Part 1 of this story concluded questioning who would be involved in data center projects given the public health risks, reckless energy consumption, potential water depletion, and widespread public hostility. Let’s start with the Broadview project developer, Quantica Infrastructure.

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A Mysterious Corporation Backed by Funders With A History of Legal Scandals and Environmental Violations

The corporation is barely one-year old. Quantica Infrastructure has only one previous project under its belt, the sale of a data center development in Texas last month. The only information about the shadowy project is a brief press release with minimal details. The buyer was undisclosed. Not even the site location was mentioned beyond “a data center campus in Texas.”

What we do know about Quantica is that they are backed financially by EnCap Investments, LP, a private equity firm. The Houston-based company has been the target of numerous lawsuits, investigations, and legal settlements in recent years. In 2018, the firm settled with the SEC for $500,000 over allegations of a “pay to play” scheme. EnCap employees and associates made large campaign donations to elected officials in Texas, Wisconsin, and Indiana who had influence over contracts and business solicited by EnCap.

In 2022, EnCap ran afoul of anti-trust law when the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint alleging that EnCap’s $1.44 billion acquisition of an energy company would have eliminated competition in the crude oil market and created conditions ripe for price-fixing. EnCap was eventually forced to sell part of the acquired company to salvage the deal.

EnCap has also been sued numerous times over insider dealing where it allegedly purchased controlling stakes of publicly traded companies, stocked their boards with EnCap loyalists, and steered business toward deals that enrich EnCap at the expense of shareholders. The corporation settled one lawsuit along these lines for $3.5 million in 2021.

While its dubious financial dealings are unsettling, EnCap’s history of funding projects with reckless environmental violations are most concerning given the scale of its plans for Montana.

In 2023, an EnCap backed project in New Mexico led the state to levy a $40.3 million fine against Amerdev, an oil and gas company with repeated, blatant violations of air pollution laws. According to a press release from the New Mexico Environmental Department (NMED), EnCap funded projects were responsible for over 3.2 billion cubic feet of leaked methane gas pollution. “These pollutants are known to cause serious health issues, including respiratory issues, impaired cognition, convulsions, and even death,” an official with NMED noted when the violations were announced. The amount of pollution leaked was enough to heat 16,000 homes for one year. In a rare move, New Mexico state officials sent a letter directly to EnCap management questioning whether their funding and business strategy led to the Amerdev project’s repeated compliance violations. Amerdev eventually settled to pay $24 million of the proposed $40 million fine.

In 2022, EnCap backed oil and gas company Enduring Resources, was part of an EPA crackdown on widespread, dangerous air pollution in the San Juan Basin. The EnCap funded company was one of three targeted for emitting hundreds of thousands of pounds of methane pollution as well as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) “which can result in health problems such as asthma, lung infections, bronchitis, and cancer,” according to EPA’s settlement notice.

So, we have a newly formed company, Quantica Infrastructure, that has almost no public record and a penchant for secrecy. That company is backed by a Texas-based private equity firm, EnCap Investments, that is associated with legal issues and scandals that include self-dealing, pay-to-play schemes, anti-trust maneuvers, and repeated environmental violations that pose such significant public health risks that state and federal agencies have levied tens of millions of dollars in fines. These are the corporations angling to set up shop just north of Billings on a 5,000 acre campus.

While local residents are deeply skeptical of these obscure corporations and their designs on Montana, county politicians have clearly sided with the out-of-state money men over their own constituents.

Part 1 of this story outlined how Yellowstone County Commissioners employed a lawsuit, proposed rule changes, and issued erroneous signature-gathering deadlines to thwart a ballot initiative requiring voter approval for data center development. Since then, commissioners have continued to express open disdain in public meetings for those who question their actions.

Friendly to Big Tech, Hostile to Constituents

For months, Yellowstone County residents have attended county commission meetings expressing worry over rumors about possible data center projects underway. Early on, responses from commissioners ranged from obvious disinterest to outright defenses of data center technology, citing “closed loop” water systems as having a minimal environmental footprint (Experts report that while closed loop systems use less water, they create an even larger energy drag for data centers, negating the claimed environmental benefits; they also create toxic wastewater problems as Cheyenne, WY recently found out.)

As rumors became substantiated with drips of information about the Broadview data center, public outcry grew louder. Commissioners have responded to calls for transparency with caginess, evasion, or outright contempt.

Commission Chairman Mark Morse has become well known for glaring at constituents with an open scowl or rolled eyes during public testimony, often barking “time’s up” when public commenters are mid-sentence, having reached the three minute speaking allotment commissioners impose. Commissioner Chris White, the newest member of the body, rarely speaks during public meetings and often looks on the verge of napping, even during an election year when his seat is ostensibly up for grabs. Commissioner Mike Waters, the only member who bothers to put a light varnish of political polish on the body’s actions, occasionally delivers equivocating statements in a calm register after public comment sessions, but carefully evades direct answers to the difficult questions at hand.

These are politicians that data center developers love. They are men at the end of their careers, enjoying retirement jobs on the public dole for salaries near or above six-figures. As political polarization hardens in a county that votes reliably Republican, these elected officials embody a classic good ole boys club, wholly insulated from voters outside of party primary contests. They are indifferent to public opinion and lack any discernible vision for the county beyond designs for a $195 million county jail expansion, which they will take to voters this November in the form of a levy and bond approval.

Public anger over the data center, on the heels of prior constituent upset over decisions about local museum funding cuts and a controversial library board seat appointment, have likely doomed the jail bond. Commissioners’ failure to build community goodwill in the same year they’re asking residents to voluntarily raise their own taxes by $195 million during tough economic times illustrates obvious political incompetence. For a data center developer seeking to push a project onto a community that doesn’t want it, however, that political incompetence is an asset.

Elected officials hungry for revenue and unmoved by voter interests could hardly be more attractive to billionaires if designed by their own AI prompts. It’s easy for politicians to ignore voter concerns about public health, pollution, environmental damage, and rising energy bills when general elections don’t matter and big tech money men are promising new tax revenue. Short term cash for the county trumps long term stewardship for men of a certain age and disposition, it seems. Last week, commissioners’ indifference to public opinion turned to open hostility.

“You people”

During public comment at a weekly Tuesday commission meeting, exchanges between constituents and commissioners became tense, yet again. When one commenter chastised Chairman Morse for being rude, he replied, “Well, you people are rude to us.” That phrase - “you people” - is used by Chairman Morse frequently during public testimony. It makes plain what many residents feel, that commissioners do not see them as valid constituents and do not see their concerns as worth considering. “You people” are a separate class of citizens, those outside the good ole boys club. Only the insiders matter.

Dozens of residents lined up and spoke for almost an hour and a half last week, providing near-unanimous testimony against data centers. Many were asking for transparency, details, and explanations. Commenters wanted answers about commissioners’ lawsuit against the data center ballot initiative, about commissioners’ efforts to thwart signature-gathering for the initiative on county property, and, especially, about the inaccurate deadline commissioners provided for the ballot initiative petitioning - an error that sabotaged the entire effort.

At the conclusion of public comment, the only response commissioners offered was “meeting adjourned.” No answers were given. No discussion or explanation was provided. Commissioners simply walked away in silence. The message was clear. “You people” don’t deserve an answer.

While commissioners refuse to provide answers to constituents face-to-face, they appear to have some concerns over the optics of their log-rolling for Quantica. Commissioner Morse submitted an op-ed to the Billings Gazette defending the commission’s lawsuit against the moratorium ballot initiative. The op-ed claims an abiding responsibility to the law, arguing that commissioners had to ensure the data center ballot initiative effort was legal. However, commissioners seem to have a much more lenient attitude about following the letter of the law when big corporations are involved.

In 2022, when NorthWestern Energy began construction for its methane-fired gas plant in Laurel, it failed to secure proper zoning permits. Opponents of the plant, concerned about toxic air pollution, quality of life issues, and impacts to the Yellowstone River where the plant is sited, argued that the industrial plant was built on land zoned for agricultural use. As the controversy continued, Yellowstone County Commissioners not only ignored the zoning error, but adopted a new growth policy and land use maps in an effort to clean up the corporation’s mess. Let’s remember that NorthWestern Energy, the investor-owned monopoly utility, that is very cozy with the Yellowstone County Commission, stands to gain enormous financial benefits from the Broadview project.

Yes, these are men a data center developer can work with.

A Story Barely Begun

It’s painful to realize that your community is seen as easy prey by tech billionaires. That insult is compounded when the politicians who are supposed to represent the people are too incompetent, compromised, or weak to stand up for their communities.

“These people do think we are stupid,” is how Tim Wipf, president of the Mountain View Hutterite community farm near Broadview, described data center developers in The New York Times. And even though county politicians are doing their best to confirm developers’ dim views of rural Montanans, that same article profiles grassroots activist Kassi Solberg and others who are fighting tenaciously to prove them wrong. They aren’t alone.

Erin Brockovich has compiled a map with over 9,000 communities across the U.S. who are tracking data center development and organizing to stop them. Here in Montana, informational events about data centers have packed rooms beyond capacity in multiple corners of the state.

Even if politicians are happy to bend over for big tech, many Montanans are poised to fight for a reasonable pause on building the resource depleting plants that power a rogue technology spinning out of control.

This is just the opening chapter of a story unfolding in rural communities across the West. While tech billionaires, Wall Street speculators, and enabling politicians try to convince the public that AI and data centers will inevitably alter and dominate our future, everyday people in communities across the country are determined to be the authors of their own stories.

Americans don’t agree on much these days, but a recent Gallup poll shows 71% oppose a data center in their area. That poll was released back in May, and the hostility only seems to be growing. The opposition is shared among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, a rare instance of political harmony in the form of universal disdain. And data centers give us much to disdain. They are massive, windowless, lifeless warehouses that sprawl, buzz, hum, and rattle across landscapes. The incessant noise and vibrations have led to nationwide lawsuits from those who live nearby. Based on descriptions, the warehouses sound like multi-acre torture chambers for helicopters that whirr, moan, and bang against walls day and night, hoping to escape their captors.

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Data centers demand ungodly amounts of energy and water to power a technology, artificial intelligence, that threatens to steal most of our jobs. According to the very creators of AI, the technology has a 10% to 20% chance of completely destroying humanity within 30 years. Some offer more conservative estimates of calamity. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology surveyed hundreds of AI experts worldwide, and that research predicts “only” a 10% chance of catastrophic harm, including scenarios of 100 million human deaths by 2030. Tech billionaires respond with all the restraint of a ketamine addict on a Vegas bender. “Let’s roll the dice!”

As public backlash grows against data centers and the ominous threats they portend, these billionaires are surveying the country looking for vulnerable communities they can manipulate, pressure, or bribe. It’s not wholly dissimilar from predatory cult leaders or sex traffickers who search for victims with troubled lives, low self-esteem, and limited power. In the case of tech corporations, they seek communities with funding challenges, limited legal resources, and feeble enforcement of environmental protections.

When billionaires target your community for a data center, consider yourself insulted.

Compliant Politicians

Most importantly, data center investors search for communities with weak, incompetent, or easily manipulated political leaders willing to ignore public opposition. It’s telling that they have chosen Yellowstone County for a proposed site in Broadview just north of Billings. Thus far, our elected officials have proven to be the hapless politicians tech billionaires love.

Since the Broadview data center has been proposed, Yellowstone County Commissioners have gone out of their way to grease the skids for the massive, 5,000 acre industrial project. Commissioners filed a lawsuit questioning the legality of a ballot initiative organized by local constituents that would require voter approval for data center development. Then commissioners tried to create new county rules to sabotage signature gathering for the initiative on county property. Lastly, while waiting for their lawsuit about the ballot initiative to play out, commissioners provided an inaccurate deadline for signature gathering, telling organizers they had a full month more than legal statute allows for the process. As a result, the petitioners were caught flat-footed and had to abandon their incomplete efforts midstream.

Quantica Infrastructure, the shadowy out-of-state corporation with designs on Montana’s resources, could hardly ask for a more compliant group of politicians. In public meetings, commissioners have ignored or outright dismissed concerns raised by the public over all of the financial, environmental, and quality of life costs that data centers have imposed on communities across the nation.

Staggering Energy Costs

Communities dealing with data centers often experience massive spikes in residential energy prices as electricity consumers “share” the cost for the enormous energy load required to power the facilities. Bloomberg News found residential energy bills rising by 80% in Virginia’s notorious “data center alley.” The same Bloomberg reporting showed a staggering 267% increase in energy costs across a five year period in areas concentrated with data centers during peak demand seasons.

The proposed data center just north of Billings would be roughly the size of 3,800 football fields requiring 1.1 gigawatts of continuous power. That figure alone is more than NorthWestern Energy, Montana’s largest monopoly energy utility, provides annually to its entire customer base. However, that appears to be the floor of the energy demand Quantica is seeking.

In May, Quantica requested more than seven gigawatts of energy capacity (that’s seven BILLION watts of electricity) from NorthWestern Energy. That means this single corporation is requesting 10 times the amount of energy that Montana’s largest electric utility currently provides to the entire state. Where would that energy come from?

Most likely, the energy would come in the form of multiple methane gas plants like the controversial $320 million methane-fired plant NorthWestern built on the banks of the Yellowstone River in Laurel, a project mired in lawsuits and formal complaints ranging from illegal zoning to unlawful pollution levels to overcharging customers for reckless construction costs.

Pollution, Cancer, and Health Impacts

NorthWestern’s Laurel plant provides 175 megawatts of energy. To meet Quantica’s 1.1 gigawatt demand for the Broadview station, NorthWestern would need to build at least seven more plants of a similar size at a cost of over $2 billion. Quantica’s larger, mysterious seven gigawatt capacity request would require 42 similar-sized gas plants at a presumed cost of more than $13 billion dollars. In either scenario, what would all of that money buy? Toxic pollution on an epidemic scale.

The methane-fired plant in Laurel is designated a Major Source of Hazardous Air Pollutants by the federal government due to large levels of toxins emitted that cause cancer and other serious health problems. According to NorthWestern’s air quality permit application, the facility emits almost 50 tons of formaldehyde pollution alone every year, a toxin associated with leukemia and other forms of cancer. It also emits hundreds of tons of other toxic pollutants annually, including particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds which, in aggregate, cause cancer and other serious diseases of the lungs, kidneys, liver, and nervous systems. Now imagine dozens of these facilities across Montana.

Given the polluting energy typically used to power data centers, it’s no surprise that researchers at Harvard’s School of Public Health found premature deaths, increased hospitalizations, and respiratory illnesses resulting from the increased air pollution associated with data centers.

The problems don’t stop with higher energy bills and dangerous public health risks. The fossil fuel energy sources used for data centers also add to the enormous water demand.

An Insatiable Water Hog in Drought Lands

Hyperscale data centers like the Broadview proposal typically require between one million and five million gallons of water per day to cool hundreds of thousands of servers housed in enormous industrial warehouses. These warehouses often bake in the sun within drought-prone climates like Broadview’s.

According to the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, Montana is in its sixth consecutive year of widespread drought conditions. 60-85% of the state is abnormally dry or within moderate to severe drought conditions. We need every drop of water we can spare simply to keep our municipal water systems and agricultural operations running, so where will we find an extra 300 million to one-billion gallons each year for the Broadview project? Even that staggering figure is only a fraction of the water required. It gets much worse.

Recent Wall Street Journal reporting shows that water demands to power Google’s data centers increase three fold when factoring in the huge amount of water required by the power plants that provide them electricity. The same reporting shows that Meta’s 19 billion gallons of annual indirect water use (the water required by power plants for its data centers) was more than 20 times greater than the water use for the data centers themselves.

When factoring in both direct and indirect water use, we could be contemplating billions of gallons of annual water use to cool and power the Broadview center alone. Again, where is this water going to come from? Quantica doesn’t seem to know. According to the Montana Free Press, they have yet to secure any water rights for the project.

Given all of the public health risks, staggering energy consumption, potentially disastrous water depletion, and public hostility to data centers, what types of people and companies are willing to withstand the backlash? In the case of the Broadview project, it’s a mix of corporations with mysterious origins and controversial histories.

Part Two of this article will dive into those details while also taking a closer look at the politicians who appear flattered that developers would consider their community for this conroversial experiment.

Like many Americans, my feelings around patriotism are complicated, nuanced, and sometimes conflicted. The country’s 250th birthday has inspired countless thought pieces, podcasts, news articles, and other reflections about what America means, what America is, and what we’re to think of ourselves as Americans in this moment. Of course, politicians of all stripes have often co-opted the anniversary of the country’s founding for their own purposes.

When at their best, leaders use the Fourth of July to unify us around shared values, tying important historical anecdotes about our founding to the challenges of the day. More often, politicians offer bland platitudes sprinkled with quotes from the Declaration of Independence that yawn from a teleprompter screen and echo mechanically through crowds of parade attendees wearing flag-adorned paraphernalia manufactured in China. These celebrations often conjure jingoistic nationalism infused with religious overtones of divine intervention and manifest destiny, leaving me thirsty for public expressions that dig deeper into the American character. What is this extraordinary, convoluted phenomenon that led to the unlikely unification of a massive landscape under a fractious coalition of immigrants from across the globe, transforming a region taken from Native Americans who resided here in relative isolation for millennia? The United States of America, for all of its goodness and glory, faults and foibles, triumphs and tragedies, is an undeniable miracle of history.

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Maintaining this union of wildly disparate interests for a quarter of a millennia is no small feat. Our political and cultural differences forever push and pull like tectonic plates sliding across pressurized rock and lava, ready to explode in volcanic violence should the seams widen just enough. A conventional politician would harness this opportunity to appeal to our better angels - or at least a larger swath of voters - calming tensions, reminding us of the fragility of our democratic experiment and the many challenges we have overcome to heal past wounds. Instead, our current president thrusts a crowbar into these tectonic seams, prying our fractures wider and wider, tempting the geysers of molten magma ready to incinerate our remaining threads of civic cohesion.

Ask any adolescent boy… It feels good to destroy. The sense of power is intoxicating. Our president lives in this space, lacking the maturity and impulse control to use power responsibly. He craves drama and enjoys spectacles of violence. Like so many of his actions, the cage fight he organized on the White House lawn, co-mingling his 80th birthday with the nation’s 250th, projects his insecurities of diminished masculinity so audaciously and absurdly that satire melts into reality as our national psyche struggles through a hallucinatory dystopia.

Here, in America’s semi-quincentennial, all is fiery, fluid, and out of control. ICE agents kill American protesters on our city streets with impunity. Threats to invade and overtake Greenland (Greenland?!) persist. A chaotic war with Iran sends prices for food and gasoline soaring while strategies and rationales for the conflict bob, weave, and wander aimlessly given the fecklessness of a bored, impetuous, and wildly undisciplined White House. The machinery of the federal government - the IRS, Department of Justice, and even the military - are nakedly used and abused as part of the president’s personal retribution campaign against perceived enemies and political opponents. And as more and more Americans find it difficult to survive economically, the president enriches himself and his family with billions of dollars in corrupt crypto deals, insider stock trades, and overt bribes and business deals with foreign nations. 250 years in, the state of our union is boiling.

As the nation feels the pressure building beneath our ruptured democratic foundation, I chose to spend the 4th of July in Yellowstone National Park, whose iconic landscape and transcendent beauty was formed by multiple volcanic eruptions beginning over two million years ago. An active magma chamber within the Yellowstone Caldera famously heats water and minerals that steam, vent, ooze, and explode onto the surface of a landscape that looks otherworldly at times. It’s ironic and, perhaps instructive, that nature’s past violence echoes across a space that now serves as a protected refuge for flora and fauna threatened with extinction from reckless human behavior. Bison roam across much of the two-million acres, calmly grazing in expansive valleys or tight pockets of grasslands between geysers, hot springs, and steaming mud pots. Wolves and bears stalk, lumber, and lope through backcountry fields and forests, freed from the threat of human hunting within park boundaries. Yellowstone is a physical reminder that the natural order can return after chaos, even as the landscape is forever changed.

I’m taking this lesson into the latter half of the nation’s anniversary year. I want to free my imagination to dream how we might rebuild our ravaged political and civic landscape into something that serves a new mission fit for 21st century challenges while never forgetting the lessons of our past - including those we’re learning today. We cannot simply hope to restore the system that preceded the vicious ruptures of Trump’s America. We are forever changed.

The geysers of anger, discontent, and frustration will continue to explode through the cracks of a political system that wholly abandoned the working class while lavishing wealth never imagined in human history on a smaller and smaller fraction of billionaires and, now, trillionaires. Their insatiable greed is only matched by the subservience of cowardly politicians happy to lick the leftovers from their masters’ caviar trays. The question is not how we rehabilitate the political landscape to what it was before the volcano, but how we transform a steaming caldera into a society where restored wisdom, decency, and compassion lead us to new ideas where cooperation can flourish while the smoldering ashes dissipate.

Yellowstone serves not only as a metaphor for transcendence, but also as a physical manifestation of how innovative, imaginative policies are possible in America. It was the first national park created in this country and the first created in the world. The park inspired a global movement of public land protections, ushering in a vast new concept of environmental stewardship and shared access to some of the most beautiful spaces on earth, regardless of one’s wealth or social stature.

Like our other national parks and public lands, Yellowstone brings together people from all walks of life enjoying the awe and splendor of nature, reminding us of our primal roots and interconnectedness with the larger world. This is a place where a rusted Ford pickup truck and a sleek Mercedes SUV quickly pull to the side of the road alongside one another with passengers spilling out to compare notes about where to catch a fleeting glimpse of the grizzly bear that just crossed the road before them.

America was once a place with the courage and imagination to dream of shared prosperity and unifying spaces like Yellowstone. More importantly, we summoned the will to make them a reality. We used to be a country that inspired the world, created allies, and exported ideas that transformed the globe for the better. We were never perfect, and our actions never lived up to our ideals of justice, fairness, and equality. But, on balance, we modeled a stable society working to improve itself and allow more people to share both power and prosperity.

Today, both our nation’s power and prosperity are being squeezed from a once expanding reservoir shared by the many into a smaller and smaller underground chamber inhabited by a callous few. As the pressure mounts, we see explosions all around. If we hope to contain them, we cannot ignore the pressures that created them.

As the elections of 2026 and 2028 approach, I’m looking for candidates, organizers, community leaders, and fellow Americans with imagination. I am challenging myself to think bigger, act bolder, and demand more from our politics. We cannot confront crisis with incrementalism. We cannot pretend that Trumpism is the cause of America’s ills, failing to recognize it as the response to decades of calcifying corruption in our political and economic systems.

We need radical change that stems from reasonable expectations. We should expect in a country with our wealth and resources that all workers earn a living wage, that corporations and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes to the nation that allows them to generate ungodly amounts of wealth, and that we join the rest of the industrialized world in adopting a universal healthcare system where families aren’t bankrupted by chance illness or medical emergency. While these demands may seem simple, the means of accomplishing them will require audacious ideas.

It’s all up for grabs. Abolishing the electoral college. Radically altering the tax code. Packing, impeaching, or otherwise reforming a Supreme Court that sees corporations as people and money as speech. Requiring worker representatives on corporate boards of publicly traded companies. Mandatory minimum 10-year prison sentences for executives that break anti-trust laws and the courage to convict.

While some of these ideas seem impossible given the graft, gridlock, and incompetence of Washington, D.C., remember how laughable it seemed that Donald Trump could win the presidency when he announced his candidacy in 2015. His shameless audacity was and remains his superpower.

Donald Trump’s two electoral victories proved that America yearns for radical change. People will follow leaders to places we cannot currently imagine if they are inspired by ideas that address the greatest challenge of our time - growing wealth inequality where billionaires and their corporations control every aspect of our lives, including the most intimate corners of our minds through algorithms that manipulate our brain chemistry while destroying our humanity. Imagine what could happen if people of character summoned the same audacity and the same ruthless contempt for corporate corruption that Donald Trump directs towards his scapegoats - the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

Despite the moral complications of its founding, America was created by people who dared to create a nation with radical ideals and revolutionary aspirations. Their audacity inspired others to follow, and, together, they changed the course of history. It can happen again.

Amidst the aftershocks and embers of Trump’s divisive destruction, I’ll be thinking of the Yellowstone Caldera throughout this 250th anniversary year. We can create something radically beautiful, unifying, and resonant with our deepest humanity even in the aftermath of volcanic chaos.

Joey stands behind the checkout and coffee counter he built for Shift Bicycle Company, providing a place for folks to pull up a stool and hang out when they stop by.

PlayStation Inspiration

Joey Isbell has devoted much of his life to mountain biking. His introduction to the sport was a little unconventional, though. As a kid growing up in Cody, Wyoming, he was obsessed with dirt bikes. Motorcycles were a hard no for his parents, so he took to other creative sports. He was big into skateboarding, but without a skate park in town or even a paved driveway at home, his unfinished basement became the local skate hang. He and his dad built ramps without any plans, and their improvised designs proved more than adequate, including a rail made from scrap trailer parts. He was also into BMX which was easier to accommodate with easy access to open land where he could build jumps. But it was a PlayStation game rented on a whim that introduced Joey to mountain bikes around age 13. The game itself didn’t capture Joey’s imagination so much; it was the interstitial video clips of pro downhill riders that opened a new world.

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“I thought BMX was the only form of cycling that existed, and then I saw that [the mountain bike videos], and I fell in love with it,” he said . “I just became obsessed with mountain bikes. And then as I got a little older, I think 18 and then into my early 20s, I raced a little bit. I raced downhill for a while and raced enduro. Then I started having kids and stopped racing for the most part.” Even if his racing career was somewhat short-lived, his passion for mountain biking continued. Two decades later, what started with a PlayStation game eventually led him to open his own bike shop earlier this year.

Shift Bicycle Company is housed in a funky old quonset hut-style building on 1st Avenue in downtown Billings. The shop has an earthy, artistic vibe, which is exactly what Joey wanted. He was inspired by the bike and skate shops of the 90s and 2000s which served as community hangs as much as businesses. The walls of Shift are painted olive green with black and white checkerboard accents that echo the shop’s logo. A mustard yellow couch with a coffee table greets visitors immediately inside the door, letting folks know they can chill and get comfortable here. Everything about Shift communicates it was curated by someone immersed in cycling culture.

When I spoke with Joey for this article, he was humble about his riding skills, not elaborating much about his racing past. But I’ve seen him in action on his dirt jumper pulling big tricks and big air with casual ease. A coffee roasting friend of Joey’s branded two roast varieties and packaged them with mountain biking themes and the Shift logo. The packages, which sit on the shop’s coffee bar for sale, have photos of Joey riding on them, including one of him sending it off what looks to be a fifteen foot boulder drop. No doubt, the dude can ride. More important to the business, he can also wrench.

Joey isn’t just an expert bike mechanic. He skills as a lifetime rider are impressive.

Learning on the Job

Joey got his first gig as a bike mechanic at age 18 while studying at Montana State University’s Billings campus. Even though he was passionate about mountain biking, he didn’t expect to build a career in cycling. “I just needed a part-time job ‘cause I was a broke college student living in the dorm,” he said.

The opportunity came through a chance meeting in Scheel’s parking lot shortly after Joey moved to Billings from Cody. He parked his Toyota 4Runner next to a similar 4Runner with a Transition Bottle Rocket sitting on its bike rack. He struck up a conversation with the owner after complimenting the bike. They went riding together later that day, and Joey learned the guy had recently left his job at a local bike shop. The shop needed a replacement.

He got the gig as a mechanic, even though he claims he wasn’t very mechanically inclined at the time. The shop also didn’t have much in the way of training or teaching resources, so Joey did a ton of on the job learning. He was also determined.

“You know, I just had to figure it out, and I’ve always been kind of stubborn. If I don’t know how to do it, I want to figure it out,” said Joey. “I don’t want to just give up. I think I’m OCD honestly.”

Without the help of a mentor or even YouTube videos at the time, all Joey had to rely on were shopworn, dog-eared Barnett’s repair manuals in a three-ring binder . He would take those home after work and study how to repack a hub or install a press-fit bottom bracket.

“And then I started to really fall in love with the wrenching, and it became a passion,” he said. “I think that job set me up really well.” The resourcefulness, creativity, and sense of accomplishment he gained by essentially teaching himself the trade instilled pride in his abilities and a drive to push himself further as a mechanic.

After spending five years at a smaller shop where he had learned about as much as he could, he knew it was time to look for a bigger shop. He also had a kid on the way and was looking for expanded earning potential.

Joey brings over fifteen years of wrenching experience to Shift.

Big Shoes to Fill

He set his sights on Red Rover Bicycle Collective, a shop with a strong community focus that was also a big inspiration for Shift Bicycle Company today. He used to show up for Friday night hangs at Red Rover to drink beer and talk bikes. “That shop was rad. They had a bar a little bigger than this one,” Joey noted, leaning over the Shift bar that he built himself so that folks can pull up a stool and have a coffee when they stop by.

He was in loose discussions with the Red Rover owners about working there, but the shop went out of business shortly thereafter. Despite his disappointment, another opportunity surfaced. He got a call from the Spoke Shop, the biggest bike shop in Billings.

“That was probably the best thing that could have happened to me as far as doing this for a living,” he said. “Big store. Way more exposure to different types of repairs. Way busier, way more hands on.”

He also had the opportunity to work under the head mechanic at the time, Jason Collier whose extensive resume included previous work with Lance Armstrong.

“I looked up to him so much, and he taught me a ton,” Joey said. “I still kind of had that ‘I want to prove myself’ attitude, and I wanted to prove myself to him. He was the head guy. If I didn’t know how to fix something, he did. He knew everything.”

After a couple of years, Collier moved from Billings, and Joey was now the head mechanic. It was a bit of a shock.

“Honestly I don’t even think they talked to me,” he recalled. “It was in a morning meeting. They were like, ‘Jason’s moving. Joey’s going to be the head mechanic.’ Absolutely scared the shit out of me. It seemed like such big shoes to fill. Like, I wasn’t even excited. I was scared.”

Joey inherited all of the shop’s high end customers, folks who only wanted Collier to work on their bikes. “I think that pushed me again to try to learn and buckle down. I started to take it really, really seriously.”

Joey earned the trust of all those clients. His skills and responsibility grew. He spent six years there before leaving for a management opportunity at a downtown shop that opened right before COVID. Bad timing. The shop closed down within a year. Before too long, he returned to the Spoke Shop where he became the service manager, gaining the management experience he wanted.

Coming to a Crossroads

Though he hadn’t mapped it out this way, Joey was making a living in the bike industry, following his passion, gaining expertise, and earning a reputation as a respected professional. But earning potential in the bike industry is limited, no matter one’s talent or dedication. After three more years at the Spoke Shop, he was starting to get itchy for a change. His family was also growing with two kids now.

“I was hitting a kind of crossroads with working in bike shops altogether. I felt like I hit my ceiling career-wise,” he said. To advance his career in the industry, he thought about looking for a job with a manufacturer. But those jobs don’t exist in Billings, and traveling with two young kids didn’t sound appealing. So, he took a job in a completely unrelated field as a sales and service rep.

“I was getting kind of burned out on the bike shop, so I just needed a change of pace. And I was kind of excited to not talk about bikes for a while,” he said.

It was a needed break. Over time, the prospect of owning a business instead of being an employee started to become attractive to Joey and his wife. They discussed all kinds of ideas, including buying a laundromat. But, after getting a breather for a while, Joey found himself missing bikes. He realized his burnout was more about the environment he was in than about bikes themselves. He also had a ton of knowledge and experience in the bike industry, so he and his wife kept returning to the idea of starting a shop.

One day, they decided to check out a property that was available near downtown. Neither of them took the idea very seriously, expecting a quick tour of a space that wouldn’t appeal to them. But once they got there, it seemed perfect for what they had in mind.

“There’s enough room for what we want to do, and we sat in the car and talked for like five minutes,” Joey recalled with a smile. “My wife was like, ‘You should just do it.’ And so we did.”

The funky quonset hut-style building that houses Shift was a perfect fit for Joey’s vision.

Making the Shift

Joey wants Shift Bicycle Company to be the kind of place he would frequent even if he didn’t work there. He remembers those skate shops and moto shops he loved going to as a kid. “There’d be movies playing and a couch you could sit at, and it was just like a cooler vibe. You just wanted to hang out and chat, kind of bullshit with the people that work there. I always liked that.”

That’s why Shift has the coffee bar, sofa, TV, and design touches that communicate a relaxed, hip atmosphere. But even though the vibe is chill, he takes the work seriously. Service is the primary focus of the shop right now, even though he can order new bikes from a handful of revered brands like Transition, Haro, and Fiardale. And Shift won’t be limited to mountain bikes. He can service gravel, road, BMX, and any other type of bike, including e-bikes, the fastest growing segment of the cycling industry. That said, any reputable bike shop wants to ensure they’re working on a safe product. Cheap e-bikes from Amazon or AliExpress can be a dangerous headache for any shop owner.

He is also happy to work on direct-to-consumer brands like Canyon, YT, Propain, or other established brands. Some bike shops cop a dismissive attitude when folks come in with direct-to-consumer bikes, expressing open frustration that people aren’t buying from their salesfloor. Joey, however, understands the value proposition of these bikes, especially given the five figure prices that some top of the line bikes demand. Of course, he would never turn down the opportunity to help clients find a good deal on a new bike through Shift.

The point is that Shift is a place that welcomes people without judgement or pretensions. The shop was born from a passion for bikes and decades of immersion in the community. For people like Joey, bikes just give life deeper meaning.

“There’s something about riding a bike that sort of clears my head or puts me in a better place than anything else I’ve ever experienced,” he explains when I ask why cycling has been such a central part of his biography.

“It does great things for my mental health. It’s just the endorphins, or I don’t know what it is. And it’s fun. It’s fun as shit,” he continues. “Something about it unlocks a mental clarity that I’ve not found otherwise. And you just feel like a little kid when you’re riding too.”

That love for cycling extends beyond just earning a living from bikes for Joey. He also finds ways to use his skills and expertise to give back to the community. He volunteers with local nonprofits to rehab donated bikes that are given to folks in transitional phases of life. He has worked with a women’s shelter as well as the Rimrock Foundation, an addiction treatment facility, to get bikes to folks who need them for transportation. Hopefully, these donated bikes will also inspire some of the childlike joy that comes with cycling.

The shop also recently hosted a bike maintenance workshop for the local youth mountain bike team, the Billings Dirt Dogz. For Shift, there isn’t separation between building community and building a business. It’s all one in the same.

Shift just finished its soft launch phase and is now open five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday. If your bike needs a bit of love to get ready for the warm weather, stop by for some top notch service. Or maybe it’s time to pull the trigger on some new bike bling to start the season, like those bright purple anodized pedals or tangerine orange grips.

When you head that way, give yourself some time to hang out, have a coffee, and shoot the shit with fellow bike nerds. Who knows, maybe Joey will even dig out an old PlayStation game to reminisce about how it all started for him.

Shift Bicycle Company has a creative vibe inspired by the skate and moto shops of the 90s and early 2000s.

To learn more about Shift Bicycle Company, visit their website at ShiftBikesBillings.com or follow them on Instagram at @shift_bicycle_company.

The following oped was originally published in the Billings Gazette on Sunday, April 12.

A favorite artwork recently exhibited at the Yellowstone Art Museum is Newborn: Hank by Tracy Linder. It’s an exquisite bronze casting of a newborn calf struggling to stand, presumably for the first time. A delicate umbilical cord sculpted from wax adorns the bronze, emphasizing the calf’s vulnerability and dependence on its mother. Linder, who lives on open prairie in Molt, grew up on a family farm in south-central Montana. Her work explores themes of farming, ranching, and rural life with lyrical forms crafted from bone, leather, seeds, and grasses. She confronts the beauty and pain of working the land and tending to animals, where nourishing life and dealing with death are commonplace. Linder’s sculptures are poetic, graceful, and austere. They embody the depth, complexity, and authenticity of someone deeply rooted in the unique culture of Montana. The Yellowstone Art Museum (YAM) provides space for creative visions like Linder’s, helping us reflect on our heritage and traditions. By cultivating and supporting our region’s artists, the YAM ensures stories from Yellowstone County are shared, appreciated, and understood far and wide.

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As Yellowstone County Commissioners draft their fiscal year budget, they should restore YAM funding from the County Museum Levy that they controversially diverted to other projects in recent years. The YAM’s role in preserving our unique culture matters to this community. If not for the museum, widely celebrated Montana voices may never have been given the support necessary to develop. Funding for the arts often feels as vulnerable as the infant calf so movingly portrayed by Linder, despite the power of art to heal, inspire, and transform lives.

Artists like Linder did not always have a place in the contemporary art world. Public art museums first emerged in major European cities like Rome, Paris, and Munich in the 18th century. Similar institutions built in the U.S. also arose in large metropolitan centers like New York, Boston, and Chicago. Placement of these museums in big cities naturally led to a predominance of artists and artworks reflecting the themes and concerns of urban life. Many art institutions ignored the rich artistic traditions of rural cultures like ours.

Nevertheless, Montana artists adopted the materials, techniques, and language of modern art even if the gatekeepers of cosmopolitan art museums were initially ignorant of their contributions. Our artists created their own vocabulary using the tools and traditions of the western high plains.

One of Montana’s most celebrated modern artists is Grass Range rancher Bill Stockton, who spent his long winters painting and sculpting when his herds and grazing lands required less labor. Stockton’s paintings, abstract and stylized, captured the people and landscape closest to him. He used the tools of ranching life in his artwork, incorporating livestock markers in his paintings and drawings while crafting sculptures with the same welding equipment used to repair gates and farm machinery.

Other renowned modern and contemporary Montana artists told their stories through the lens of rural life. Isabelle Johnson’s paintings captured the expansive plains, snow drifts, and transcendent beauty of her family’s ranchlands in Stillwater County. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith rose to international acclaim for her paintings and prints that drew upon her life growing up on the Flathead Reservation. She combined Native iconography with traditional American pop culture to ask probing questions about the history, treatment, and depictions of Indigenous people in the United States.

These artists evoke an urgency, authenticity, and beauty that cannot be ignored. And thanks to the YAM, their stories - our stories - are not ignored. The YAM has supported these and countless other Montana artists, collecting their works, interpreting their place in art history, and sharing them in exhibitions that travel the world over.

This is but one way the YAM enriches Yellowstone County. The museum also provides free arts education for our schools, free programs for people living with dementia, and free admission to all county residents. County residents have repeatedly made clear our wish for Museum Levy funds to support the YAM at previous levels. Please contact County Commissioners at commission@yellowstonecountymt.gov reminding them to respect our wishes and respect the YAM’s history of excellence stewarding our culture and sharing our stories.

NOTE: My wife, Jessica Kay Ogdin, is the Executive Director of the Yellowstone Art Museum.

If you didn’t attend one of the two No Kings rallies held across the country last year, you’ve surely seen the images. Throngs of people packing the streets carrying signs, wearing costumes, singing songs, and joyfully lifting their voices to peacefully resist efforts by Donald Trump and his administration to erode our democracy and undermine the rule of law. Most of us simply show up, unaware of the exhaustive planning, organizing, and strategy required to ensure these rallies are safe and successful. We have people like Elizabeth Klarich of Billings, Montana to thank for making these historic events happen.

Klarich is the Chapter Leader of Yellowstone Indivisible in Yellowstone County, Montana. More than 2,500 grassroots chapters of Indivisible are spread across the nation. Indivisible works with a coalition of hundreds of other organizations to mobilize people to action.

Last year’s No Kings rallies set records as the largest protests in U.S. history, with estimates ranging from five to seven million attendees at each. A third No Kings rally is planned for this Saturday, March 28, and it is expected to break records yet again. Over 3,000 individual rallies are planned across the globe, including another in Billings at 12 PM on the Yellowstone County Courthouse lawn. Previous Billings rallies organized by Klarich, her fellow members of Yellowstone Indivisible, and other ally organizations drew thousands.

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The Google Doc

It’s hard to imagine that this historic organizing effort all began with a humble 23-page Google Doc.

Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, former congressional staffers who married in 2015, drafted a pragmatic guide for influencing members of Congress shortly after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016. The document outlined practical tools for engaging in the political process to protect civil liberties, defend policies including healthcare access, and fight the autocratic threats Trump’s campaign rhetoric foreshadowed. The Google Doc went viral almost immediately after publication and quickly led to Indivisible’s founding with a mission “to stop the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and to demand a real democracy.”

Indivisible is decentralized by design, drawing strength from localized, volunteer members and leaders like Klarich who know and understand their communities best. The central Indivisible organization, headquartered in Washington, D.C., provides tools, training, research, and coordination to support chapter leaders like Klarich in communities throughout the nation.

Klarich first learned of Greenberg, Levin, and Indivisible in 2017. “I just found them compelling and so deeply authentic and passionate about democracy and people and humanity,” she said as we chatted on a park bench in Billings last week. Unfortunately, Klarich suffered a stroke shortly after learning of Indivisible and had to devote years to rehab. She wasn’t able to become actively involved with the group but continued to follow their work.

“I needed to act”

After Trump’s 2024 election, Klarich was participating in online group sessions to brainstorm strategies, hear people’s concerns, and learn what could be done in this new political era. “And I realized in listening to those pep talks and having that sense of community from everyone, I needed to do more than just listen,” she said. “I needed to act.”

“I can literally remember sitting at my kitchen table and pressing the button to submit my registration for being a chapter leader and that feeling of, ‘Okay, I don’t know what I just did, but I guess I’ll find out,’” Klarich continued. “I started going to leadership training meetings online, and then realized I need in-person training because this is overwhelming.”

Determined to develop her organizing skills, Klarich paid her way to Washington, D.C. for an extended weekend of training with the Indivisible leadership team, including founders Greenberg and Levin. As she learned more, she realized she had many natural strengths as a leader. But, she also noted with humility she “had a hell of a ton of weaknesses” to address. So she sought help from trainings, friends, and mentors.

“Swimming in the sea of humanity” is a phrase often repeated within community organizing circles. It describes the challenge of close collaboration with people who bring their authentic selves to a movement, including the personality quirks and complications that all humans exhibit. Klarich found herself immediately navigating those rough waters as she dove into this new leadership role.

“I thought everybody is on the same page with wanting democracy, and we’re all going to be willingly working together, and we’ll just respect one another and move hand-in-hand in Kumbaya,” she said of early organizing efforts. “It was just not at all like that. It was very messy. And I fell on my face a lot.”

She relied heavily on Indivisible’s network of support, especially the organization’s statewide leader. She also reached out to people she has met over decades in Billings with different skills and talents. Soon enough, the chapter held two successful events: a town hall attended by hundreds, and then the Hands Off rally in April 2025. That Billings rally drew 1,000 people according to Klarich and was part of the largest single day act of public resistance nationwide (until the forthcoming No Kings rally broke that record).

It was clear that Klarich’s training, hard work, and determination were paying off. She and her fellow Indivisible volunteers were making headlines, energizing their community, and giving hope to people who felt like core American values were being torched by a president and administration hostile to democracy itself.

Whoever is having the most fun in politics wins

An adage employed by many electoral campaigns is “whoever is having the most fun in politics wins.” This speaks not only to a philosophical mindset that having fun is a win in and of itself. It is also meant literally. People want to be part of a campaign or movement that expresses joy, humor, and human connection. Indivisible embraces this doctrine, and so does Klarich.

“The philosophy of Indivisible and many other groups that are fighting this authoritarian breakthrough is based on the success of peaceful non-violence, using frivolity and whimsical strategies,” said Klarich.

“We will dance even though you’re trying to silence us and make us cower,” she continued. “We’re not going to cower. We’re going to dance. We’re going to put on inflatable costumes. We’re going to laugh. We’re going to have music.”

She also described the contrast created when people embrace joy as an organizing principle.

“The ones that are being hateful and cruel are going to stand out more because those of us who don’t want that cruelty and hate in our culture, in our communities, in our states, in our country… will stay in the light, in the joy, in the fun.”

The Power is in the People

When asked what the No Kings rallies and this larger movement have accomplished, Klarich said, “Courage is contagious.”

“Every rally has more people because we’re spreading courage and hope and inspiration like a good virus… The power is in the people. It is not in the few that are in positions of power right now, and we are proving that.”

As more and more people reject the policies of the Trump administration, including the use of military troops in our streets, efforts to restrict voting rights, defying court orders, and abducting immigrants without due process, the No Kings movement continues to grow. Klarich encourages people to get involved, even if they’ve never attended a public demonstration.

“To all the people who’ve never come to a rally before, you don’t want to have that fear of missing out. That FOMO? No, no, no. Don’t live with that FOMO. Come see what’s happening,” she said.

“It will be not only safe and secure and peaceful, definitely non-violent. It will be fun. It will be joyful. There will be music, there will be art, there will be a child care center where a professional child art teacher will be bringing all her supplies to keep all the kiddos happy.

“It’s just a fun celebration of community, and hey, we have people in power that want to strip away our rights to assembly and our rights to free speech, and we’re not having it,” concluded Klarich. “We’re going to say we want to speak out and we want democracy. We want dignity.”

You don’t need a costume, amazing art skills, or a powerful singing voice to make an impact this weekend at No Kings (though all of the above are welcome). You simply need to show up. Your presence, combined with that of millions of people across the nation, lets our leaders and the world know that in America, government answers to the people, not the other way around. We don’t do kings.

Learn more about Yellowstone Indivisible.

Find an Indivisible chapter near you.

Find a No Kings Rally near you.

Last fall, a group of fourth grade students from Crow Agency sat in front of Sean Chandler’s 10-foot-wide painting, “Going On, Under, and Over the Golden Gate,” in one of the Yellowstone Art Museum’s (YAM) spacious galleries. Their eyes danced across the canvas of abstracted figures and contemporary interpretations of traditional Native iconography. Chandler is an enrolled member of the Aaniinen (Gros Ventre Nation). The students were quietly focused on his painting until YAM Education Director Carrie Goe Nettleton asked a question, then outstretched arms reached for the ceiling with kids competing to share their interpretations of the vibrant imagery. The gallery viewing took place within an all-day student field trip as part of a larger education partnership between the museum and Crow Agency.

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Crow Agency is the home of the Crow Nation, or Apsáalooke Tribe, in south-central Montana. The reservation is about 60 miles east of Billings, where the YAM sits in an expansive downtown building that blends sleek modern architecture with a historic, traditional western construction style. “Apsáalooke” means “children of the large-beaked bird," which was later misinterpreted by white settlers as “crow” or “raven.” “Apsáalooke” and “Crow” are often used interchangeably by Tribal members.

The Crow Agency partnership with the YAM began in 2005 and combines biannual field trips to the museum for third, fourth, and fifth graders alongside recurring art classes taught by YAM staffers at Crow Agency. Goe Nettleton travels to Hardin, MT on the northern border of the reservation once a month to teach third graders while YAM Art Educator Angel Shandy travels there once a week to teach fourth and fifth graders. Everyone involved sees value in the partnership as evidenced by the enthusiasm of students, parents, and educators from both the YAM and Crow Agency. An unexpected hiatus took place last school year, preventing students from participating. Since its return, appreciation for the program has only deepened.

That one-year pause stemmed from a non-Native school administrator at Crow Agency who wanted to focus more attention on core academic pursuits, such as math and reading. Presumably, that administrator was unaware of research that indicates how arts education improves overall student academic performance, with one study finding that sustained arts education leads to SAT scores that average 100 points higher when compared to students with limited art education opportunities. The benefits to mental and emotional health are even more compelling, and those positive outcomes were noticed immediately by Crow educators when the program returned.

“This year, with the few opportunities they have already had, I rarely hear students say ‘I messed up’ and [instead] hear ‘it’s art, make it work,’” said Connie Michael, a fifth-grade teacher at Crow Agency. Having a learning space centered on expression and experience rather than test-focused evaluations with “right and wrong” answers builds self-esteem and the courage to try new things. “It’s about the process and the joy in making it rather than having a perfect end product,” says Shandy.

Across the country, school districts have reduced investments in arts education. For economically challenged communities, art education is often first on the chopping block. Without the Crow/YAM partnership, it’s unlikely these students would have access to art classes in Hardin. For Crow educators like Lucy Real Bird, art education is essential to students’ understanding and engaging with their cultural history.

“As Apsáalooke, we come from a long line of artists. Art is a major part of who we are.” Real Bird described the rich artistic traditions of the Apsáalooke, including dancers, musicians, master bead workers, and contemporary Crow artists like Linda and Ben Pease, whose work has been exhibited at the YAM. She noted the sense of pride and accomplishment that students feel when given the opportunity to exhibit their work in the YAM’s Young Artists gallery at the end of each school year, especially after seeing the work of professional artists they admire. “They walk through the halls of the museum, learning about different artists that they look up to, and then to see themselves on those same walls. I think that is so powerful,” says Real Bird.

YAM educators Goe Nettleton and Shandy talk about how the partnership creates a lasting relationship between Crow students and the YAM. “The museum is a space where they feel they belong, a kind of home, even, that encourages them to continue to come back as they grow older” says Shandy.

It’s clear that YAM staff benefit as much from this partnership as the students themselves. The smiles and laughter shared between students and educators came easy and often as I observed printmaking classes and gallery visits during a field trip last fall. Everyone involved is excited to have this partnership return.

“Art is life, for Apsáalooke,” concluded Real Bird. “And once they took it away, students were sad... But now that light is back, and I think that’s what Yellowstone Art Museum does. They provide that art, that beauty to our classrooms.”

A version of this story was published in the Yellowstone Art Museum’s quarterly newsletter, Triptych. The author’s wife, Jessica Kay Ogdin, is the Executive Director of the YAM.

Don’t let the photogenic appeal and breezy charisma of Patrick Certain and Claire Overholt fool you. This couple has grit. It takes sweat, toil, and tenacity to produce the abundant crops they grow on just a few acres in Laurel, Montana. In less than five years, Claire and Patrick transformed a plot of scrappy land previously used for haying into a bustling, community-focused vegetable and flower farm that prioritizes sustainable practices.

Stone Soup Garden is a mission-driven project and part of a growing movement to reclaim our food system. The name was inspired by the moral of the European parable that suggests cooperation and collaboration lead to greater prosperity than harboring a scarcity mindset. The relationships fostered between food, farming, and people are essential to the operation.

“Healthy food creates healthy people. Healthy people create healthy communities,” is how Patrick describes the farm’s mission. “And like the name suggests, it’s a collective effort.”

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Growing Healthy Communities

This collective spirit was on display when I came to interview Claire and Patrick. One of their friends and customers, Pete Tolton, was there with his young son volunteering his time to harvest plump tomatoes and vibrant-hued peppers in one of the farm’s greenhouses. How often do you see people offering free labor where they purchase their food? Surely Albertson’s isn’t getting offers from customers to stock their shelves for fun.

Stone Soup returns us to a culture when neighbors helped one another during harvest, planting, branding, or calving season. This was the norm when most of rural Montana was devoted to local agriculture.

Claire is quick to point out a statistic she hears frequently from Abundant Montana, a nonprofit that focuses on revitalizing the state’s local food system. According to the organization, 70% of food eaten by Montanans was produced in the state in 1950. Today it’s 3%.

Even in a state whose identity is defined largely around ranching and agriculture, that statistic illustrates how distanced most of us are from the meals on our dinner plates. “The process of growing food, people are really curious about what it takes to do that. So there’s a lot of education,” Claire says. People want to learn and want to help. That’s why Stone Soup gets so much participation on their regular volunteer days. It’s why their friend Pete was helping harvest, clearly enjoying direct involvement with his local food system.

“If you give other people a sense of ownership over something, where they have a connection to it… you can have an even bigger impact,” Patrick says.

Given Claire and Patrick’s youth - and the small scale of the operation - Stone Soup is a distinct outlier when compared to decades-long trends in both the Montana and larger U.S. agriculture systems. The average age of farmers in this country continues to rise each year, with more farmers aged 75 and older than below age 35. And, unlike Stone Soup, most farmers raise commodity crops like soybeans, corn, or wheat that are used in industrial food production. Those crops either feed the poultry and livestock that end up as Vienna sausages and Spam or they become the delivery mechanisms for sugar, salt, fat, and food coloring in Doritos and Pop Tarts.

It’s not that farmers necessarily wanted to become the first link in industrial food supply chains. Similar to most sectors of the U.S. economy, smaller players have been forced into relationships with large corporations to survive, even if that means limping along with diminished revenues and even smaller profits.

“Get Big or Get Out”

Beginning in the early 1970’s, under the Nixon and Ford administrations, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz famously said to farmers and ranchers, “Get big or get out.” Butz was an unabashed supporter of global “agribusiness” over family-scale farms that feed their local region. He touted the tools of corporate “efficiency” to industrialize our food system, ushering in the ultra-processed foods that make up as much as 70% of foods consumed by American households today.

This radical shift in our food system has led to epidemics of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer while devastating the economies of rural communities across the country. Most of the money that used to circulate across small farming and ranching towns has been funneled to a handful of multinational corporations and their lobbyists who spent half a billion dollars during recent Farm Bill negotiations to keep a stranglehold on U.S. ag policy.

Because food is such an essential and intimate part of our lives, people intuitively understand this problem. Most of us are rightly suspicious of the factory farm model. There’s a reason that industrial food corporations brand their products with misleading renderings of bucolic family farms, masquerading as wholesome stewards of a local agricultural heritage. No one likes to think about how often we cook dinner with food-like products manufactured by automated machines churning out laboratory concoctions.

Real Food, Real Relationships

People crave real food, real relationships, and a connection to the people who grow what we eat. Even if you steer clear of processed foods, the difference between produce from big box grocers and locally grown vegetables from Stone Soup is unmistakable.

“I just know our food has more nutrients than what you get at a typical grocery store,” Claire says, “because it’s not shipped across the country.” In fact, the produce that Stone Soup’s customers enjoy might have been harvested and washed the same day it’s purchased. You can also taste the difference. Their radishes explode with a spicy earthiness. Last summer, my wife came home from work one day, wondering what smelled so amazing in our kitchen. She immediately noticed the tart, pungent aroma of some Stone Soup dill simply resting on my cutting board as I prepared dinner.

For most of human history, the plants we ate had these robust flavors. While corporate agribusiness may have created greater abundance in terms of overall production quantities, it has also given us tasteless tomatoes awash in pesticides, often trucked hundreds or thousands of miles from another country.

“Tomatoes you usually get from the store, they’re harvested when they’re not totally red and ripe on the vine,” Claire describes. “Then they are bulk bagged. Most of the tomatoes sold in the U.S. today are grown in Florida or Mexico.

“And so think of how long it takes to drive from there to Montana,” Claire continues. “They’re ripening off the vine, and when they’re picked earlier like that, they don’t get the same flavors and they don’t have the same richness of flavor; it’s non-existent. They also don’t have the same level of nutrients because they haven’t been developing on the vine as long and getting all the benefits of photosynthesis. It’s just so apparent to anyone who knows homegrown tomatoes versus other ones.”

Whether it’s their home grown tomatoes, pungent turnips, or sweet, crisp carrots, Stone Soup reminds us how actual food tastes. It also provides a model for how we can return to the healthier food systems that existed before the “get big or get out” industrialization regime led us into the culinary cul-de-sac of engineered, unhealthy food-like product.

Patrick and Claire use the same practices that would qualify them as an organic farm, though getting that formal certification is an expensive and time-consuming process. “There’s no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides” in the operation, Claire notes. “We use compost and cover crops to add nutrients to the soil. So we’re taking care of this little corner of land and trying to build soil health.”

“Because we are such a small operation and know practically all of our customers by name, organic certification doesn’t feel necessary,” adds Patrick. “Our customers are less concerned with certified organic labeling because they can just ask us what practices we are using.” He prioritizes “local” as a more important value than chasing a costly and cumbersome certification.

While Stone Soup has grown quickly in a short time, the project hasn’t been easy or free from mistakes. The farm began with a group of volunteers helping Patrick erect a large-scale greenhouse, roughly 18 feet wide by 100 feet long, with a burly steel tubing frame. This was a significant structure that took many hands and several hours to construct. With the building of that greenhouse, Stone Soup immediately transformed from idea to reality. A former hay field was now a place to grow cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and more. Or so Patrick thought.

After the greenhouse was erected, Patrick tested the soil and found it to have elevated salinity levels. Vegetables struggle in salty soil. The greenhouse had to be moved to a section of land with better drainage. That was one of countless lessons that Patrick has learned along the way.

Trial and error are always part of farming, but it’s especially hard to start a new farm from scratch. The challenges are even greater when you don’t have direct generational knowledge to draw from. Most farming operations are family businesses, handed down from one generation to the next. Those families come to know their land intimately, understanding the subtle nuances of soil nutrients, moisture, and erosion based on time of year, weather trends, and how the earth has been stewarded over its lifetime.

Instead of family history, Claire and Patrick rely on the advice of friends who farm, their experience working for others, and formal education (Patrick studied Sustainable Food and Bioenergy Systems at Montana State University). They are obviously quick studies given the success Stone Soup has had right out of the gate.

Sharing the Harvest

Stone Soup only leases five acres and currently farms less than half an acre. This is a minuscule footprint compared to the average Montana commodity farm, but it provides more than enough land to meet their goals as a community scale operation.

In the summer of 2022, just over a year after establishing their farm property, Stone Soup launched with a pragmatic approach. The couple sold through a small farmers market in Billings. They also distributed through the Yellowstone Valley Food Hub, a cooperative of family farms and ranches located primarily in Yellowstone County. This first year operating on a smaller scale allowed them to generate some income while building their infrastructure for more expansive offerings. Each year, they added new crops, developed new gardens and arable fields, and refined their practices. Claire also added flower gardens to the operation.

In 2025, they took the leap to start the first local CSA that Yellowstone County has seen in at least a decade. In community supported agriculture (CSA), members purchase a “share” of the operation’s harvest prior to the growing season. This gives farmers the up-front funds needed to cover their operating costs without going into debt or depleting existing funds. At a designated period (typically weekly), members are given their share of the farm’s bounty. Stone Soup provided folks the option to buy full or half shares depending on their household size. An initial spring launch quickly sold 26 shares and the main season of summer shares sold out all 40 shares available.

Patrick considers it strange that no one has adopted a local CSA model in such a long time, especially given that Yellowstone County has the largest population in Montana.

“That’s crazy,” he says. “ I mean, I don’t know how many people we’ve had say, ‘I’m telling you, I’ve got four more people that want to sign up.’ We could quadruple the number of CSA customers next year in terms of the market, though not in terms of what we’re actually capable of doing. But the demand is there.”

Adopting the CSA model was both exciting and scary. On the one hand, the partnership would generate significantly more income and allow them to begin building the community that was always central to their vision. On the other hand, they were putting themselves on the hook to produce enough food to meet customers’ expectations. For the first several weeks, Patrick was full of anxiety worrying they wouldn’t have enough food for customer pickup days.

“Every week, I said, ‘We’re not gonna have anything. What are we even gonna give people this week?” Patrick recalls while Claire laughs.

Each week, however, they had more than enough food, and their customers were stoked to have a full array of produce grown by people they love and trust. Patrick’s self described “physic drain” of anxiety would quickly evaporate as they unloaded at Carter’s Brewery where their Billings customers pick up weekly shares. “Being on the other side of it [the anxiety], was always just, like, gratitude for the opportunity to hang out with friends while we give them food,” he says.

“Patrick probably has more of that stress because he’s more of the field side of the farm, and he’s been the one that’s planning and seeding crop rotations,” Claire notes. “But I’m the computer half of the farm, and I live in my spreadsheet… I see, ‘Oh, according to our records, we do have all these in the field right now.’

“It’s a balancing act, though,” she concedes. “ You can have your plan on the spreadsheet like we do at the beginning of every year, and then a hailstorm happens, like this past June. Or, a couple years ago it was cloudier for the first month of the season than we expected and everything grew slower… Stuff happens, and you can’t really predict how fast your tomatoes are going to grow.”

Enjoying the Fruits of their Labor

Despite their anxiety, the first year of the CSA was a huge success. As one of their customers, I can attest to the quality of their produce and how well they organized the complicated logistics of getting their food into the hands of people spread across a large geographic area.

As they set up their tables at the local brewery each week, I saw people genuinely giddy with excitement to see what new radish or tomato variety was in their weekly share. Folks were quick to talk recipes, compare notes, and even make plans for shared meals together.

Stone’s Soup assertion that “healthy food creates healthy people, and healthy people create healthy communities” was playing out each week.

It’s strange how something so wholesome and deep-rooted in the DNA of human beings can also feel somehow radical. But Stone Soup is a radical project. It’s an assertion that no matter how much money, technology, and power is assembled to distort something as essential as the food we eat into an industrial profit pipeline, people will still choose human connection when given the opportunity.

You can learn more about Stone Soup Garden at stonesoup.garden.

The Faceplant

Jaxson O’Brien’s love for bikes imprinted at an early age. As a young kid not much older than a toddler, friends of his mother gave him his first bike, a pink one with a banana seat and training wheels.

“I was so excited about it, that I got a bike, and I started to ride it,” Jaxson recalled. “I was graduating from my Big Wheel, and I decided to hop on it and give it a shot. And we had a porch, like an elevated porch, and I rode that thing right off the end of the porch into a face plant. That was my first experience with the bike.”

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Thankfully, Jaxson was undeterred, and bikes have been significant to his life and identity ever since. The determination of a kid unfazed by a big wreck in his first instant of riding is evident in his ambition today.

He has a good-natured intensity about him and speaks in a staccato rhythm. Reflective pauses follow quick eruptions of words as competing thoughts seem to vie for air time. His eyes widen and his posture elongates when speaking about the realization of his dream project, a community-based bicycle cooperative whose first phase launched last year under the moniker Black Cloud Bikes.

Jaxson is a certified bike mechanic, and Black Cloud Bikes is stocked with all of the tools, stands, and equipment needed for any repair, service, or upgrade. However, Black Cloud is much more than simply a place to get a punctured tire repaired or a new wheelset assembled. It’s designed on the premise that “bikes can change lives - not just for those riding them, but for the communities they move through.” At least what its website says. But, what does that mean…?

It means that Black Cloud isn’t just another business trying to make a buck following its owner’s passion (a tried, true, and wholly respectable model for many bike shops). It’s more like a living manifesto that blends elements of DIY, punk rock, and sustainability with the creative rebellion found in various cycling subcultures. However, the shop forgoes the “hipper than thou” sanctimony often fostered in bohemian scenes. Instead, Black Cloud is built on inclusivity, empowerment, and accessibility for all. “No judgment. No ego. Just bikes, tools, and good vibes,” their website goes on to say.

The Heart of the Shop

Black Cloud is a full-service shop in downtown Billings, Montana where you can drop off your bike for repairs or maintenance if that’s all you need. However, it also includes a DIY workbench that locals can rent or reserve with access to a large stockpile of used and older bike parts to keep two-wheeled rigs rolling, no matter their age. Jaxon describes the DIY workbench as the “heart of the shop” where customers can receive repair and maintenance advice directly from him if interested. The goal of the project is to empower people with knowledge, keep bikes out of landfills, and expand the joy, freedom, and utility of bicycles as far and wide as possible. Black Cloud also organizes group rides and has big plans for expanded community projects, a reflection of Jaxson’s upbringing.

He grew up in Chester, a small town of about 800 people on Montana’s Hi-Line. The cultural values of a close-knit small town are embedded in Black Cloud’s mission. When you live in a remote, rural area, you make do with what you have, and you learn to trust and rely on your neighbors. Jaxson recalls an informal community bicycle graveyard he and his friends visited frequently.

“There were people that kind of kept old bikes, so that others could, essentially, take parts off or make other bikes,” he said. “And so even as a kid, we were always scabbing stuff off of bikes. And, you know, it wasn’t an official shop. It was more like a big pile of bicycles in the alley. It was pretty fun, because you could come home with a different bike than you started the day with, or you could fix up your buddy’s bike, or something like that.”

The communal ethos of that back alley bike stash lives on in Black Cloud Bikes, transformed into a legitimate, thoughtfully curated brick and mortar establishment. As much as possible, the shop employs a “pay what you can” model. Jaxson’s altruist values have earned him a wagonload of karma along the way, helping him secure the tools and inventory to launch Black Cloud. Almost everything in the space was acquired second-hand from bike shops with owners heading into retirement or beyond.

His biggest cache of professional tools came through a machinist mentor who Jaxson sought out, hoping to learn the welding skills needed to build custom bike frames. This machinist, Kenny Glenn, had a brother in California who was closing down a bike shop. Kenny put Jaxon in touch with his brother, Bob, and after some chatting, they agreed on a fairly modest price that fit Jaxson’s budget. He anticipated a relatively small package of tools from Bob based on their negotiation, and was bowled over to receive a crate with 200 pounds of high caliber tools far beyond his expectations.

That big score gave fuel to the idea that eventually became Black Cloud. “That was pretty sweet,” Jaxson said. “That kind of got me going… Like, ‘Hey, man… I can really have the ability to fix up bikes now.’”

The Inspiration

Jaxson has long been inspired by creative, mission-driven bike spaces he’s visited along the way. While attending college in Seattle, he came across quirky community bike shops and cycling collectives that made an especially big impact on his thinking.

“It really blew my mind that all these people were coming together with bikes and giving back to the community,” he said. “They had a lot of historic bikes, and you can see the whole history of it, you know. And so from there, I started to seek out community bike shops wherever I was at or wherever I traveled.”

One establishment that lodged itself in Jaxson’s consciousness is Bicycle Heaven in Pittsburgh. It was founded by Craig and Mindy Morrow and began when Craig nabbed a single discarded bike in the mid 90s. From those humble beginnings, it has grown into a revered institution specializing in vintage bikes and parts. It houses “the world’s largest bicycle museum and shop” according to its website.

Jaxson had the opportunity to meet Craig and was impressed by the dedication and scale of the project. “He’s got an amazing collection,” Jaxson recalled. “It’s there to preserve the history of bicycles. His museum has bikes from probably the 1800s all the way up to pretty modern.”

Set with professional tools and inspired by what he saw in Seattle, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere, Jaxson kept an eye on message boards and buy/sell groups for bikes, parts, and other inventory. Around 2024, he came across a listing for the full contents of a Montana bike shop on Facebook marketplace that piqued his interest, though the price seemed out of reach. He didn’t know it at the time, but Jaxson had some experience and familiarity with the shop from decades ago. It was related to his prior experience as a wildland fire fighter, a seasonal vocation he undertook for 12 straight years in his younger days.

Back in 2002, he was preparing for an annual firefighting training in Miles City. He knew a fellow firefighter and cyclist from Miles City, bike mechanic John Petroff, who worked at Pedal Power Sports, a local bike retailer. Jaxson decided to bring his mountain bike with him for this multi-week training, knowing he could find time to ride local trails with John. Between training sessions, the two firefighters were able to get in some trail miles and also spent some time hanging out in the shop on occasion. They lost contact over the years, but that relationship with both John and Pedal Power Sports became significant when the shop’s owner, Miles Milligan, passed away.

Matt Gittings, the nephew of Miles, inherited Pedal Power after his uncle’s death, and he was the one who posted the shop’s contents on Facebook marketplace - the same post that caught Jaxson’s eye. The sale listing said nothing of the shop’s name or history. It was essentially an anonymous post about a bunch of bikes, parts, and gear for sale.

If It’s Meant to Be…

At about the same time, Jaxson’s wife, Tiffany, was looking to open a second location of her successful westside Billings general goods store, Frae Everyday Goods. Frae isn’t just any old shop, though. It’s a mission-driven business (note the recurring theme in the O’Brien family). Frae provides sustainable bulk products like laundry detergent, dish soap, and other daily cleaning products that folks can purchase in reusable mason jars or upcycled glass bottles, eliminating the packaging waste of traditional grocery stores. The products are also sold in concentrated form, unlike most mass produced goods that are sold in larger containers than necessary to give customers the false impression they’re getting more than they really are. Of course, this excess packaging adds extra weight, volume, and a massive bloat to a product’s carbon footprint at the scale of the multinational corporations who employ these practices across global markets.

Frae also gives customers other ways to opt out of corporate consumption by carrying locally produced foods, clothing, and artisan crafts. Jaxson says that Frae echoes some of the values he grew up around in the Hi-Line.

“Tiffany wanted to have that model of the corner store, and I love that,” he says. “When I grew up in Chester, we had a corner store a couple blocks away from my grandma’s house. She used to send me down there when I was only five or six to go pick up stuff for dinner. They had a charge account, and having that community trust was pretty neat.”

The new Frae location that Tiffany and Jaxson were considering would be in downtown Billings, offering that corner store model where folks could pop by on their way to or from work. The space they were considering had a couple of features that made Jaxson’s bike collective seem more possible than ever. For one thing, it had a ton of storage that could be used for bikes and parts. In fact, it was big enough to accommodate another idea that Tiffany and Jaxon had been considering.

They wondered what might happen if they used part of a bigger location to house smaller “micro-businesses” within the larger Frae store. The idea was that local artists, designers, and entrepreneurs could take on short-term leases (with an option to renew) where they could incubate their ideas without assuming the financial risks of a traditional long-term lease for a pricey downtown storefront. This would be a perfect opportunity for Jaxson to use one of those smaller spaces within Frae to realize his bike shop dream on a smaller, manageable scale, at least to start.

As the new Frae location was looking more and more likely, Jaxson told Tiffany about the bike shop for sale on Facebook, noting how far out of reach the price was. Tiffany encouraged him to reach out and start the conversation anyhow. “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be,” she told him.

The Storm Gathers

Jaxson took her advice and inquired about the listing. He quickly learned the shop for sale was Pedal Power Sports, the shop he used to visit during firefighter training in Miles City. He told Matt, the nephew who inherited the shop, his idea for a bike collective and made him an offer much lower than the listing, the only amount he could reasonably afford.

“Matt thought about it for a couple of weeks, and he came back and he said, ‘You know what? That’s pretty cool, because that’s exactly what Miles [his uncle] would have wanted.” Jaxson recalled. “It was really an honor that Matt was willing to do that.”

He later learned that his old firefighter friend, John Petroff the Pedal Power mechanic, and others from the shop had vouched for him. Matt wanted to make sure that Jaxson could really pull off his idea before agreeing to the deal. Jaxson’s integrity and commitment to his values are a through line in the story of making Black Cloud Bikes a reality.

Those same qualities are evident in Frae, which is surely part of the reason Tiffany was able to secure the downtown location and launch “Frae Collective,” which includes the smaller incubation spaces she and Jaxson imagined. The new location is thriving and has housed smaller business experiments ranging from florists to fashion designers. And, of course, it also houses Black Cloud Bikes.

The Black Cloud space within Frae is small, intimate, and immaculately organized with tools, spare parts, and funky artwork hanging on the walls. In its first few months of operation, Black Cloud has had customers from all walks of life. “Customer” probably isn’t the right word, though.

“You’re not only making a business transaction. You’re also making friends, and I think that’s pretty cool,” he said. He described one patron who was a bit down on his luck, a middle-aged guy whose bike was his only form of transportation. Jaxson not only helped fix up his bike, but also taught him some new maintenance skills.

“He was super pumped about it. He was like, ‘Man, I’m 57 years old, but I’ve never learned how to work on a bike.’ And I was like, ‘All right, well, come back, man, and I’ll show you how to do more.’ I think that made his day.”

He had a similar experience with a teenager whose bike was his only means to get to and from his job bagging groceries. After stopping in for a repair one day and learning about the DIY workspace and mentoring opportunities, he now makes consistent appointments to fix and maintain his bike with Jaxson.

Already, Black Cloud is the kind of space where people seem to find reasons to stop by on the regular, which is exactly what Jaxson wants. “A lot of days, I think about it like a barber shop, almost. People coming in, and we’re hanging out, working on bikes, and we just shoot the shit. It’s a good time.”

The day I came to interview Jaxson, he had a young girl’s bike on the workstand. It probably wasn’t much different than the bike he face-planted off the porch as a kid himself. He was giving this one away to a family who had brought their daughter’s bike to a local nonprofit called Kids In Motion that provides bike safety education and holds clinics to tune up bikes in disrepair. Unfortunately, the one the family brought to a recent clinic was too far gone, so Jaxson dug into his stock and found a recently donated bike that fit her perfectly.

Living the Dream

Jaxson’s commitment to change lives through bikes isn’t marketing bullshit, and it isn’t a pipe dream. It’s what he does. Even his mechanic’s shirt says so, with his name embroidered on one side and a patch on the other that says:
“LIVING THE F🩷CKING DREAM.”

While it’s taken him years to bring Black Cloud Bikes from concept into reality, the project hit the ground rolling and is gathering speed with each passing day. The shop’s tagline is “Ride Beyond the Storm,” a reference to Jaxson’s belief, bolstered by personal experience, that bikes can be a source of resiliency in people’s lives.

“Bikes have always been a sense of freedom,” he said. “If I’m having a bad day, I can hop on my bike and it’s 100% a good day. And that’s where we came up with the model for Black Cloud, which is ‘ride beyond the storm.’”

“Whatever storm can happen in life, ride beyond, you know. And it still stands true. I can come home from work and I’m stressed out or whatever, and I can hop on the bike, and in no time at all, I’m alright. I’m ready to face whatever it is.”

Jaxson’s realization that bikes can be vehicles for personal transformation is shared by others who recognize his success. Black Cloud is currently exploring a partnership with a well-established nonprofit that would expand the project to a second location in a large industrial warehouse, growing the size, reach, and mission exponentially. That kind of expansion would allow Jaxson’s larger vision of custom bike-building, formal youth apprentice programs, and even a Black Cloud bicycle team of some sort to emerge.

A perfect storm of opportunity is brewing for Black Cloud Bikes, a testament to its owner’s commitment and character. Jaxson O’Brien truly is living the fucking dream, and Billings, Montana is a better place because of it.

You can learn more about Black Cloud Bikes at their website, BlackCloudBicycle.com.