FAITHFUL
I DLING ON THE SKIN TRACK, his face flushed with gusto and sunburn, Toby Yoder tells me about God. “When we’re up here, I feel we’re with Him,” he says. Behind us, rays of April sunlight pour down Kakache Peak’s northwest-facing couloirs, which harbor powder that hasn’t been touched once this winter. The blocky 8,575-foot mountain sits between Missoula and Whitefish, Montana, within the Confederated Salish and Kootenay Tribes’ Mission Mountains Wilderness, the first wilderness area in the United States to be designated and administered by a tribal government. With few people and no roads, the 45-mile-long Mission Range is quieter than nearby Glacier National Park, and features sprawling wilderness, high alpine lakes, imperiled glaciers, dramatic horned peaks, and knife-sharp ridgelines.
The people who ski Kakache, like 32-year-old Yoder, live in St. Ignatius, on the Flathead Nation Reservation just south of Flathead Lake, the largest freshwater body west of the Mississippi. About 850 people call this small agricultural town home. In the late ’90s, a few Amish families moved to St. Ignatius from the backwoods of northwest Montana in pursuit of more open living in the wide-set valley. Their settlement grew, attracting Amish people from across the country. Now, 23 families pursue a devout Christian lifestyle in the shadow of the Missions.
“Being up in the mountains, seeing God’s creation and the awesomeness of it, really makes God real. The quietness, the peacefulness. Sometimes it’s stormin’ and blowin’, and it reminds us of the power God has,” Yoder explains. “In my everyday life, I feel a connection to God. I feel like I have God on my side. I’m living for God. But when I’m up here, it seems like there’s an extra-special closeness.”
When I came here last spring seeking a glimpse of this closeness, I hoped it would be more profound than the sermons of the blissed-out bros who proclaim skiing is their religion. I learned, for Montana’s Amish, their actual spiritual work happens down in
