Tim Pattison, known as “Bo” Tim, is a modern day mountain man who’s been living in Big Sky, Montana for the last 40 years. “I’m a poor man but I’m rich in life,” Pattison says. PHOTO BY TYSON KRINKE
As the Outlaw Partners editorial department nears the release of the Winter 2020 edition of Mountain Outlaw magazine, we at EBS look to share some of the best stories from that cherished sister publication as it heads into a celebratory phase—10 years running, and strong. Enjoy. -EBS STAFF
Tim Pattison pulls out an old brown hiking boot, its upturned toe and
worn, cracked leather befitting a yesteryear thrift store. He points a gnarled
index finger at the heel.
“That’s where her front teeth went through,” Pattison says in his easy
cadence, pawing the two punctures. “These got a partial steel shank in ‘em. If
I’d had tennis shoes on, she would have broke my foot and pulled me out of the
tree.”
That was in 1979. A grizzly bear had chased a 24-year-old Pattison up
a lodgepole pine and snagged his left boot. He kicked it in the snout, and it
let go. But it’s a recurring pattern for Pattison. Bears have treed him seven
times since.
“I can’t live in the city,” Pattison says. “If there ain’t a grizzly
bear around, I don’t want to be there.”
Tim Pattison is a modern mountain man, an outlaw living in a world of
technology –one he regularly avoids. He has a television, but prefers watching
the wood burn in his stove: “caveman TV,” he calls it.
He lives in Big Sky, Montana with no cell phone, no email, no driver’s
license. He and his tight-knit crew of hunters and shed-antler seekers are
known as the “Bos.” This is Bo Tim.
***
Tim Pattison has a sturdy build and walnut eyes that gleam when he
tells a joke, which he does often. He keeps gray-streaked hair in a ponytail
that drapes like a mane from under his wool balaclava. He hasn’t shaved off his
beard since 1977, when it was a shade darker than his eyes. His smile says he
knows something you don’t.
“He’s a gentle giant, and my best friend,” says Terry Thomas, who
along with his twin brother Lance, grew up with Pattison and eventually
followed him to Montana.
Pattison was raised in Sacramento, California, the son of a rocket-engine
inspector and a tough stay-at-home mother. When he was a junior at Rio
Americano High School, his father took him deer hunting in Idaho for two weeks.
On that trip, a 17-year-old Pattison killed the largest mule deer buck of his
life with the .30-30 he got for his 12th birthday. Bo Tim was hooked
on the mountains.
“I was looking for the wilderness experience,” says Pattison, who turns 60 in February. “I wanted to do what I wanted to do and not get caught up in the rat race.”
(L-R) J.C. Knaub, Shad Boardman, Terry Thomas, Suzy Samardich Hassman, and Tim Pattison dragging out a bull elk, circa 1996. “It’s pretty religious shooting an animal, and I depend on elk meat,” Pattison says. Bo Tim shot his latest bull elk on November 13, 2014. Where’d he shoot it? In the neck. PHOTO BY FAITH MALPELI
On Thanksgiving Day, 1974, Pattison moved to Big Sky, Montana and into
the Michener cabin with his black lab, Dudley. Built in 1913 near the
intersection of Highway 191 and Lone Mountain Trail, the Michener cabin was a welcome
sight for Pattison. He rented it for $33 a month.
“It was wine, women and song back then,” recalls Pattison, who once
had 30 people in the 250-square-foot cabin. In 1997, Big Sky’s Ophir School
administration refurbished the cabin and moved it south. It now rests in front
of the school. “Bo Tim and Dudley” is carved into the center ridge beam.
Pattison needed a new place to live, and asked local contractor J.C.
Knaub if he could put up a wall tent on his property, a veritable compound dubbed
“Knaub’s Hole.”
“Tim showed up here and said, ‘I need a place to put my wall tent for
a couple weeks,’” said Knaub, sitting in his kitchen one afternoon last
October. “He lived here for four years.”
In 1996, Pattison met Meredith Madden, Knaub’s nanny at the time. “She’s
legend,” Pattison says. “She was the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen in my whole
life.”
They had their first and only child in Knaub’s cabin next to the main
house on February 7, 1997. It was -38 F the day their son Winter was born.
“Bo Tim is what he is,” said Scott Hammond, who’s known Pattison for
20 years and now rents him a cabin on the banks of the Gallatin River. “He
doesn’t want to be bothered by modern day business. We could all aspire to be
more like him.”
***
No one quite knows what a “Bo” is, though some venture to explain the
term. It’s a noun; it’s an adjective; it’s often verbed. There might be 10 Bos
right now. There could be 20.
“If they liked you, they Bo’ed you,” says Wade Stone, known in the Big
Sky area as Woody the Wood Lord.
“They’re kind of a counterculture to the suit and tie,” Knaub says.
“You hunted a lot, had your dog, lived in your wall tent, had friends that
shared the same values.”
The Bos have lived by their own terms in Big Sky for decades. Some say
you had to live in a wall tent for three Montana winters before you became a Bo
(Pattison lived in a wall tent for five). Others that you needed to kill a bull
elk every year (Pattison has killed one each year save two since 1974).
It may be just living off the land, or using the term “legend” to
describe virtually anything.
“When I first met the Bos, everything was ‘legend,’” Knaub said,
adding that Pattison created the moniker. “‘I went on a legend 10-mile hike,
and I put a bull elk down with a legend shot in the heart.’ ‘I just had this
legend burger.’”
Pattison and his crew hunted elk-shed antlers for 25 years, and have
stories that stretch the confines of the imagination; tales of big money and
high risk, of a man with three fingers and ungulate heads the size of
Volkswagen Beetles. They have satellite hunting camps up places like Tick Ridge
and Never Heard ‘Em Scream Creek.
For 40 years, Bo Tim Pattison has lived like a mountain man in Big
Sky, growing vegetables, hunting, fishing. He still seeks a bull elk every
fall, but these days he also forages for character lodgepole pine logs to build
his beds.
Six days a week, Pattison builds lodgepole beds by hand in the shed
adjacent to his cabin. He’s a master at his trade. A single bed can take up to 115
hours to construct, and in mid-November, Bo Tim was on his 123rd. Through his
business, Rustic Log Beds, Pattison can sell beds for as much as $3,500 apiece,
but living the life he loves trumps all.
“Money is no big deal for me,” he says. “If I can wake up every
morning and look out my back door and see elk up on the hill and the river
flowing and the colors changing and I’m here and healthy, that’s all that
matters.”