Lone Peak Cannabis Company, known by most Montana locals simply as “LPC,” is, as Founder and Owner Charlie Gaillard puts it, “Big Sky born and raised.” It’s a phrase that carries weight, sparking curiosity among outsiders. If you’re lucky enough to grow up in Big Sky, MT—a small, tight-knit mountain town of approximately 3,500 year-round residents—you understand why. LPC’s home there is as central to its identity as Gaillard’s relationship with the community and his outlook on the world.
“I moved to Big Sky to start LPC, so my love affair with Big Sky is also my love affair with LPC,” he says. “I’ve really embraced the ski community and culture, and to have them fully embrace me back has been incredibly fulfilling.”
That sense of reciprocity—what Gaillard describes as the community “giving him and LPC a big hug”—is what he loves most about the resort town. “There’s a connection between the ski culture and the way in which we run our business. We’re 100 percent organic; we grow in a living soil that’s 14 years old, and those involved in the ski community look at that—they respect it.”
Gaillard hasn’t just built a cannabis company in Big Sky, he’s built a cultivation philosophy shaped by personal need, place and a belief that growing should work with nature—not against it.
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Nestled against the backdrop of the iconic Lone Mountain, home to Big Sky Resort—one of the world’s most in-demand destinations—Gaillard opened the very first LPC store in 2010. With its natural beauty and abundance of outdoor activity, Big Sky is a natural fit for LPC’s ethos.
“This is our heart and soul up here,” says Gaillard, 56, who’s found a way to balance the demands of being a business owner in the cannabis industry with his joy for engaging in all the Big Sky fun.
“He’s kind of like a fixture,” says Heather Budd, who’s called Big Sky home since 1997. “He’s always got a huge smile on his face—he’s always having fun. We see him out and about on the hill and at events. I’ve always really respected his product and his approach. He supports a lot of local endeavors. I think it’s really hard to live, work, play and be successful in a community such as Big Sky. It’s really awesome what he’s doing.”
Moving from Philadelphia to Big Sky was a deliberate choice at a moment when both Gaillard’s life and the cannabis industry were beginning to shift. In 2010, a friend who’d recently moved there encouraged him to come look at Montana’s blossoming cannabis scene.
At the time, Big Sky was still largely off the radar compared to Jackson Hole and Aspen, for example. The Montana town, he says, was filled with ski bums, bikers, anglers, avid outdoorsmen and hippies—a bunch of misfits finding a new home. And while the state’s medical cannabis scene launched in 2004, it didn’t really gain traction until 2009-10. Timing—and decades of experience cultivating his own stash—were on Gaillard’s side.
“Something that helped me is that I went into the sheriff’s office up here in Big Sky and gave them my social security number, and I was like, ‘Hey I want you to look into me because if I move here, I’m moving here to grow marijuana.’ And they were like, ‘It’s cool man, it’s legal.’”
Five dispensaries existed in Big Sky when Gaillard arrived, but before long, LPC was the only one standing. “The others had shut down for various reasons, and we grabbed a foothold and started making some waves in the local community—growing 100 percent organic, living soil marijuana for the people. People really liked what we were doing, and away we went.”
But Gaillard’s personal connection to cannabis—and the philosophy that would shape LPC—started long before Big Sky.
As a teenager, he struggled with debilitating migraines that produced blindness in his left eye at onset. The solutions provided by mainstream medicine were far from ideal, being prescribed drugs that would leave him incapacitated for days.
“One of the symptoms of the migraines would be my left eye would go blind about an hour before the pain would set in,” he says. With the encouragement from a friend, he experimented with cannabis as an alternative. “Smoking a joint made the pain tolerable where I didn’t have to just stop living for four days. It didn’t make the headache go away, but it lessened the effects to where I didn’t need the medication,” he says. “I started growing weed because of that.”
Eventually, he began growing his own and became known among his friends for the incredible quality of the weed from the very beginning. Much of that is thanks to his living soil growing practices, which he describes as modeled after the organic processes of the earth.
Why living soil? For Gaillard, it’s simple. “I’m into preserving the earth and all that crunchy stuff,” he says. He doesn’t use bottled nutrients or chemicals, even if they say they’re organic. His farming methods are designed to protect the mechanisms he believes exist between the plants, the soil and the microorganisms in the soil. “I think it’s the way it should be done,” he says. “That’s just the way I grow.”
With strong convictions and an admirable 24/7 work ethic, what started as personal instinct now defines how LPC operates at scale. From the beginning, Gaillard was focused on making LPC as a living soil, organic-based grow operation. And more than a decade later, they’re still using the original soil he created in 2012. With modern soil tests and organic amendments, he’s able to keep the soil fully alive and vibrant, giving his plants the very best nutrition possible.
Gaillard also developed a unique approach to watering—something that reflects his continued drive to stand out and stay aligned with natural systems. Rather than top watering like most soil operations, LPC uses sub-irrigation. This comes from the historical way cannabis plants have always gotten water, by sending a tap root deep into the ground to find water when the topsoil is dry, especially late in the season.
“Our beds, so to speak, always have six to seven inches of an aquifer available,” he says. “It’s cool, because if you do some research in the Himalayas—where a lot of people say the plant originated—you’ll find similar subterranean water availability to plants.”
A self-described “earth guy,” Gaillard says he’s doing what he can to respect and take care of the land that gives and gives.
“I don’t think we should be digging, sucking the oil out of here. I don’t think we should be touching the earth,” he says. “This is all about water conservation as well—the amount of water our plants require versus another grow is greatly reduced. We’re trying to target all these little hot spots in society that say, ‘Hey, we need to protect the earth.’”
Gaillard is concerned about the human impact on the planet. “I’m a big believer that if we keep doing what we’re doing and we show no signs of stopping, we’re going to eventually create a catastrophic event that might possibly take us out as a human species,” he says. “So, I’m trying to do my little part. I can’t control the masses, but at least I can control me.”
Gaillard’s personal mindset extends to his business practices. With a realization that they can only scale cultivation so much, LPC has expanded strategically through its retail footprint with nine stores and three cultivation facilities across the state, and they’re on the hunt for more space. “We’re really good at running retail stores—at least we think we are—and it seems that the consumer agrees with us.”
Today, Big Sky is home to five other dispensaries. And while LPC does see sales boost from tourist surges, Gaillard says the majority of business is locally generated. He attributes much of that to being a visible, active community member.
“I’m involved in the community—not like a politician, but for those that are in the ski culture who like to ski and party, they see Charlie all the time,” he says, chuckling. Besides skiing, he says he attends live music shows, rides mountain bikes and is the manager of both the softball and curling teams.
“They do the same stuff I like to do,” he says. “You put my liking of organic products on top of that combined with thoughtful ingredients and production…well, it’s made an impact.”
And in Big Sky, that kind of alignment doesn’t go unnoticed.
Originally published in Issue 53 of Cannabis Now Magazine.
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