Rising 10,604 feet out of the Tobacco Roots, Hollowtop Mountain overlooks hundreds of acres of farmland west of Manhattan, Amsterdam and Churchill.
For more than 100 years, snowmelt from Hollowtop trickled down into the valley, helping to irrigate the thousands of potato plants near Manhattan belonging to the Droge family.
From the time he was young, Jeff Droge, 30, helped work the farm; planting seeds, spraying Hollowtop water and harvesting truckload after truckload of spuds. But when the time came to decide whether to buy into the operation, Droge decided to “go out on a limb” and try something different.