Jeff Epperly knows more than most that his family name is synonymous with basketball in the Flathead Valley.  

The now 63-year-old remembers being a child and watching in awe as his father, a Montana Coaches Association Hall of Fame inductee, led the Flathead High School boys' basketball team to three consecutive state championship appearances.  

As the coach's son, it was only natural that he became immersed in basketball. He played for Flathead High School before going on to become a four-year starter for the Montana State Bobcats. His sister, meanwhile, played for the University of Montana Lady Griz. His son later embraced the sport, and his nephew now coaches the Glacier High School team.  

"The name has been in the sports world for a long time," Epperly said.  

Throughout his time playing and eventually coaching basketball, Epperly described himself as a technique-oriented person who values practice and discipline.    

He applies those same values, which brought so much success on the basketball court, to his latest endeavor as the sexton of Kalispell's Conrad Memorial Cemetery.  

"I still think some of the mindsets that come from sports still are obviously a huge part of me. They're part of my personality," he said. 

It was a job Epperly never imagined for himself. That is until the C.E. Conrad Memorial Cemetery Association — which owns and operates the historic burial ground — approached him about taking on the role. Having known the association's trustees for years, he agreed.  

Epperly was hired after the former longtime groundskeeper, Jim Korn, vanished in 2025 along with a trove of records needed to sell gravesites. The loss left the cemetery in limbo for six months until the paper documents were recovered from a distant relative's home later that fall.  

Korn, who died on May 17 at age 92 in a Utah hospital, maintained gravesite and monument sales records using a distinctly old-school system that relied entirely on paper. He also had a personal method of color coding and used either pen or pencil to indicate when someone had been interred in a previously sold lot, a system Epperly has had to decipher on his own.  

The daunting task of digitizing the recordkeeping system Jim employed for over two decades, while also documenting burials that predate his tenure, sounds overwhelming. Yet Epperly said he approached the challenge the same way he found success on the basketball court: staying levelheaded and taking it one step at a time.  

"It's discipline and being patient. Not worrying about it, not freaking out. I'm not going to get it done right away. It's going to take time, so having some patience to do that," Epperly said. "I'm still learning a lot."

WHILE OVERSEEING a cemetery's day-to-day operations was not on Epperly's bucket list, management is a skill he's cultivated over the years.  

After spending a decade pastoring, he returned to the food and beverage industry he had become familiar with during the eight summers he spent bartending at Moose's Saloon. Starting in 2011, he managed Sykes Diner and became the food and beverage manager of Buffalo Hill Golf Club a few years later.  

Epperly's latest gig is not the first time his professional life has intersected with death either.  

Epperly spent seven years as an end-of-life counselor at Logan Health Hospice helping patients prepare for death. His goal, he said, was to ensure each person experienced a "gentle landing" in their final days.  

"Death is the big unknown," he said. "You don't experience it and then come back and tell everybody about it. You experience it and you're gone, and everyone else is left behind." 

Now, Epperly helps those who are grieving over the loss of a loved one, whether it's getting a monument engraved or scheduling a burial.    

"Grief is a tough one, and so my staff and I interact with that grief," he said.  

While Epperly is thankful for the three-person crew responsible for maintaining the cemetery's 104 acres of rolling green hills and towering trees, he remains solely responsible for nearly every other aspect of the operation, from selling grave lots to managing employees, recording sales and overseeing special projects.  

To stay on top of the constant stream of calls he receives, Epperly keeps a detailed log to ensure he returns them as promptly as possible. That log has grown to more than 2,200 entries since last October.  

Responsiveness is important to Epperly, but so is keeping Conrad Cemetery a beautiful, calming landscape for families to remember loved ones.  

That shows in his extensive docket of projects to spruce up the area, including updating irrigation and roads, designing a walking garden park through a columbarium and buying new machinery for landscaping.  

"It's a place where people can grieve and remember. The history of Kalispell is represented at the cemetery, and that's amazing," he said. 

EPPERLY CURRENTLY works out of the basement of the Northwest Montana History Museum, a fitting location for digitally logging gravesites from paper grave cards that date back over a century.  

"We're still burying people in graves that were bought in 1905," he said.  

But the space is small, and the thousands of files laid out on several tables in his office are covered in tarp because the ceiling tends to leak when it rains.  

The cemetery recently purchased the former Big Sky Monuments building that sits off Conrad Drive at the cemetery entrance. Once renovations are completed, it will become Epperly's new base of operations.  

Once he's moved in, he hopes to delegate some of his many responsibilities to more staff.  

"This whole thing is a legacy project into modernizing it and taking it to another level," he said. 

Sharing the cemetery's past was a passion of Korn’s, one that Epperly wants to continue as sexton. He is crafting a website for the public to search for gravesites and read about the people buried there.  

Notes Korn left behind reveal just how much he valued the history tied to the grounds, Epperly said.  

"[Korn] really wanted to honor the Conrads," he said. "He was passionate about that." 

Alicia "Lettie" Conrad established the cemetery in 1903 following the death of her husband, Charles E. Conrad, a pioneer and businessman who founded Kalispell.  

Epperly recalled learning about Lettie Conrad's frequent evening trips on horseback from her home, the Conrad Mansion, to the mausoleum where her husband was buried.  

"You start getting those images in your head and you go, 'Yeah, it's quite a legacy to try to honor that and her wishes,'" Epperly said. "That's where [Korn's] influence on me in his writings took shape." 

Epperly described the historic cemetery as being in a period of transition.  

"I want to leave it way better than I found it," he said. 

Reporter Jack Underhill can be reached at 406-758-4407 or [email protected]. If you value local journalism, pledge your support at dailyinterlake.com/support. 

    C.E. Conrad Memorial Cemetery sexton Jeff Epperly looks over a table full of recovered burial plot deed books, site maps, gravesite index cards and other records at the Northwest Montana History Museum on Thursday, Nov. 20. (Casey Kreider/Daily Inter Lake)
 Casey Kreider