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Ultimate Ski Bum

By Beacon Staff

By all known criteria, Craig Moore is an ultimate ski bum.

The 32-year-old Whitefish resident has skied at least once a month for the last four years; he averages about 70 days a season on Big Mountain and another 80 in the surrounding backcountry. When he’s not taking turns with his wife Amy and documenting it for own his enjoyment or as part of his career as a professional photographer, he’s partnering with fellow members of the Flathead Nordic Backcountry Ski Patrol. When his friends are enjoying the lake in the summer, Craig is usually out exploring the mountains for a hidden treasure trove of remaining snow.

He has an outdoor mentality and adventurousness that often embodies the town he lives in, a place that recognizes six new inches of snow overnight as a valid reason to be late for work and is filled with like-minded winter sports fiends.

And yet Craig, sitting inside the Great Northern Brewing Company on a recent day, sporting long curly hair and a beard and rattling off about a lifetime on skis, has a hard time explaining why.

Why does he ski so much? Why risk life and limb for a sport even he simplifies as “sliding down a mountain?” Why does he love being out there?

With that sense of humor his friends often cite and a knack for photographic description, Craig eventually arrives at these answers in a roundabout way.

The day after graduating from high school in North Carolina, Craig was sleeping inside the post office in Bozeman.

The 18-year-old left home with only a backpack filled with the basics and ventured out West. He knew only one person in Bozeman, a student who had given him a tour of the Montana State University campus months earlier. He spent his first days walking around town alone, cash strapped and wide-eyed. As he remembers it, the doors of the post office were open, so he found a table in the back corner and slept underneath those first two nights.

He chose Montana, it would seem, because he was recruited to play football. Bigger, more prestigious colleges closer to home had recruited him too, but Montana naturally “just fit.”

“After visiting and seeing those two ski resorts, I thought, ‘Man, this is sweet,’” he said. “Montana just had this majestic thing to me.”

Craig had skied before arriving in Bozeman. When he was 16, his parents were going through a divorce and the mountains were an escape and provided solace.

Pretty soon he was getting done with football games on Friday nights and driving to the local ski area. He said he would sleep in his Jetta so he could hit it hard early the next morning.

That same mentality followed him to Montana. As a yearly season-pass holder at Bridger he was skiing more than 60 days a winter. By his sophomore year, he had called it quits with football and was fully embedded in the lifestyle of a budding ski bum.

Along with his love of being outdoors, Craig loves taking pictures. After college he worked for several newspapers, including contributing to the Beacon. By 2007 he had established himself in the Flathead Valley and had found a way to successfully blend a freelance career and a love of being outside.

That’s when the streak began.

In November 2007, Craig wanted to see how many months in a row he could ski at least once every 30 days within roughly 100 miles of Whitefish.

Craig Moore, left, and Dan Koestler, center, gear up to ski Bird Woman Basin during a summer ski outing in Glacier National Park. – Contributed photo by Amy Moore/GlacierWorld.com

“I was just curious, ‘Is this something I could do?’” he said. “I figured it would be a good personal project.”

With camera in hand, along with the proper avalanche safety gear, Craig began his quest.

This month marks 48 in a row. In that time, Craig has skied throughout Glacier National Park, down the Swan range and in the Whitefish range. The winter months have been easy, obviously, with days at Whitefish Mountain Resort, and vast acres of wilderness covered in backcountry powder. But when winter tails off and spring and summer arrive, the search becomes harder.

Even today he still picks the brains of friends and local outdoor enthusiasts who can lend a tip here or there. That’s how he met Dan’l Moore, a Kila resident who himself continues to ride an amazing stretch of skiing.

Fifty-four-year-old Dan’l, no relation to Craig, said he has skied at least once a month for 14 straight years. Dan’l has traveled around the country and even down to Australia and New Zealand to ski.

“I just like being out in the mountains and it’s a good excuse to go,” Dan’l, who moved to Montana in 1985, said.

Both Dan’l and Craig are members of the Flathead Nordic Backcountry Ski Patrol. They both promote avalanche awareness and are involved in search and rescue efforts along with avalanche incidents throughout the year.

“Avalanches are definitely a reality,” Craig said. “You’re never bigger than the mountain.”

Craig said he has been partially buried in an avalanche before and several times has “definitely had things go bad real fast.” He has lost friends in avalanches. Just talking about some of the possibilities that can arise on the mountain, Craig said he gets goosebumps.

But still, he can’t stay away.

Recently a friend of Craig’s recommended he enter an international contest aimed at crowning “the ultimate ski bum.” The contest, being held by The Powder Highway based in British Columbia, offers a grand prize ski package valued at $30,000. Voting ended last weekend and now the judging begins. If Craig makes the final cut this week, he will have to send a short video explaining why he is the ultimate ski bum.

But how would he really answer that in a short amount of time? He could point to the streak, which he plans to keep alive for as long as he can. He could tell about all those nights sleeping in his Jetta as a 16-year-old, or the decision to move to the mountains of Montana, a place he had never been before but could not shake from his mind. He could tell them what he feels when he’s outdoors — “I feel more alive in the mountains. Nothing is hidden. You’re just able to be in the moment, I guess is the best way of saying it.”

There’s a whole lifelong story that Craig could tell, and it would prove, through and through, he’s ultimately a ski bum.