Keeping it Quirky: 7 Strange Truths about Life in a Mountain Town

Wild Rye was born in Ketchum, ID, a “gateway town” for folks heading to fish, hike, bike, ski, raft, and otherwise recreate outdoors in and on its surrounding wild mountains and rivers. 

I was born in the flatlands of the midwest, where mountains were things I read about in my “Hatchet” series books and rivers occasionally caught on fire (Chicago is a magical place). 

Our worlds were not on course to collide until I somehow made it into college on a scholarship that allowed me to choose a little liberal arts school with both a big outdoors club and study abroad program. From there, even as I thought I was navigating myself towards academia or a press room, each spring break spent backpacking or semester spent snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef was actually steering me towards life in an up-till-then unknown destination called Mountain Town.

In Mountain Town, pretty much anything that had once seemed clear about how the world worked got as murky as a beaver dam bog, and the “traditional path” disappeared like an overgrown, washed out forest service road, leaving a pile of weird truths in its place like rocks.

I wanted to call out seven particularly notable mountain town quirks because, for all that they’ve become just normal, every day shit for me now, they’re honestly still kinda hilarious:

Mountain Town Truth #1: Many of your friendships are as seasonal as your clothes.

The only thing more exciting than pulling the ski bibs or bike shorts back out of seasonal storage, is getting to the resort or trailhead for the first time each year and seeing your winter or summer friends again. 

Sounds like fake news, but I promise that everyone in a mountain town gets what I’m talking about: you have ski friends, you have trail running friends, you have friends who live in a mountain town with a different peak season than yours and you swap visiting each other during your respective off seasons. 

And even after months of only “talking” via memes about the sport you’re not doing together because it’s the wrong time of year, the second you link back up, it’s out into the mountains you go, trusting each other with your lives, like no time has passed at all - but someone probably now has a kid or something.

Weird Mountain Town Truth #2: “The goods are odd but the odds are good.”

Mountain towns are full of extreme athletes, but none are more dedicated to their sport, perhaps, than the resident willing to continue overcoming the endless obstacles of dating in a small, incestual, town.  

About every six months, I log back into apps like Hinge, body steeled like I’m about to drop into the gnarliest line I’ve ever skied or biked. I used to think that moving to a mountain town would help me find the love of my life: there would be people who shared my passions! Sensitive souls who understood the poetry of the natural world! Hot mustaches!

But, instead, what inevitably happens is that the same peeps are still there, waiting  with their same fish pics, or their “epic ski shots” (where their face isn’t visible), or their van life videos and the proud proclamation: “I’m a wanderer! A digital nomad! I’m not sticking around for long! Follow me on social media!” Most of them will have either dated my friends, or matched with me in the past only to discover that I was serious about being a feminist and a goddamn liberal. 

And so I will spend a day wondering if maybe someone fell through the cracks since the last time I was here, feeling all sorts of *cringe,* as the youths say, until I log back out again for another half a year or more. (Because, speaking of youths, the only new faces are 23 year olds who were born about the time I started college. And even Katie Burrell, with her assertion on an IG story series years ago that you get an eleven year grace range where dating up or down is allowed, wouldn’t call these fresh finds age appropriate.)

I dunno what it is that makes mountain town men harder to date than I expected. A girlfriend and I once mused if it didn’t have to do with the fact that these guys are all here to relish in the Peter Pan noncommittal, sport-oriented life, living out a script in which they’re cast as the main character, and where they don’t have to try very hard to make shit work, because a mountain town has always been a safe and accepting place for them to show up and just *be*. 

Don’t get me wrong: plenty of my dude friends here are incredible. But there seems to be a disconnect between the women who have had to work that much harder to be accepted as guides, athletes, or even just ski bums, honestly, and the bros who don’t need to challenge the status quo because it serves them well enough.

So in the meantime, I just settle back into my lovely, if celibate, life where my gal pals are everything and my vibrator never far from reach.

Weird Mountain Town Truth #3: There are “Types” of fun

When I was a kid in an urban environment, you were either having fun or you weren’t. As an adult in a mountain town, I can be having fun (Type 1), having fun that’s not fun yet but will be some day (Type 2), or having fun that’s actually not really fun and probably won’t ever be fun, except as a retelling as a story years from now (Type 3), or not having fun but grinning and bearing it, because not everything that’s fun is fun. I’m honestly still trying to figure that one out. 

Weird Mountain Town Truth #4: The money matrix glitches. 

Billionaires look like ski bums, ski bums are actually floating their lifestyle with a trust fund, and the ever rarer true skid uses a medieval barter and trade system like they’re playing an IRL game of Catan that their life quite literally depends on. (Speaking of which… if anyone has one guest house in the Tetons, I’ll trade you in caretaking favors and loaves of fresh sourdough…) 

Weird Mountain Town Truth #5: There is THAT Facebook group.

You know the one. It’s either the most wholesome thing you’ve ever encountered (“I have too many raspberries in my backyard! Come pick them!”), the best source for breaking news (“Anyone know why there are so many emergency vehicles with sirens on going through town?” “There is a collision at the intersection!”), or the most vitriolic echo chamber (I still cannot even with 2020 and the absolutely awful way folks treated their neighbors for caring, well, about their neighbors).

Weird Mountain Town Truth #6: Paradise is built on Paradox

Your county may be the wealthiest in the US, but its infrastructure will feel as rural and lacking as the day it was founded - and any attempt at updating things will cause a big ol’ kerfuffle because YOU’RE RUINING THE AREA’S CHARACTER (no matter that huge, $10 million homes have been plopping down for years, erasing any actual charm there ever once was). 

Oh, and there is certainly no place for a turn lane or new road to connect yet another NIMBY neighborhood to the highway so their construction, window washing, landscaping, dog walking, grocery delivering, house cleaning, etc. crews can commute more effectively… But boy howdy we’ll sure complain about traffic! 

And while there may be more nonprofits per capita in your mountain town than anywhere else in the world, all of whom fundraise VERY successfully each year, somehow, when it comes to public buses or ski patrol pay or affordable housing, suddenly everyone’s straight outta pocket change.

And though self-proclaimed wilderness and wildlife lovers abound, if you ask them to consider the environmental impact of their private jets or sushi grade tuna brought in to a high desert state, they’ll deflect and tell you about that one time they hosted an event for a conservation group at their hundred acre “ranch” that uses more energy to heat, cool, power in one month than any of the caterers who served the small bites on disposable plates at their last function use in their skid shacks in a decade.

And lastly, locals (though what, really, is a local is probably the hottest debate in any mountain town), love to tell new arrivals: “We’re full, go home!” Of course, if they and their families have really been here as long as they claim, they a) were a new arrival at once point when their mountain town was (ahem) still native land in native hands, and b) are the only ones who’ve been around long enough to be blamed for voting policy into place that encouraged outsiders with wealth to congregate and concentrate in the area in the first place.

But, no, we would never want to have our cake and to eat it, too…

Weird Mountain Town Truth #7: Individualism is the myth, community is the reality

People love to talk about rugged cowboy mentality shit like it’s the goddamn gospel in western mountain towns, but try to survive here without community and you’re not making it through your first winter, Cletus. 

Because when the utilities shut down in a winter storm, people immediately rally to share food and generators and spare beds. Or when the road falls off the mountain due to a landslide, folks coordinate huge carpool and dog-walking and kid-from-daycare-picking-up phone trees to manage the now two hour detour cutting them off from their daily lives. Or when a house burns down, your handful of volunteer firefighters call every other fire station in an hour radius for backup to prevent the whole valley from going up in flames, and every civilian within an hour jumps into action searching for the family’s missing cat. 

In this era of isolation, extremism, and fear, I can’t help but wish we were all a bit better at remembering that it literally takes a village - and that the village only thrives when we have a diversity of talents, an inclusion of new and creative viewpoints, and an equitable division of resources. And that’s one truth that crosses the divide between mountain town and city. 

 

Written by: Ariel Kazunas