To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Kalispell Ski Club picked up the tab last Saturday evening for anyone in the valley who wanted to make some turns at Whitefish Mountain Resort. And yet what might be most amazing about the Kalispell Ski Club’s long history is that such a display of generosity pales alongside the service the club’s members have performed on Big Mountain for five decades.
Since 1959, the Kalispell Ski Club has been promoting, teaching and spreading the sport of skiing in the Flathead, primarily by making what can be an expensive and intimidating sport more affordable and accessible. The club’s annual ski swap, held every fall at the Northwest Montana fairgrounds, gives families access to quality, inexpensive used and new equipment.
But for decades, the nonprofit club’s core mission has been offering ski lessons to kids and teenagers at the beginner and intermediate levels. And the hundreds of skiers throughout Montana and beyond addicted to skiing will attest to the club’s success.
Matt Shearer, a former president of the Kalispell Ski Club who also directed its “Learn-to-Ski” program, interviewed many of its founding members. He credits Jean Arthur’s book, “Hellroaring: Fifty Years on the Big Mountain,” as the definitive chronicle of the events surrounding the birth of the resort there. In the 1950s, he said, Whitefish Ski Club members saw a need for a similar organization for their neighbors to the south.
“Members of the Whitefish Ski Club decided that maybe they ought to have something for Kalispell, because people were commuting,” Shearer said.
Oystein and Gail Boveng, along with Bob Fehlberg and Jim Stephens were among the founding members of the Kalispell Ski Club, according to Shearer, who said there were others involved but he had difficulty researching who they were.
In its early days, an enormous amount of volunteer effort went into making the resort a successful, ongoing venture and into developing athletes to ski there.
“Their issue and our issue still is to introduce people to skiing and make it a lifetime sport,” Shearer added. “The mission is the same.”
The club began with 10 or 12 instructors teaching somewhere between 50 and 75 kids. In the ensuing decades the club has grown to include as many as 400 families a few years ago, though Shearer believes membership has tapered off a bit since then. But as the club grew, the demand for volunteers to work as ski instructors increased.
“As we had more people willing to teach, then we had more and more teachers available so we could teach more applicants,” he said.
Over time, the hundreds of kids passing though the Kalispell Ski Club’s instructional program developed into a feeder program for the resort, developing its racing squads as well as its local customer base.
“You get these kids, 6 to 14, hooked on skiing and that becomes their priority,” Shearer said. “It becomes a real positive focus in their lives and it does for their families too.”
Shearer credits Pat Gyrion, who ran the ski school for 15 years, as being instrumental in making the program what it is – and his dedication was characteristic of the many volunteers who passed through the Kalispell Ski Club over the years.
“He carried all of the ski school signs up every Saturday morning and took them down every Saturday night,” Shearer said. “That became kind of a full-time job for him.”
On a recent weekday, when the snow was dumping out of the sky, Shearer headed up to the mountain to ski, and marveled at the crowds, even after the holidays had passed.
There were many skiers. They were all locals. And the Kalispell Ski Club had a hand in teaching many of them.
“The ski clubs have had a major impact on filling those parking lots over the years,” Shearer said. “It’s wonderful for the mountain and it’s wonderful for us.”