Father skins Big Mountain to support recreation nonprofit that empowers his daughter

Over the span of the most recent winter season outdoor enthusiast and father Chance Cooke recorded 118 uphill ski days — a stark contrast to the 20 or so he usually averages.

During a six-month timeframe he ascended around 363,000 vertical feet, summited Big Mountain 173 times, and spent nearly 250 hours recording more than 700 miles on his alpine touring skis. That total includes ascending the Benny Up to the summit of Whitefish Mountain Resort 10 times in one day in late March to raise more than $8,000 for the nonprofit DREAM Adaptive Recreation.

The statistics he gathered from the season are quite remarkable, even Chance agrees, but his motivation behind dedicating that amount of time outside on skis is where the real story begins.

Chance and his wife Barb have three daughters — Paetra, 17, Isabelle, 15, and Kate, 11. The family loves to ski together and spend time outdoors in the beautiful area surrounding Whitefish where they call home.

Eleven years ago when the Cookes welcomed baby Kate into their family their whole world shifted. During delivery Kate suffered a trauma that created a small bleed in her brain leading to her being life-flighted to Seattle Children’s Hospital where she underwent her first brain surgery at just four weeks old.

She was diagnosed with Hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid deep within the cavities of the brain, which warranted the surgery to insert a shunt to relieve the pressure in her skull. The condition was her first diagnosis and many other challenges have stemmed from that, including developing intractable epilepsy.

“The nature of her medical history is one that’s very complex and not crystallized,” Chance told the Pilot. “It’s very nebulous; neurology in general is very nebulous.”

Through all the medical challenges that have arisen as Kate’s grown older, she lost the fine motor skills needed in order to use her right hand and her right foot, and also she can see only out of the left side of both eyes which cuts her field of vision due to the epilepsy in the left hemisphere of her brain.

Because of this she needs adaptive equipment in order to be active outside with the rest of her family — that’s where the DREAM Adaptive Recreation program steps in.

“She has a place where she can embrace the outdoors and have a program that embraces her for what she can do, not what she can’t do,” Chance expressed.

At the beginning of the winter Chance already knew he wanted to raise a significant amount of money for DREAM at their annual Shred-A-Thon Fundraiser in the spring and training for that was a large part of his reasoning for getting up the mountain almost every day. But as far as the day in and day out motivation goes, Kate’s well being and his family are always at the forefront of his mind.

Chance and Barb persevere every year by supporting Kate through her many surgeries and medical consultations, which often puts them in a car traveling to hospitals far away. Chance had a goal to go alpine touring as many times as he could before the almost inevitable, a downturn in the health of his daughter that was made apparent by increased seizures, would make it impossible to have time for skiing.

“My daughter is 11 years old and the roller coaster just keeps coming in different shapes and forms as she grows up,” he said. “So we entered this fall sort of staring down another puzzle for her wellbeing.”

“The motivation (to ski) was built around the expectation that at some point I was going to have to set that activity aside so I better make the most of it while I can,” he added.

But for the first time ever Kate’s surgery to replace a valve in her brain this winter — her fifth brain surgery to date — was able to occur locally at Logan Health in Kalispell, giving the family a break from the taxing roadtrip they were anticipating. And that made it so Chance could continue his usual early-morning mountain climbing pursuits all winter long.

Chance can leave his house in Whitefish, skin Big Mountain and make it back home in about a two-hour round trip. So throughout the winter it became a routine bout of exercise of sorts for him as well as a recharge for his mental health.

“A friend made the comment that there’s a lot of sanity in the process,” he recalled. “The fitness feels good and the exercise feels good, but also you’re in control of something. Like, if nothing else goes right today I’m going to go knock off a lap on the hill and then I can deal with whatever disaster sort of falls over in front of me.”

And so he kept going. He got up before the sun rose and had an empowering ski season that helped him through the stresses of life at least for a moment.

CHANCE HAS been grateful for the community of Whitefish ever since he and Barb relocated here in the early 2000s. He began volunteering on boards with the city and then community involvement has just dovetailed from there. Chance now reinvests his efforts into volunteering and bringing more awareness to DREAM.

Prior to coming to Whitefish, Chance was a professional biker; he dabbled in road racing and also had several sponsorships for mountain biking. He grew up participating in sports and played lacrosse all throughout college at Radford University in Virginia.

His athletic background taught him a plethora of lessons relatable to the real world and in turn it made him an adaptable person that champions difficult situations.

But what bike racing really brought into focus was the power of being around people who are inherently optimistic — 125 top-level racers at the line and each one has utter confidence they will come in first, he pointed out with a laugh.

“That optimism, at least I learned to recognize it and learned to value it,” Chance said. “Then some of the challenges that we’ve faced as a family I think definitely benefit from recognizing the value of surrounding yourself with those types of people. We found them in spades within the healthcare industry, especially pediatric care.”

KATE HAS a complex mountain of health challenges to climb daily, but somehow she maintains the brightest smile and her beautiful soul shines through to those around her.

She’s dealt with seizures and intractable epilepsy, meaning epilepsy that is still uncontrollable with pharmaceuticals or therapy, since she was a baby. When she was 4 years old her seizures worsened causing her to vomit often and go days without eating. She was diagnosed with failure to thrive, forcing her parents to look for new treatments.

Kate’s doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, determined the best chance at controlling her seizures was to perform a hemispherectomy — essentially they would sever the left side of her brain from the right side which would end all cross communication between the hemispheres.

“When they do the surgery they’re basically taking away half of her computing, OK we’re knocking half of your brain offline and it’s never coming back,” he explained. “You don’t go down this path lightly, it was taken into heavy consideration.”

It’s such a rare and invasive surgery that Chance and Barb said no at first, and even the Mayo Clinic canceled the surgery to reevaluate before going through with it. The greatest risk in doing the hemispherectomy, according to Chance, was that Kate could have experienced total loss of language. He says amazingly she came out of the surgery able to speak, and the first thing she asked for was her dad.

After her recovery, Kate’s seizures diminished significantly. Although she still experiences seizures, she’s able to do much more in her everyday life. Kate loves to play the piano, swim, paddleboard, bike, ski and ride horses at the Two Bear Therapeutic Riding Center.

“I like just being outside,” Kate says.

DREAM ADAPTIVE came into Kate’s life five years ago and has played an integral role in helping her feel more confident and independent, Chance noted.

The program has helped Kate in more ways than one, but also the entire Cooke family. DREAM Adaptive’s mission is to enhance the quality of life of individuals with disabilities by providing year round outdoor adaptive recreational opportunities. But Chance says they have a large focus on helping the families of these individuals as well through support.

DREAM has allowed Kate to be able to have her own experiences in the great outdoors just like the rest of her family. Chance recalled a time when his two older daughters were in the ski racing program at Whitefish Mountain Resort. He said they drove to the village to drop off the older girls and then went to the base of the mountain to get Kate set up with her DREAM Adaptive program for the day.

“That’s a pretty good example of the spectrum that we live with in our household — kids that have very different perspectives of the world, they’re getting different experiences living in the exact same space,” Chance said. “Being raised in the same house, growing up with the same peer groups for the most part, but they are experiencing life in the community on very different levels.”

Because of the program’s importance to the Cooke family, Chance made a point to get after it lap after lap for DREAM’s annual Shred-A-Thon event.

Because of him, the uphill category was added this year and four people participated by skinning the mountain on March 27 while many others participated by riding lifts and tracking as many vertical feet as possible.

Chance got his crew together at 6 a.m. that morning with the goal of making six or seven laps. Once he and his friend Jeff Brown, among other community supporters, got into the groove they just kept going, he says. The laps to the summit took just under one hour each time. Chance also wore an Elvis suit at the beginning and had a goal to bring awareness to the nonprofit.

“I knew I wanted to knock it out of the park in a way that would make a spectacle of the event,” Chance explained. “I wanted people to talk about it. I wanted there to be a positive narrative around supporting DREAM that inspired people to come out and be a part of it next year, that was my goal.”

He surpassed that goal by rallying community members to pledge more than $8,000 for “Team Kate.” A total of $35,000 was raised for DREAM through the event.

He ended up climbing over 20,000 feet in 10 hours for the fundraiser — more vertical feet than he’d ever recorded in one day. But when he thinks of what kept him going, of course, it was his daughter Kate.

“Climbing mountains — that’s a persistent theme in the DREAM program, it’s empowering,” he said. “So here we are in a moment of honesty and clarity, I have the ability to do things that not everybody does.

“If I can do that and can draw attention to that activity, then I can derive resources for the program by making a spectacle out of it.”