The latest Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine has landed in stores this week. Appropriately, it’s the “Phoenix Issue.”

We’re excited to announce Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine #38 is hot off the press and available in stores, cafés and restaurants from Courtney, British Columbia, to Calgary, Alberta, to Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. To see a full list of where you can find your copy, check out our distribution page.

This is a particularly emotional announcement for us because there was a time, earlier this year, when we didn’t know whether there would ever be a next issue. The global pandemic impacted our advertisers and our own business in ways we never could have imagined. It’s testimony to the strong sense of community we have in the Kootenays that companies put their faith in us in the form of their advertising dollars largely because we have such a core readership.

When we finally got the green light in August that this issue would be a go, the team had to scramble to create something in a month and a half. We agreed the them has to be the “Phoenix Issue,” because, as we state in the table of contents: “When you’re beaten down, there’s nowhere left to go but up.” And here we are: on the upside.

This is the first time in KMC’s 19-year history that we have had a yellow cover and the photograph of the skier and his yellow school bus nicknamed “Honey House” on the highway north of Revelstoke was taken by American photographer and writer Matthew Tufts,  Here are his words about it: “Pure gratitude. My first image published in a ski magazine ran in Kootenay Mountain Culture a few years ago. It wasn’t a champagne powder face shot, nor a dawn patrol uptrack bathed in alpenglow; in fact, it wasn’t a shot of skiing at all. It was an accident scene on Rogers Pass, an underlying snapshot of ski culture. A few years and a more than a few dozen poutines later, I couldn’t be more stoked to have landed the cover of the 2020 winter volume with this timeless shot of Cody Cirillo and the 1962 Honey House Bus.

An enormous thank you to Cody, Kelly Wilson, Joey Schusler Wiley Kaupas and Thomas Delfino for having me along to document their story; to Peter Moynes and Vince Hempsall, and the whole team at KMC for their tireless work to publish in a wild year (and for crafting the first yellow cover in KMC history, yewww!!); and to Revy, a place I fell in love with a half decade ago and will always return to… at least, when the border opens… or I find a Canadian wife… or a work visa. I’ve long admired KMC Mag’s commitment to going beyond your average ski porn to share the quirky, the funky, the human side of mountain culture. There’s a space for all of it, and for everyone, in mountain culture. And there’s most certainly a space for print. Don’t ever let folks tell you it’s dead. Now to a pressing matter: can I show this to border patrol to get in, please?”

The cover spine text on this issue reads “Yes, we will” and we’ll leave it to you to deduce exactly why it’s there but we will say this about it: Yes, we will keep going. Despite dire projections earlier this year, we kept cool heads and kept given’r and as a result, we present the “Phoenix Issue” – the one that rose from the ashes and took flight across mountain ranges, through cities, and over international borders, pandemic be damned.

Will we keep sharing amazing content from the Kootenays, one of the world’s most important mountain culture regions? Yes, we will.