From Whitefish, Achy Bones Co. Sends Visions of Another Realm

For the creative part of Angus Matheson’s brain, there’s just something about operating a skid steer that gets the ideas flowing. His visions, found on T-shirts, hoodies and stickers throughout the Flathead, often arrive during his day job building trail, and they tend to fall somewhere between the macabre and the irreverent.

The first version might be an idea jotted down, or a rudimentary sketch composed after clocking out for the day. In the surreal and sometimes grimy Achy Bones Co. universe, the final product could look something like a skeletal grim reaper wizard, tongue out, drooling over a snowglobe encircling Big Mountain. Or undead gnomes with blank eyes standing to attention. Or a flying saucer on a collision course with the backside of a sasquatch that’s bent over and gleefully giving it a full moon.

It might be a little hard to find the through-line in all these scenarios, but it’s there, and it goes directly through Matheson’s brain. To be the creative force behind such a vast world of possibilities could be stressful, but fortunately Matheson’s got help from a cast of characters like Cody Sumthin’ and Achy Bones himself, who just so happen to look a lot like Matheson in a cowboy hat, or wearing a gnome beard, or with some fake teeth popped in.

Cody Sumthin’, Achy Bones, Matheson, and an associate who goes by the alias Mahalo Malone, sometimes appear on the Achy Bones Instagram page promoting the brand, dispensing life advice (one video is called 5 Simple Business Steps for Highly Successful Entrepreneurs and begins with the advice to shrink your audience by posting absolutely outrageous, ridiculous things online), teasing podcasts that never drop, asking for support from voters (Cody Sumthin’ has been running for “govner mayer of the United States of Montana” on the policy platform of saying no to everything since at least September 2023), promoting Whitefish rental opportunities like a dirty shed subletting for $2,499, or trying their best to otherwise make it as influencers.

The origins of the Achy Bones Co. goes back to a little over a decade ago to when Matheson was living in Bozeman and a buddy with screen printing equipment helped him take a drawing of a yeti character and make it wearable. Matheson had always doodled, sketched and drawn, and at the time was trying to start a powder surfboard company. His buddy’s idea was to sell the shirts with the powder surfboards.

 “I started doing that, and then the shirts were more popular than the boards,” Matheson said. “I was like ‘Oh, cool. I’m on to something.’”

In 2016, Matheson moved to Whitefish and started working at Great Northern Powder Guides, before eventually going over to Stumptown Snowboards in 2018. As he grew more and more accustomed to seeing more touristy, run-of-the-mill clothing and gear designs, he became convinced there was a need for art that set itself apart somehow.

Achy Bones Co. started gaining momentum when Matheson first released his “Shred the Fish” illustration. The black and white drawing shows an airborne skeleton, snowboarding on a fish and soaring through the night sky, his bony right hand gripped to the fish’s front side in what’s known as a mute grab. A massive moon hangs above the tree line, and in the galactic distance, planets float, asteroids fly by, and stars shine.

When Matheson dropped the design on the Achy Bones Instagram page in November 2020, people in the replies did their best to beg him to take their money, with one commenter saying “I want whatever this goes on. Even a baby onesie and I have no kids.”

Other designs followed from there. In one, a snowboarding yeti is being beamed up to a flying saucer. Another illustration, completed for the Fifth Annual Beehive Basin Banked Slalom, shows a large ribcage honeycombed and dripping with bees hovering nearby and snowboarders riding the contours of its bones. Last fall, Matheson released a “Kali-Dega 93 Speedway” design in homage to the “Completely Unpatrolled All Out Speed!” opportunities one might find on the highly trafficked Flathead roadway. More recently, the country and Americana artist Sierra Ferrell dropped by one of Matheson’s pop-up sales and nabbed a shirt encouraging the marriage of psychedelics and politics, and also grabbed a second shirt that she said was for fellow Under The Big Sky 2024 performer Billy Strings.

“Everything’s sort of a bit of like a cathartic release,” Matheson said. “… I’ll take something serious and then try to turn it into something funny.”

It can feel like the working class side of Whitefish has long been on losing end of a tug-of-war with second homeowners, tourists and remote workers all pulling the other way. The edge to Matheson’s designs — one of the brand’s most ubiquitous logos features the phrase “Shred Butt” — can have a kind of gatekeeping effect that keeps the brand outside of the mainstream. Although even that outsider status seems tenuous at times as Achy Bones Co. finds new audiences. And Matheson emphasized that anyone can wear Achy Bones Co. designs, and that he sees buying Achy Bones Co. products as a way to show support for Whitefish’s workforce.

The name Achy Bones Co. is a nod to the soreness that a person can feel at their core after a long day of hard work or manual labor. And, as Matheson also shared, the fixation on bones and skeletons is also a kind of acknowledgement of where we’re all ultimately headed in life. But amid all the seriousness of life, and the sometimes maddening feeling of working all day in proximity to so much affluence, you’ve got to be able to laugh at things. Maybe that’s where sasquatch and the flying saucer come into the picture. That’s also probably why Matheson tries to use Achy Bones to promote having fun on the mountain no matter your skill level, including through calls for video submissions of people snowboarding, with the main criteria being that they show themselves having a good time.

“That’s kind of what it’s all evolved into, is that whole idea of feeling part of a community and expressing yourself,” Matheson said.

One of Matheson’s more popular designs are variations on the “Shred the Fish” concept, but with the phrase “Till I’m Six Feet Deep.” Speaking outside his workshop earlier this summer, Matheson explained the layers to that phrase which seems to have resonated so deeply with the people who wear his designs.

A couple years back, Matheson was on a job site and it started snowing. He and a buddy were tired to the point of feeling burnt out. They looked over at Big Mountain as the snowflakes fell. “Shred till you’re dead, dude!” Matheson’s friend yelled, before urging him to put the phrase on a shirt. Matheson knew the phrase wasn’t original, but there was something about it that stuck with him. Sometime later while he was driving the skid steer he kept repeating words in his head in different combinations to try and capture the same sentiment. Eventually he settled on the phrase “Till I’m Six Feet Deep.”

The design stayed in the vault until November of 2021, when Matheson’s good friend Clay LaChance died by suicide. LaChance had been among Matheson’s first friends when he arrived in Whitefish, and they’d worked together at Stumptown Snowboards. Releasing the “Till I’m Six Feet Deep” design, which in its first iteration showed a skeleton carving up the snow with a casket for a snowboard, was Matheson’s way of making a statement about the sadness and loss he was feeling. He wanted it to be a call for self preservation, and a way of encouraging people to take care of themselves and each other by making time to do the things they love.

“The six feet deep one was kind of my personal breakthrough,” Matheson said.

At that stage of Achy Bones Co., Matheson still wasn’t particularly fluent in the skills it took to digitize a design. But he felt motivated to learn. He knew he had to print the design. Since then, he’s done a new version of the “Till I’m Six Feet Deep” design every year, and he’s got his own small screen printing operation up and running out of his Whitefish residence.

The most recent version of “Till I’m Six Feet Deep,” dropped in January, with the big reveal coming on Instagram.

“Till I sleep with the fishes,” Matheson wrote. “A window into another realm.”

To check out Achy Bones Co. apparel, and for more information on pop-up shops and sales, go to https://achybonesco.com/.

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