The Baby Boomers Are Arriving in Montana

In the 1950s and ’60s, when televisions had three channels, the “Davy Crockett” series about the fearless frontiersman was so popular that Disney sold 5,000 imitation coonskin caps a day. I wore one of those caps for several summers. My wife, Kristy, didn’t wear a Polly Crockett cap—same coonskin design made of faux white fur—but we were both fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books and the “Little House on the Prairie” series based on them. Later we read Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It,” John McPhee’s “Coming Into the Country” and Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild.” As retirement loomed, our inner John Muir and the mountains were calling and we had to go.

We wound up in a real-estate office in northwestern Montana, where we introduced ourselves to Nichole, the agent on duty. We were from Omaha and curious about moving to the mountains to “get away from it all.” Nichole helped us focus. Get away from what all? If we were escaping humanity, how far from humanity did we want to live? Just us and Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in “The Revenant”?

Also, we were a two-headed client called a couple. I daydreamed about a log cabin on 40 acres of wilderness with internet courtesy of Elon Musk’s Starlink. Kristy wanted a place near a charming mountain town offering more amenities than a gas station. An airport within an hour or so might be nice. Groceries. Medical and dental care. Somewhere our adult sons and daughter might like to vacation, even though their parents live there.

(snip)

Hiking the trails, we soon met other graybeards and their sturdy partners, all of whom must scroll the same feeds: “Ten Affordable Mountain Towns for Retirement!” I thought we were rediscovering Thoreau’s wilderness, but I soon realized we were part of a gray invasion that began long before the pandemic. We were simply the latest wave of silver seniors in pursuit of Rousseau’s nature and outdoor sports. Forest bathing! We met legions of other elderly long-haul hikers and bikers and climbers and white-water rafters, including the odd octogenarian daredevils who still ski down black diamonds. They don’t want to die on the golf course or the pickleball court, or, worse, in a hospital bed. They want to go in a backcountry avalanche.

The idea is to die outside with your hiking boots on. Stay on the trail, on the road, on the mountain, on the bike, in the canoe, on the white-water raft. Go outside every day, even if your knee or your ankle or your shoulder hurts, and once outside push your declining limits. At 80, let’s say, you push a little too hard at the wrong time. You come around a bend in the trail through the cedars and on the right you see two cute bear cubs and on the left an 800-pound mama grizzly, and just like that you’ve managed to die outside with your boots on.

Mr. Dooling is a novelist.

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