Dear Bozeman: I Am a Part of The Problem
I’ve spent the majority of my young adult life searching for community. In college it wasn’t uncommon to catch me at the Brevard Rock Gym three days a week in a struggling effort to match the ability of the other climbers while holding down a stacked study load and a job. Afterwards I thought I’d made the best friends of my life on the Appalachian trail. We trudged through thunderstorms, negotiated the outbreak of COVID while living in the woods, and ultimately were shook from each other in the aftermath. But the following year I found my way into something truly incredible; the Bozeman adventure and ultrarunning scene.
Somewhere pocketed in the middle of cowboy country, Montana, was a group of folks that reflected so much of what I valued. Nowhere before had I encountered a culture so willing to get up at 4:00 in the morning, run a full marathon through mountains of snow, and spend the whole afternoon volunteering with trail crews, youth programs, or the like. It encapsulated so much of what’s important to me. Folk cared about being healthy and expressed it through rigorous training and phenomenal efforts in the mountains with little concern for how agreeable the conditions may be. We are stewards of the land with a vested interest in the health of our outdoor spaces, and not just in the short-term. Hell, I even managed to work in the community garden without killing anything.
These are all amazing things, and I think since so many of us in Bozeman come from other parts of the country we’ve been able to cultivate a more well-rounded community with values that continually develop as new community members incorporate their own knowledge and experiences into the pool.
But climbing mountains and planting trees don’t make a community in its entirety.
Not unlike my home region in Southern Appalachia, Bozeman’s explosion as a scenic adventure hub has its problems, and I’m a part of it. A median household income of $59,965 (US Census) presented against a median cost of a home at $922,500 (Bozeman Real Estate Group) makes for a hauntingly-disparaging situation. Multi-generational Bozeman families are being run from town at alarming rates while tech moguls, second home owners, and, yes, cheap-living dirtbags like me encroach on the space. Half the year I am away training, exploring, and working in other regions of the world, leaving much-needed housing space vacant but unavailable to those who may need it. Once back in town my focus changes back to volunteering with trail crews, yes, but with Summer being my “off season” professionally I’ve become aware that the area my work impacts does not include Bozeman.
In some capacities, Bozeman is the basecamp I deploy from, but not quite the home I live in. This isn’t the fault of a young twenty-something trying to establish himself in the guiding space, and I would caution against any such finger pointing that’s become so common as the dialogue around costs of living and remote-working develops. Instead, I think we can use the ideas prefacing Leave No Trace (LNT) as a guide to fostering better community. “How much am I taking from this place?” “How much am I giving to it?” “Will my presence in the long term have certain impacts locally?” While often difficult to admit, the very fact that we as people exist means we will be exerting pressure on systems that keep us alive, and if what we produce and contribute primarily lies somewhere far away while our consumption stays local we may ultimately be a strain on that local community.
How to balance this moving forward? Well, that needs to be navigated on a person-by-person basis, but maybe those trail crews aren’t such a bad place to start.
Looking to give back to Bozeman? Here are some great organizations.
Gallatin Valley Land Trust (Conservation & Trail Crew): https://gvlt.org/
Eagle Mount (Special Needs Youth Engagement): https://www.eaglemount.org/
Big Sky Youth Empowerment (Youth Engagement): https://www.byep.org/
Gallatin Valley Food Bank: https://gallatinvalleyfoodbank.org/give-help/