appreciation of something seemingly so familiar.
On top of all that, Hergert gives us as many photos of the towns and landscapes near the ski areas as he does of the ski areas themselves. A few pages after that fabulous aerial of Discovery Basin, there is a two-page spread showing a wide shot of Philipsburg, a closeup of one of that town’s beautifully restored downtown buildings, a shot of the ski hill at dusk and an eerily gorgeous shot of Granite, a ghost town near the back side of Discovery. I don’t remember even hearing of Granite before, but the immense wall of rock shown—an old mill, apparently—looks like a set from “Game of Thrones.”
Over and over, we read and see photos of mom-and-pop ski hills, places where the powder might be awe-inspiring but the margins thin, and the bars and restaurants rustic, to put it mildly.
As Warren Miller says in the foreword, “For me, skiing in Montana is the way skiing was back in the 1940s and early 1950s. … Sure, Montana has a couple of ‘deluxe resorts’ with high-rise condos, nightlife, and anything else one could want, but it also has a lot of small ski areas where skiing is just like it used to be. Simple, beautiful, and quiet.”
Simple, beautiful and quiet: I remember that Montana, and this book brings it back in dozens of different ways.
