Page 17 - Flathead Beacon // 1.28.15

FLATHEADBEACON.COM
COVER
JANUARY 28, 2015 | 17
he approached Elliott about making good on his claim, and Elliott leased the bar from the mountain.
“They called him up at the end of the season and said, ‘If you think you can do a better job, then why don’t you run it?’” recalls Bev Elliott, Gary’s wife. “So we did. It was good fun.”
Gary Elliott passed away last year, but Bev said the 25 years that the couple ran the bar helped shape its enduring spirit, which has been pickled and preserved through years of rowdy nights.
“It was like organized chaos. One night we had someone ride a motorcycle through the bar,” she said. “But Gary ran a good bar. It always looked like it was out of control but it was just good, clean beer-drinking fun.”
Two of the bar’s strongest traditions emerged dur- ing the Elliotts’ tenure at the Bierstube – the annual Pray for Snow party and the bar’s souvenir ring.
“We used to sacrifice a virgin,” Bev Elliott said. “I would buy a mannequin from Penney’s and dress her up and all of the bartenders would wear black robes and carry her above their heads and dance around a big bonfire and toss her in. The crowd would go wild and every year we would have snow within 24 hours.”
It was also Elliott who installed the colossal bell hanging behind the bar to dispense souvenir rings, free for the asking. The Great Northern Railroad previously owned the bell, but gave it to Ed Schenck, who installed it at the top of the T-bar.
According to Bev Elliott, a group of ski patrollers stole the bell one night after too many drinks and fer- ried it down the mountain. When they sheepishly re- turned it to Schenck the following day, he hung it in the Bierstube.
“They were very drunk,” Elliott said.
The Elliotts also started the Bierstube Olympics, which involved upside-down beer chugging contests at the bar, above which skiers would hand by their legs from a rope suspended between the rafters.
Skiers perched on the open rafters where they
learned the fine art of drinking while hanging upside down, “defying both gravity and digestive sensibility,” Norm Kurtz said in the book “Hellroaring.”
One night, a skier donned an old pair of Kazama skis, opened the doors on both sides of the Bierstube, climbed to the top of the parking lot, crouched in a tuck and shot through the bar, grabbing a rope hanging from the ceiling to swing through the backdoor and off the end of the deck.
The Blacks, who owned the Bierstube prior to the Elliotts, raised the ire of the locals by raising the price of beer to 35 cents for a mug and 40 cents for a red beer, when the price had previously been a quarter for a mug. But skiers came down in droves from Canada, and Bev Elliott recalls one hectic night when 125 school buses were crammed into the parking lot.
The Bierstube was named the Best Bar in Canada following a contest held by a Canadian radio station, an honor the bar displayed proudly. The bar also pro- vided the tubing for keg-sucking contests, in which two groups of Canadians – generally opposing race teams – would line up on either side of a long table and pass the tubing attached to a tap.
“It sounds terrible now but in those days it was all fun,” Elliott said. “It was fun. Granted some of those kids got sick but that is what happens when you drink from a tube.”
Their Backdoor Burgers also received national ac- claim when they were voted “Best Burger” and “Best Ski Bar in the West” by U.S. News and World Report. Later on, when the après-ski bar installed a mechani- cal bull under new ownership, the short-lived machine garnered most of the out-of-town press until it was re- moved in favor of ski movies.
Big-ticket musical acts played the ‘Stube every night of the week, including bands like The Drifters, Asleep at the Wheel, Bo Didley, Elvin Bishop, The Box- tops, Vassar Clements, the Mission Mountain Wood Band, and The Beat Farmers.
“There was always music there. Every night was a party,” Buck Love said. “And there were people ev- erywhere. We all hope the Bierstube survives in some shape or form. It is certainly a tradition at Big Moun- tain and you can ask any Canadian visitor what they remember about Big Mountain and the answer is inevi- tably the Bierstube. They were here for the Bierstube. I still go in there now and then and it’s still great to have a beer and catch up with the old timers.”
Polumbus, WMR’s spokesperson, said the moun- tain’s management team is sensitive to the historic significance of the Bierstube to Big Mountain, and will work with McCintosh to preserve its legacy and pro- vide a future for the bar.
“There has always been a Bierstube from its origi- nal carnation in the Lodge outside of Ed’s office to its new location after the fire, to its current location built in 1967. We invested $120,000 to restore the founda- tion in 2011. So the management and owners and em- ployees are committed to the future of the Bierstube,” she said.
The resort invested the money to restore and en- hance the structural integrity of the Bierstube, with Whitefish Mountain Resort President Dan Graves say- ing at the time: “The Bierstube has played a significant role in shaping the mountain culture of this resort. We feel strongly, as part of our commitment to preserve the ski area’s heritage, we want to extend its life for years to come.”
McCintosh said that while there’s a potential for the Bierstube to move locations at the behest of White- fish Mountain Resort, its essence will remain the same.
“I don’t want it written on my tombstone that I killed the Stube,” he said. “I’m not going to let that hap- pen. The Bierstube is more than just the bar. It is kind of a moment or a place in time. It can be recreated. I do believe that there will always be a Bierstube up here and hopefully those values will be preserved.”
[email protected]
ABOVE: Whitefish Mountain Resort co-founder Ed Schenck skiing on The Big Mountain. COURTESY STUMPTOWN HISTORICAL MUSEUM
TOP LEFT: The Bierstube at Whitefish Mountain Resort. GREG LINDSTROM | FLATHEAD BEACON
BOTTOM LEFT: On Oct. 31, 1963, a fire burned the Bierstube, including much of the original Frabert monkey and much of the original Lodge. COURTESY STUMPTOWN HISTORICAL MUSEUM