Casting stones

On a frigid Saturday night at Stumptown Ice Den in Whitefish, Gina Kiehn celebrated her birthday like never before.

A group of young friends had gathered on the other end of the ice rink, and one by one the men and women begin sliding across the ice in short lunges. Meanwhile, a man wearing a beret and a tropical shirt, his sleeves rolled up, approaches Kiehn and a few others. He sets out one disk-shaped boulder of granite after another.

Two years earlier, Kiehn was blowing out candles in the warmth of her home in Arizona. This year, on her 44th birthday, she has to blow into her gloves to keep her hands warm. She wonders what’s more surprising — the fact that she’s standing on ice for the first time in her life or that she’s expected to get one of those 42-pound stones to the other end of the rink.

The men wielding “brooms” is the least surprising part at this point.

These are Kiehn’s first wobbly steps into the world of the Olympic sport of curling.

Kiehn, who lives and works in Kalispell, saw the sport played on television during the winter Olympics four years ago, and thought it was “just the coolest thing,” she said.

So when a friend at work told her about a new club in town that met once a week to play, she didn’t blink an eye, at least not until she stepped out on the ice.

“It was intimidating (at first),” she said. “Hey, I believe you should do something new every year, so this is it.”

Not before long, Kiehn was settling in like a regular, rumbling stones down the sheet of ice or taking up a “broom” and sweeping the ground furiously to help a teammate’s throw keep speed as it attempted to land as close to the “button” as possible and score.

Kiehn fit right in with the 16 others playing in two separate games that night, much the same way curling has in Whitefish.

That’s the beauty of the sport, says the club’s president, John Hoepfer —  whether it’s half a century ago on a frozen lake in Scotland or last Saturday at the ice rink in Whitefish, it brings people together for a good time.

“One of the reasons that curling has come down from 500 years is because that’s how people got together all those years,” Hoepfer, 60, said. “They didn’t meet at the Safeway like they do now. They came together after work and met for a game ... Even in a small town, you’re meeting neighbors for the first time in a sense. You have something in common, and you’re getting to know each other on a social level, and have fun.”

Plus, there’s nothing like a little friendly competition, he said.

“A lot of us aren’t in high school anymore so we’re looking for other things to do,” he said. “Fishing, that’s individual. Skiing, that’s you and the mountain. Now all of a sudden, here we have a team thing and it’s totally unique. It’s a sport that is kind of attractive to all levels of athletic ability, and it can work for everybody.”

The Whitefish Curling Club, which started up this winter, is the only official club in the state. In just about two month’s time, the club has already gathered a group of over 55 members who play in weekly league games and help build the club with events like “Learn to Curl Night.”

The group consists of residents like Kiehn who had never tried the “mysterious white art” until Hoepfer came to town and took up the task of spearheading an organization.

“I even bought ‘Curling for Dummies,’ ” said club member Tim Joern, who got hooked to the sport after recently playing for the first time, despite a few slips and falls.

Joern saw a flyer for the newfound club at Whitefish Middle School, where he teaches science. Having used the friction and acceleration concepts connected to curling in his classrooms before, Joern decided to try it out firsthand so he could help answer that eternal question that comes up in young minds — why do I need to know this?

“I thought, ‘well shoot I’m going to experience it myself,’ then I can talk to my kids and have a real-life application there,” he said. “Plus, it’s a sport of finesse and strategy more so than power, and that challenge is interesting. So I’ve showed up and haven’t turned back since.”

For years, the hope of curling coming to town has been a quiet murmur, while nearby Canadian establishments up north — described by some as “bowling alleys on ice” — flourish.

In June, hope came. Hoepfer arrived from Aspen, Colo., where he had helped establish a successful curling club from the ground up. Hoepfer is relatively new to the sport himself, especially considering the game dates back to 16th-century Scotland, but after playing for the first time in 2006, he was hooked. From there, Hoepfer and other enthusiasts created the Aspen club, which currently has more than 15 teams playing during the winter, Hoepfer said.

By the time he landed in Whitefish, Hoepfer had a good understanding of how to get a club on its feet and curling. With the encouragement and backing of Whitefish Parks and Recreation, Hoepfer started rallying together support little by little. A small group of locals whose only curling background came from watching the Olympic events started gathering regularly to figure out the logistics.

Pretty soon the club was up and roaring.

Recently the club celebrated quite the achievement — 32 of their very own, brand-new granite stones arrived. For the past month, the upstart organization had to borrow the expensive stones from a group in Bismarck, N.D. But not any more.

“We’re excited to have those on board,” Hoepfer said. “That will certainly be a point of pride for everybody.”

By the night’s end, Kiehn had gotten the hang of the lunging throw and had landed a stone within feet of the button. It wasn’t the birthday present she had expected to receive this year, but she didn’t seem a bit disappointed.

“I think it’s awesome, I love it,” Kiehn said after her first game. “It’s a test of balance and strength. You have to really get it going.”

Hoepfer spent most of the night helping teach the basics to Kiehn, which is what he has had to do from the start and will probably have to continue doing as more people become interested.

“I think the fascination of the strategy and everything overtakes (people’s) fear of ‘Gee, am I going to be able to do this?’” Hoepfer said. “The strongest thing I ran across when starting is almost everybody who connected with me said that they’d only watched it on TV but they’ve always kind of had a fascination for it and something about it clicked with them. There’s just something about it that was attractive.”

“It’s just wholesome fun,” Joern said. “Nobody gets bent out of shape. Everybody congratulates everybody when you do make a good shot.

“And we’re too old to fight anyway,” he laughed.

Visit www.whitefishcurlingclub.com for more information.

Reporter Dillon Tabish can be reached at 758-4463, or by e-mail at dtabish@dailyinterlake.com