eanie Gusty took a winding path from the small rural village of her childhood to selling almost $3 million worth of heavy equipment last year. But it was the path itself that helped Gusty lean into her individual strengths and set her up to be a unique asset and incredible employee.

Growing up in a tiny Kuskokwim River village, Gusty and her family participated in the traditional life of subsistence hunting, trapping, and gathering.

The residents of Stony River are Athabascan and Yupik. The 2020 census recorded thirty-nine people living there on the north bank of the Kuskokwim River, 185 miles northeast of Bethel.

It’s way out in the Alaska Bush, but Gusty says she always had her eye on the big city. She remembers a trip to Anchorage with her first-grade class.

“It was going to the big city,” she says. “I knew I wanted to move out of the village.”

Why?

“I liked running water, TV, going to the movies, dining out.”

Gusty grew up in Stony River hunting moose, harvesting berries, and growing vegetables in a garden. While she moved away from the village, she didn’t entirely leave the lifestyle behind. She now escapes Anchorage and reconnects to the land at her own property: five acres with a lake tucked in 12 miles west of Sleeping Lady, where she hunts for moose and fishes for trout.

The cabin there was built by Gusty’s late fiancé Randy Jaques, and it was a labor of love that she treasures.

It’s not the only treasure she’s found outside the big city. She recalls from her childhood that, in the village, her family had to prime and pump a well for water. One day, it didn’t work, and the mechanism ground to a halt. Her dad took it apart and found what was jamming the pump: a gold nugget.

Gusty doesn’t know anyone who has looked for gold in Stony River, much less anyone who can say a gold nugget ever came looking for them.

Gusty, who is Yupik, says her 1996 entrance into the world of business was by way of the Alaska Job Corps, part of the federal government’s nationwide Jobs Corps program that provides free career training and education for people aged 16 to 24.

“I went to the Alaska Job Corps for one year to certify as a receptionist,” Gusty says. The Alaska Job Corps not only trained her in her chosen field but also taught her how to transition to city life from village life and navigate Anchorage.

“It wasn’t easy,” Gusty says. “The Job Corps paid us every two weeks, and they taught us how to take the bus. And I was just a shy girl always sitting in the back.”

Although challenging, Gusty persevered, and with a reception certificate and her status as a Calista Corporation shareholder in hand, Gusty landed a position as a receptionist in Calista’s Anchorage headquarters in 1997. She steadily moved up in the organization, taking on roles as an accounting assistant, an accounting technician, and then an administrative assistant.

She left Calista in 2007 to work for The Kuskokwim Corporation, the joint village corporation for Stony River and nine of its downstream neighbors.

“I worked as a contractor on base as the executive assistant to the tribal liaison Jerry Wilton,” Gusty says. In that position, she helped research and document the history of the Alaska Territorial Guard, a project she found very interesting, Gusty says.

The Alaska Territorial Guard, also known as the Eskimo Scouts, was a military reserve force component of the US Army organized in 1942 in response to attacks on United States territory in Hawaii and Japan’s occupation of parts of Alaska during World War II.

The Alaska Territorial Guard operated until 1947 with an estimated 6,368 volunteers, who were enrolled from 107 communities throughout Alaska and served without pay. Members ranged from 80 years old to those as young as 12, because so many fighting-age men were already in regular military service.

In 2013, Gusty directed her career back to Calista when she was hired as an executive assistant for Yukon Equipment, a subsidiary of Calista’s construction subsidiary Calista Brice.

Founded in 1945, Yukon Equipment is the oldest Alaskan-owned heavy equipment dealer in the state, selling new and used backhoes, excavators, skid steers, wheel loaders, bulldozers, equipment trailers, forklifts, and tractors. It became part of Calista in 2010 when the corporation bought Brice Inc. and its subsidiaries.

“I caught on with equipment and one day decided to reach out to villages with phone calls, emails, mailings, and cold calls,” she says.

Being able to speak Yupik has helped Gusty in business. “I speak a little Yupik and utilize my language to sell equipment,” she says.

And sell she certainly does.

She sold $1 million worth of heavy equipment in 2020, $2 million in 2021, and close to $3 million in 2022.

According to Calista, rural sales represent more than 30 percent of Yukon Equipment’s total equipment sales and accounted for roughly 20 percent of company revenue in 2022.

Gusty attributes her sales acumen to not only to her ability to understand a village’s need but also understanding her contacts’ dislike of cold calls. She makes the pitch brief and follows up with an email or a mailing.

Gusty also credits the success of the department to her co-workers for their support and close working relationship. “It’s a lot of teamwork and good staff that gets the job done,” she says. “When selling heavy equipment, Charles Klever and myself—we make an excellent team.”

That cooperation is exactly what is needed given Alaska’s vastness, geography, and lack of roads. “If a village needs a piece of heavy equipment ASAP, it’s flown out, but 90 percent are barged out,” Gusty says, and delivery by water can be tricky. “Like, Allakaket gets only one barge a year.”

What is the piece of equipment that her Bush customers want most?

“It’s the 821G Case wheel loader,” she says.

Answering many villages’ desire for a machine that can do it all, the loader comes with automated bucket controls—such as return-to-dig, return-to-travel, and height control—and four power modes to control speed and power. An electro-hydraulic, load-sensing system allows for precise bucket and loader functions.

Gusty says the loader is used to move hefty, heavy containers like Conexes. She says the Case 821G wheel loader can easily handle the load.

Every day is a chance to sell heavy equipment, she says, and her success in doing so is a benefit for the purchaser and the company.

“Working for a Calista Corporation subsidiary is a great honor,” she says. “I’m very humbled to be working for a company that has been here for over seventy-eight years. I enjoy my daily duties such as building ads that we place in magazines, preparing reports, greeting visitors, and answering phone calls.”

She says she has gotten to exactly where she wants to be in life: working for a great company.

“It’s a good job, good people, and I’m happy to be here.”