Charles Post: Max, could you start by sharing a little bit about your relationship with Montana and hunting? Set the stage for us.

Max Lowe: I was born in Bozeman, Montana to two native Montanans. My dad is second-generation. His parents moved here from the East Coast. I’m fifth-generation on my mom’s side of the family. Her great-grandmother and family immigrated here in the late 1800s as homesteaders. So, for both families, living off the land and being in a close relationship with it was always part of their lives and their upbringing. My dad — my biological father, Alex Lowe — grew up in Missoula, same for my mom. Alex grew up hunting with his two brothers and his dad, and that was how they would provide meat for their family. All three boys would go out with their dad and shoot a couple deer and elk each year to keep the freezer stocked. Hunting was just a part of how their family lived; that was kind of understood from when I was a little kid.

When Alex became a professional mountaineer, he stopped hunting and existing in that realm as deeply as he had when he was younger… mountaineering took the forefront of his focus. He did still own a rifle though, and we’d go out every year or two. But I never got a chance togo with him and actually hunt myself. I vaguely remember going and sighting in his rifle with him the year before he passed away in 1999.

Hunting was always just this natural part of my childhood, and understanding that hunting was a part of the world that we existed in, it wasn’t necessarily this huge choice to be made — to kill something — but more just a way to survive, a way to