Saige Mortensen was a dancer. She loved ballet, tap and hip-hop. She also loved to ice fish with her family and play four-square with her friends at Osmond Elementary.

Kirstin Mortensen loved to read books and be at home with her family. She was a mother, daughter, sister and friend. She was also beloved by her ESL students at Osmond and Afton Elementary schools.

Those are just some of the things Derek Mortensen would like you to know about his daughter and wife — who in his eyes will forever be 11 and 40 years old.

There is something else Derek would like you to think about when remembering his family — don’t drink and drive.

On May 24, 2023, on Highway 238 between Afton and Auburn, the Mortensen family was on their way home from a night at the movies when a drunk driver crossed the center line and hit their GMC Acadia head-on. Derek survived with serious injuries. Their then-18-year-old son, Spencer, escaped with a broken leg. But Kirstin and Saige died at the scene. Another daughter, Jennifer, then 17, was not in the car that night.

In the little more than a year and a half since that tragic evening, Derek Mortensen has taken his grief and channeled it to healing and health — and into a business that not only carries on the memory of his family but also supports anti-drinking-and-driving initiatives. On a recent sunny, January day, SVI Media met with Mortensen at his business, Survivor Rods, in Afton, a basement operation he launched in July 2023 just two months after the accident. With this reporter, he reminisced about marrying his high school sweetheart, raising their family, ice fishing trips to Montpelier reservoir, the horrific night their lives changed forever and the healing that can come when focusing your grief — and even anger — into something good.

“The whole thing was to make people realize in a subtle way that there’s a reason behind this business,” Mortensen said, sitting at a desk covered in custom-made ice fishing rods, some bearing the name, “Signature Saige,” in his daughter’s favorite colors — teal, pinks and purples.

“The accident is what created this business,” he continued, “and by calling it Survivor Rods is because Me, Jenn and Spencer survived. Through this business, we’re still growing; we’re still pushing ourselves, and we’re trying to give back to the community.”

Survivor Rods is an LLC based in Afton that creates custom-made fishing rods, including ice fishing rods, sold through survivorrods.com. Five percent of proceeds go back into a part of the business that feeds anti-drinking-and-driving initiatives. With his partners, Grant and Heidi Rogers, in whose home the basement business resides, they create t-shirts and water bottles bearing sayings like, “After three, give someone the key” and “Don’t drink and drive.” At last winter’s Parade of Lights in Afton, Survivor Rods sponsored a float from which parade-goers were tossed free t-shirts.

In time, according to Mortensen, as the business grows, more proceeds will be funneled to non-profits supporting anti-drinking-and-driving causes. Mortensen emphasized he has no malice toward the driver of the other car who also did not survive the accident, nor does he have malice toward alcohol.

“I have issues with the decisions people make after they drink alcohol,” he related, adding that he hopes when people do activities such as ice fishing and consume alcohol, and perhaps they’re using one of the Survivor Rods, “it’s a subtle reminder, ‘we built this business because a drunk person took the lives of my family.’”

In 2000, Mortensen was a senior at Star Valley High School when a new girl from Bountiful, Utah, moved to Thayne. He learned her name, Kirstin Derbidge, because she asked his friend to a dance. A group of 12 teenagers went together and “had a blast,” Mortensen recalled, smiling. Realizing they liked one another, Kirstin asked Derek to the next dance. “The rest was pretty much history. We became high school sweethearts.”

The two even had competitions to see who could be most creative in asking each other out. One year, Derek and a friend used red food coloring and a spray painter to paint “Will you go to the prom with me?” in the snow. Derek and Kirsten stayed in touch when he served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 2001 to 2003 in Phoenix, Arizona. Two months after he returned, they married on June 26, 2003, in the Bountiful Utah Temple.

The young couple lived for a time in Idaho Falls, Idaho, but moved back to Star Valley in 2007. Derek worked in sanitation services and Kirstin landed work teaching ESL in the school district.

“She loved to connect with the different cultures,” he recalled about his wife. “To this day, a lot of those kids remember Kirstin. They just adored her for her teaching style.”

Over time, they had children: Spencer, born in 2005; Jennifer, 2006; and Saige, 2011. They also started their own renovating business called DKM Renovations for “Derek and Kirstin Mortensen.” The business flourished to the point Derek quit his job with sanitation services to serve clients full time.

“I’ve always been the entrepreneur-type,” Mortensen said, describing his days growing up on the family farm north of Afton where you fixed or built machinery yourself.

And all the while, the Mortensen children were growing up. Derek describes his daughters as “spicy” with minds of their own but with matching kind hearts. One year, Saige was frustrated because no one would include her in four-square on the playground. So, Derek and Kirstin bought her a four-square ball and urged her to create her own group.

“Pretty soon, everyone wanted to play with Saige because she had a four-square ball. Instead of her feeling like she was the victim, she felt like, ‘Okay, I’ve got this group of people, and we can play four-square together.’ We empowered her,” Mortensen related.

Today, that same ball is on display with other items at Osmond Elementary as a memorial to Saige.

On the night in 2023, the family was celebrating Spencer’s graduation the day before from Star Valley High School by going to see the movie, “Fast and Furious 10.” At roughly 9:40 p.m., they were on their way home. Kirstin was driving. Spencer was in the front passenger seat, with Derek and Saige in the two back seats. The driver under the influence coming the opposite way sideswiped a truck in front of them before smashing into them.

“We heard that impact inside the car, so I looked up, and I remember Kirstin gasping, and she gripped the steering wheel,” Mortensen recalled. He blacked out for a short while, waking to Spencer trying to climb out through the sunroof. His wife and daughter were not moving.

Later, first responders were able to lift Derek, painfully, out of the vehicle. The accident, said Mortensen, “sent the ball of my hip through my pelvis.”

Until he was in the ambulance, Mortensen held onto hope that Kirstin and Saige were just unconscious. But then, he thought to himself, “I don’t think they’re with us.”

Later, at the hospital, a close friend comforted Derek, confirming that Kirstin and Saige were gone. Derek was life flighted to University Hospital in Salt Lake City, where he underwent two surgeries in 24 hours. He wasn’t back on his feet until August.

During those 10 weeks off his feet, unable to work, Mortensen pondered with his friend, Grant Rogers, what they could do to honor Kirstin and Saige. It had to be something meaningful, not superficial like a bumper sticker.

Then, the two reminisced how Saige loved to ice fish with the family. How they would put up a hut on the frozen reservoir and see the fish swimming below. “Saige got really good at it, and she would pick ‘em, just like fishing out of a fishbowl.

“One year we went out, we caught 160 perch. [Saige] would name them. Like, ‘here comes Johnny. Here comes Sally.’ She’d have a blast with it,” Mortensen said.

Rogers suggested to his grieving friend, “Why don’t we build fishing poles because Saige loved to go ice fishing?”

Mortensen loved the idea. “We thought, ‘Okay, we can do that. Let’s name it the Signature Saige line of poles.’ What we did was we looked at the business through an 11-year-old’s eyes.”

From that first line of “Signature Saige” poles in teals, pinks and purples, Survivor Rods has developed to include different kinds of fishing rods in various colors. Word of mouth has spread, and Survivor Rods is getting orders from Wyoming, Utah and Alaska.

In the months since the accident, Mortensen has learned a lot about the stages of grief — and the importance of faith. When speaking of the deaths of his wife and daughter, he became quiet and emotional. Then he related a promise he made to himself. “There are stages of grief, and I need to allow myself to go through those stages of grief. The one thing I told myself that I would never do is get stuck in any of those stages. The one stage I was most afraid of was anger.

“First off, I have to do something to be an example to my kids and help them get through this process. If I get stuck in anger or I get stuck in any of the other aspects of grieving, I can’t be of assistance to them. So, when I was in the hospital in Utah, I made a pact with myself that if I felt anger that I would be angry for 24 hours. Then after those 24 hours, I had to let it go.”

Several times since then, Mortensen said, he’s had to go through that 24-hour process. And each time, he gave himself 24 hours to move on. In that time, he, Spencer and Jennifer had leaned on each other. And Mortensen has leaned on his faith.

“I’ve heard people talk that they were angry with God because of the situation they were in,” he related. “I had enough self-worth to understand that being mad at God is not going to solve my challenges. If I got mad at God, I would have more challenges. I felt like I had to lean on Him.”

And channel his energy into something that would make a difference — such as what he calls a “grass roots effort.” There is already a law on the books, he said. Don’t drink and drive.

“We can’t attack this through [more] laws because people don’t follow the laws anyway,” Mortensen contended.

But maybe, just maybe, if someone goes ice fishing and they look at their pole and “see the name ‘Signature Saige,’ they know an 11-year-old lost her life because of a drunk driver.”