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Ski the Flathead

As Whitefish Mountain Resort on Big Mountain celebrates 70 years and Blacktail Mountain Ski Area approaches its 20th anniversary, locals recall the valley’s storied history on the slopes

By Tristan Scott
Skiers at Big Mountain in the 1950s. Courtesy of the Ski Heritage Center

The rich history of skiing in the Flathead Valley was forged by people of good faith and hardy stock, visionaries who arrived at the bases of big mountains wrapped in winter white and saw a blank canvas of limitless potential.

It’s a history etched in the slopes flanking the communities of Whitefish and Lakeside, and inscribed on snow-ghosted trees striking rime-encrusted poses from their summit-top perches, which are buffeted by the wind and fog churning off the sprawling glacial lake below.

Still, even despite the monumental upgrades in technology, the inflated prices of a lift ticket, the once-unfathomable growth that defines the region, and the legions of visitors who converge here during the winter months, it’s a history that feels familiar to those who chronicle their roots here by charting a decades-long relationship with skiing.

“Skiing’s still skiing,” Cliff Persons, 81, a former ski patroller, groomer and mountain manager, said on a recent powder day at Whitefish Mountain Resort on Big Mountain, which this winter is celebrating its 70th season. “Back in the ‘60s there were times when there weren’t more than 40 people up here. You don’t see that anymore, but we’re still having a really good time.”

Persons still skis four days a week, a habit he adopted long before the advent of plastic and fiberglass boots, back when lashing a skinny pair of 8-foot hickory planks to flimsy leather boots was still a novel concept.

Cliff Persons, pictured at Whitefish Mountain Resort on Jan. 11, 2018. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon

“Back then you just kind of adjusted to the gear you had,” Persons said of the early technology, including bear-trap cable bindings and bamboo poles.

>>>Click here for a schedule of upcoming events celebrating 70 years on Big Mountain

“The magic of it hasn’t changed,” added Pat Muri, who’s been skiing Big Mountain long enough to remember pioneering routes like Evans’ Heaven with the run’s namesake, former ski patrol chief Gene Evans, and Banana Chutes before they had designated names.

“My good old days aren’t any different than someone else’s good old days being made on this mountain right now,” Muri said. “The spirit of adventure is the same.”

As the late ‘60s rolled into the early ‘70s, Muri found himself working behind the bar at the Bierstube, one of Big Mountain’s most iconic drinking establishments, and chasing that spirit of adventure up and down the slopes.

He also glimpsed it from his beer-pouring post at the ‘Stube, where some of the most famous names on Big Mountain were household.

“Toni Matt, Danny On, Tommy Moe. Those are just names to a lot of people. But they were all our friends,” Muri said, rattling off the names of elite skiers who made their name in Whitefish.

Persons is the stepfather to Tommy Moe, the gold-medal winning Olympic skier who was raised on Big Mountain, as well as a close friend of Tom Moe, Sr. He recalls watching the future ski-racing phenom growing up and honing his slopeside skills.

“People like that don’t come along very often, and when Tommy was skiing, you paid attention,” Persons said. “He had that competitive drive.”

Muri recalls a different competitive drive between Persons and the elder Moe, which was on full display around closing time one night at the Bierstube.

“I remember kicking them out of the bar at the end of the night. They went down to Casey’s for breakfast, headed home to pack their ski gear and hiked up to ski Great Northern Mountain,” Muri recounted on a recent afternoon at Big Mountain while Persons beamed.

Brian Carper, director of lodging, arrived at Big Mountain after graduating from college, and interviewed his future wife for a job. He lived at Kamp Kare Free in Whitefish, an apartment complex he said exuded the spirit of the era.

“It was full of ski bums and people fresh out of college just like me. All we did was ski,” he said. “It was amazing. So much has changed on the mountain over the years and yet so much has not. There’s this sense of family and community that make it work.”

Yet to fully grasp the nascent days of skiing in the Flathead, it helps to stand in a small clearing in a stand of trees at the head of Hellroaring Creek on Big Mountain and imagine a tiny cabin with a barrel stove burping out heat, a rustic, rickety affair built by a pioneering band of skiers.

Several of the region’s first skiers, Lloyd “Mully” Muldown, Lyle Rutherford and Ole Dalen, began climbing the Big Mountain in the 1930s, wearing squat leather boots and wool pants while inching their way uphill, fur-skinned climbers strapped to their wooden planks so they wouldn’t slip back down.

In 1935, the men, along with about a dozen volunteers and a few government mules, hammered away on the mountain’s first ski cabin, a rustic hut that provided cozy quarters for eight. When the local clergy grew nervous about men and women cohabitating in the forest, the friends mounted an effort to spearhead a second cabin the following winter. The U.S. Forest Service permits they obtained to build the Hellroaring Ski Cabins were the first recreational permits issued in the region.

The original Hellroaring Ski Club was born.

The rules to the cabin, handwritten by Mully, the club’s president, were straightforward, requiring guests to “pay one dollar per night in order to help the members to defray expenses. Adult memberships to the Hellroaring Ski Club cost $10 annually, while junior memberships cost $5.

Today, there is only one surviving member of the club, Jack Collins, who still lives in Whitefish.

By 1937, the club’s members had scabbed together a rope-tow system that was as much a work of art as a working ski lift. A few Model T wheels served as the rope-tow sheaves, the remnants of which are still girded to an old larch, while a logging rope, a vintage car engine and a handful of gears turned the grueling hike to the top into a finger-burning glide through woods thicker than dog hair.

The sheave from the original rope tow at Whitefish Mountain Resort on Jan. 11, 2018. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon

Local unemployment was high as the Depression settled on the country, but in the years leading up to World War II emphasis was placed on recreation, and members of the Hellroaring Ski Club skied all winter long.

“That really was the beginning. Back then, the only thing on the mountain were those old cabins and they received a lot of use,” says Tim Hinderman, the son of ski pioneer and long-time Big Mountain Ski School Director Karl Hinderman. “They’d hike or snowshoe or use skins to get up there. Or tow themselves up using dogsleds or horses. They had all kinds of ways of getting up there.”

A more civilized T-bar lift wasn’t installed until Dec. 14, 1947, when the Big Mountain officially opened for business, a feat of miraculous proportion spearheaded by Carl E. “Ed” Schenck and George Prentice, who arrived in Whitefish from Great Falls with $20,000 of their own money to invest in their burgeoning company, Winter Sports Incorporated.

In those early years, Schenck and Prentice put in long days and nights to open the ski area and keep it going, enticing world famous ski instructor Toni Matt to open a ski school and developing a partnership with the Great Northern Railway to draw guests from around the country.

As general manager for more than 30 years, Schenck was fully committed to pursuing his dream, doing whatever it took from driving snow plows, tending bar, making beds, and everything in between to offer guests quality skiing and a friendly atmosphere.

“So much has changed since that era, but at the same time it hasn’t changed at all,” Chester Powell, the resort’s current general manager who has been working at Big Mountain for 41 years, said recently, standing beneath the old larch and gazing up at the remnants of the original rope-tow sheave. “That was a totally different time, but the family-friendly environment still defines this place.”

Powell raised his family at Big Mountain, and recalls his grown daughter, Meagan, sipping hot cocoa and eating brownies with the switchboard operator in The Chalet (now Hellroaring Saloon) and answering the phone when guests called with inquiries.

“Raising a family and two kids on this mountain was the best thing ever,” Powell said. “It’s an amazing place to see through the eyes of children.”

Whitefish Mountain Resort general manager Chester Powell, pictured on Jan. 11, 2018. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon

To preserve the rich history for future generations, Hinderman, executive director of the Flathead Valley Ski Education Foundation, and a troop of volunteers established the Ski Heritage Center on Wisconsin Avenue, which features a replica vignette of the original Hellroaring Ski Cabin, including replica bunk beds that Persons built. The museum’s walls are adorned with historic photos of Big Mountain and its founders, and an upcoming exhibit will pay tribute to local members of the 10th Mountain Division, which was deployed to Europe to help liberate Italy in the final months of World War II, and in which his father served.

This week, the Flathead Valley Ski Heritage Center will induct three new members into its hall of fame — Sandi Unger, Giselle “Jessie” Harring and Stacey Bengtson.

Last year, the center’s four new hall-of-fame inductees included Steve Spencer, general manager of Blacktail Mountain in Lakeside, whose connection to Big Mountain dates back to 1967.

More than two decades ago, Spencer was a manager on Whitefish’s Big Mountain, and grew concerned that the hobby was becoming too cost prohibitive for some of the valley’s residents. So he left his job in Whitefish and began scouting out suitable terrain for a small, regional ski area. Twenty years later, Blacktail Mountain is going strong while Spencer’s influence on Big Mountain hasn’t been forgotten.

“In terms of the history of skiing in the Flathead Valley, few people know it better than Steve Spencer,” Hinderman said.

The same could be said about Hinderman. He’s been around to watch as the original T-bar was replaced by chairlifts in 1960 and 1968. Today, the area has 11 chairlifts, two T-bars and a magic carpet servicing the mountain’s three main faces.

It’s a departure from the mountain’s opening day in 1947, when the lone T-bar served a main slope and a lodge, and approximately 350 skiers and spectators turned up. A lift ticket was $2, a burger cost a quarter and a few nickels were enough to buy a beer. A total of 6,900 skiers visited Big Mountain that winter — last month, more than 7,000 skiers visited on four consecutive days leading up to New Year’s Day.

Still, Hinderman says much about the region’s ski heritage and its character remains unchanged.

“We’re still not mainstream even as we grow. We’re unique, still just a little ways off-the-beaten path, a little bit hard to get to,” he said. “We’re just small enough to not be big.”