A Lifelong Calling

Nate Kane marks 10 years at Northern Lights

Nate Kane always knew what he wanted to be when he grew up.

“I wanted to be a lineman since I was 5,” he says.

With two uncles who were journeymen linemen, Nate grew up seeing firsthand what the job entailed. He remembers family gatherings when the power would go out.

“My uncles would get called to work during Thanksgiving or Christmas, and I remember them getting up from the table and heading out to get the power on,” Nate says.
Years later, Nate is the one answering those calls.

This September, Nate celebrates 10 years with Northern Lights, Inc., where he serves as a journeyman lineman based in Trout Creek, Montana.

Born in Great Falls, Montana, Nate grew up north of Hayden, Idaho, and graduated from Coeur d’Alene High School. His interest in linework never faded. During his senior year,
he job-shadowed a lineman and completed his senior project on linework.

After attending pre-apprentice lineman school, Nate worked as an apprentice tree trimmer for a contractor working on Northern Lights’ system. In 2016, he joined the cooperative as a meter reader at the Sagle headquarters.

From there, he entered Northern Lights’ lineman apprenticeship program. Becoming a journeyman required years of on-the-job training along with classroom instruction. For
three years, Nate spent Saturdays in class while completing the thousands of hours of field experience required.

In August 2020, he completed the program and earned a “golden ticket,” an official journeyman lineman card.

“With that, you can work anywhere in the world,” he says.

Nate later returned to an apprenticeship program in a different role, spending a couple of years teaching the next generation of linemen.

After working in Sagle, Nate transferred to Trout Creek in March 2020. There, his crew serves a large stretch of Western Montana, from east of Troy south, and from just south of Clark Fork, down Highway 200 serving the Heron, Noxon and Trout Creek areas to just north of Thompson Falls.

“I really like that because we are local, living and working in the area, we get to know the people in the community,” he says.

“When you see an outage, it’s not a random house, it’s like, ‘Oh, Dave is out of power.’”

Nate and his wife, Paige, are raising their two boys in the community. Northern Lights provides electricity to the school where his oldest son attends kindergarten this year.

For Nate, variety is still one of the best parts of being a lineman.

“No two days are the same,” he says.

One day might be spent working from a bucket truck and another traveling by side-by-side or snowcat. Storms and outages still mean missed holidays, interrupted weekends and long nights in difficult conditions.

That makes one piece of advice he received especially important: Don’t become complacent. Complacency can kill.

When he isn’t working, Nate enjoys hunting, camping, fishing and competitive long-range shooting. He also makes an annual trip to Florida with his parents to fish for tarpon, although home is still where he prefers to be.

“I like Montana,” he says. “I don’t like leaving Montana.”

Ten years after joining Northern Lights, Nate is doing exactly what he imagined as a kid: serving his community as a lineman and, when the call comes, heading out to get the power back on.