New Episode of Distinctly Montana Stories: "Hank Williams Jr. On Ajax Mountain"
On August 8, 1975, Hank Williams Jr. nearly ceased to exist on the face of Ajax Mountain near Missoula. He was 26, a country music star trying to escape his father's shadow, and he had decided to go mountain climbing.
He didn't make it down the same way he went up.
The fall lasted 500 feet. At some point during it, he thought, I am a bobsled. When it was over, his hunting partner Dick Willey was pushing pieces of brain back into the cleft in Hank's forehead. His eye had come free of the socket. Walt, their guide, was screaming.
The new episode of Distinctly Montana Stories tells the story of that afternoon — the hike up, the moment the snow gave way, the fall, the desperate improvised rescue, and the long road back that followed. It's one of the most viscerally written pieces the magazine has ever published, and it makes for about twelve minutes of audio that will hold you from the first sentence to the last.
Hank Williams Jr. would eventually return to Ajax Mountain to look at the place where it happened. Standing there, watching a recreation of the fall, he saw himself — in his words — as "a tiny, limp dummy tumbling and falling." The accident didn't end his career. In some ways, it made it. But that's a different story. This one is just about a mountain, an afternoon, and what it takes to survive both.
"I Didn't Die in Montana: Hank Williams Jr. on Ajax Mountain" is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Pocket Casts.
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