Since ‘73: Hannah Johansen 

An aide to Chet Huntley, mother of two, backcountry adventurer and local business owner, Johansen reflects on 50 years in the place she could never leave.

By Mario Carr EBS CONTRIBUTOR 

When Hannah Johansen and her family came to Big Sky in 1973 they were living in a teepee and drinking water from the Gallatin River. 

In a 1987 letter to her family, Johansen wrote, “I just returned from a sweat down at the river. I let the fire build up to the point of near intolerability, and then I whisked myself down into the river before my feet got too cold in the snow… We all have ceremonies of sorts. I guess the Gallatin River is mine. When [our family] used to live down there so many years ago, I would often sit by the Gallatin River, and marvel at the fact that no matter what happened in our lives, the river kept on flowing, the seasons kept on coming. Somehow this sense of continuity has always given me comfort.”  

Johansen’s children were two and four years old when the family moved here, and from the moment she saw Lone Mountain, she never let the challenges of early Big Sky living take her away from this place that she loved. After two years in the teepee, her family moved to a one-room cabin on the same property. She and her husband continued to use the teepee as their bedroom in order to have their own space as their children grew. Johansen described these early days in Big Sky in a “Local Look Back” piece she wrote five years ago. 

She’s moved from place to place as often as needed, but Johansen has always done everything she could to keep her roots planted in Big Sky. One of the moves along the way included renting a room from a woman who had a hot tub in the entryway of her home; a woman who also believed that hot tubs were meant to be used in the nude.  

Johansen opened Alpenglow Spa next door to the Sky Spirits liquor store in 1974, and soon after, she opened a location at the ski resort. For nearly two decades, she had these locations before her business became Alpenglow Traveling Spa. Then for more than two decades, she and her fellow massage therapists traveled to people’s homes, and even out into the backcountry to provide massages for groups camping in the wilderness. Less than two years ago, Johansen handed the business off to one of her therapists.  

Throughout the last 40 years, Johansen has also taught yoga. She continues to teach; she’s been leading 6:30 a.m. classes at Lone Mountain Ranch this fall. Now 76, Johansen is currently in search of another part-time job to help with the cost of living in Big Sky. 

Johansen spent meaningful time with Chet Huntley in the final year of his life. He sought her out to be his secretary when he heard that she was the sign girl working construction on the highway that knew shorthand. Huntley and Johansen shared an attitude toward Big Sky and the area’s healing power.  

Early residents like Johansen are first-hand witnesses to Chet Huntley’s vision for Big Sky and she still gets teary-eyed today when talking about that dream. 

About a decade after meeting Chet Huntley, Johansen wrote a “new year” letter to her family at the beginning of 1985. She had this to say about her life in Big Sky:  

“I feel that living/running businesses in a ski resort puts us in a world a bit unique from most of your worlds out there. It’s a life that I think we all love, but it does take its toll at times. Most especially at Christmas time. Once November rolls around, the activity of preparing for the ‘winter season’ begins to take precedence, and by mid-December the snowball has already begun its careening course down the mountain side, its pace ever quickening, its size ever enlarging, until BANG, it comes to a jolting stop around the 2nd of January. I think the sudden CEASE of activity is as difficult an adjustment as the dizzying activity that precedes it.” 

‘You can’t stop change, nothing stays the same.’ 

Johansen’s two children went through Ophir Middle School, and took the bus to Bozeman for high school. She said that her son had at one point calculated the many thousands of miles that he had ridden that bus throughout his high school days. Johansen is very grateful to have raised her children in Big Sky, and she cherishes the memories of the unique experiences they had growing up, including tracking their mother for miles by her tracks in the snow while she was guiding a visitor through town, cross-country skiing under the full moon with pancakes for dinner at midnight and skipping school the next day, witnessing the solar eclipse of 1979 and even bouncing on a dead, bloated elk like a trampoline. 

Johansen looks back at the beginning days of Big Sky with fondness. One of her favorite memories of the young community was the community potluck dinners at Lone Mountain Ranch. She laughs, remembering visits with friends to Buck’s T-4 to cash their checks when there was no bank in the town. Johansen explained that at that time, Buck’s T-4 was more than a bar and a bank, it was also the town’s “living room.” They earned their paycheck, and proceeded to collect their cash and spend it at the same bar, she said. 

Johansen appreciates today’s community events, like Music in the Mountains and the Big Sky Farmers Market, that are free to the public and help promote a culture of connection. However, she is concerned by how expensive she believes local activities and events have become, and the rising overall cost of living. Johansen finds herself in the middle of a division she sees forming in the community. 

“There’s still this separation between the workers and the wealthy… I’m retired and we’re building for our workforce but I’m not really a [member of the] workforce, I am somebody who has had my own businesses,” Johansen explained. 

Johansen has concerns for the environment and the community that inhabits it, and these concerns are connected to how she believes we ought to be measuring our wealth. While there’s nothing wrong with having wealth, she said, she’s troubled by how it is being expressed in Big Sky. Johansen compared the construction of new mansions in the area to kindergarteners competing with each other in a sandbox on the playground; however, these mansions are not just sand castles, they are large projects that consume large amounts of energy and water, she explained. She feels blessed to be a part of this community in this beautiful place, but desires that rather than simply feeling blessed by the natural beauty, individuals would seek to be a blessing to the people and nature around them. 

“To me, wealth is: are you friendly? Are you honest? Do you pay your dues?” she explained. 

When asked about what some people may call the “good old days” of Big Sky, Johansen was sure to point out, “These are good days too… and you can’t stop change, nothing stays the same.” 

When Johansen owned a spa at the ski resort, she and her massage therapists could ski for free. With walkie talkies they would ski as long as they could before their next appointment. She skied that way for 18 years while she was still able to lease a space at the resort. 

“So I skied a long time and then I had a major accident skiing like all of us who have had knee problems,” Johansen recalled. “I belong to the group that hurts their knees when they’re skiing… ACL! It’s part of the business.” 

Over the years, Johansen continued to get out on the snow, going out into Yellowstone National Park to backcountry ski, always making sure to have three people in the days before cell phones and the internet. 

“If somebody got hurt, somebody could stay with them, and somebody else can get help,” she explained. 

Johansen’s favorite part about the backcountry was breaking trail—as a Big Sky community member, the tracks she was setting in her life would be set for the next generation. She and her kids would climb Lone Mountain each summer, and year after year, she even noticed how the shale of the mountain was getting more and more broken up along the trail. It was one of the smaller but more thought-provoking changes among the countless more that have occurred in the last half century. 

Commitment to a place 

From teepee life, to cabin life, to condo life, Johansen found herself at Allgood’s Bar in the early 1990s, reading about a house that she was convinced she would buy. Johansen had made up her mind—she was dedicated to living in Big Sky. 

“So I made an appointment to see it and when I walked in, I knew it was my house,” she said.  

Around the year 2000, Johansen slipped on a mound of ice created by heated sidewalks outside the studio where she was teaching yoga. She suffered a traumatic head and neck injury that still sends shocking pains down the left side of her body.  

This difficult time didn’t stop Johansen from seeing beauty. One of her yoga students recommended a specialist at the University of Washington hospital. After discovering the benefits of Ayurvedic medicine for her injury, she began regularly traveling to India. There she would buy handmade artisan work to bring back home and sell at the farmers market in Big Sky. 

After talking about how Big Sky has changed and how many people have come and gone, Johansen explained why she feels she’s never been able to leave. 

“Why don’t I move away? It’d be really easy to move away,” she said. “But there’s something—I don’t know what it is. I think it goes back to before I even knew about Big Sky.”  

She remembers declaring that she’d move to Big Sky one day, and tried her best to explain why: Johansen described her love for Mother Nature, and how this inexplicably powerful source of attraction was the force that brought her to Big Sky, and since kept her here. The vision of Big Sky living that she shared with Chet Huntley has become reality through the past 50 years of her life, and she’s not planning on leaving any time soon. 

This story is a part of an ongoing series. Read the rest of them here.

Correction: This story was edited from its original version to include Johansen’s correct age. The original version mistakenly stated her age as 84 years old.