Early troubles plagued Big Mountain founders

This column is created by the Flathead Valley Ski Education Foundation and the Ski Heritage Center Museum of Skiing. Enjoy these fascinating stories about the rich and colorful history of skiing in the Flathead Valley and get ready for Ski Heritage Days on March 16 – 18.

Ed Schenck told the story of the founding of a ski hill on Big Mountain to Edmund Christopherson for The Saturday Evening Post on March 4, 1950.

Popularity? Once a couple of disgruntled stockholders started a movement to have us run out of town. Since our project on the hill was largely built with townsfolk’s money, we’re watched as closely as the bank president or a new school teacher. Why, even now, if I drive the corporation’s jeep downtown at night to mail a business letter, it’s ten to one that the next day I’ll overhear someone saying “There goes that Schenck. Saw him last night using the company car to go out beering again.”

Still, there are few people in town who don’t feel personally proud of Big Mountain. You can see it from almost anywhere in town. It stands out from the other mountains to the north because of the wide, crisscrossed patterns, like an enormous figure four, that the ski runs etch in its evergreen cover. Somehow it has become a concrete expression of the town’s spirit of adventure and co-operation.

When the lift broke down, as it did twice last season, the townsfolk flocked to repair it as if it were a levee about to give way in flood time. Both times the cable jumped a sheave on Tower 2. The T-bar bounced off the timber, got tangled, and made a sickening, splintered shambles of the rigging.

The sudden silence of the lift motor hits the whole mountainside with a thud. It’s especially bad on Saturday morning, for, in addition to the nasty job of repair, we have to turn the skiers away and give refunds during our most lucrative weekend business. Right away George jumps in the jeep and starts hunting for four 22-foot-long, 4-by-8 timbers that the lumber yards don’t stock. After looking at the damage, I get on the phone and call for volunteers, for bolts, a welding outfit, lights, an electric drill and a transit to put in new center-line stakes.

In response to our call, half a dozen men will drop what they’re doing – leave their shops, close their offices and rush up to help on the hill. Every minute counts, and others are already on the tower, dismantling the wreckage. When the timbers finally arrive, 20 men, with ropes and tackle galore, drag them half a mile up to the tower through waist-deep arrow. Other volunteers show up as the day wears on. As night closes in we train floodlights, borrowed from the local theater, on our work.

While we take turns working at the icy tops of the 40-foot poles, wives keep food and coffee hot in the lodge, and joke and sing at us over the PA system. In between stretches on the wind-whipped tower, weary, chilled volunteers, including weekend skiers from Montana State University, warm themselves by the lodge fire and catch short naps in the bunks downstairs. By opening time we have Tower 2 repaired and the lift running again. Last summer, many of the same volunteers helped fix the tower so it won’t go haywire again.

The breakdowns reminded us of our whole hectic adventure in building the ski lift and the lodge. To start with, we couldn’t find a contractor who was interested in even looking at the hill on anything but a cost-plus basis. We’d designed a good modern lodge, but we discovered that every possible building site was pocked with subterranean springs. So we had to begin with an extensive underground drainage system. All our building materials and sometimes even the water to make concrete had to be brought up to the site over a road the last couple of miles of which existed chiefly in our imaginations. Gravel, billed at a $1 a cubic yard loaded into the truck, cost us $5 by the time it was dumped on the hill.

Workers were hard to coax up to the hill too. Caterpillar-tractor drivers were especially hard to come by. George had done some mountainside cat driving while a partner in a gold-mining venture several years before. “But when I stepped off that old pile of iron,” he says, “I was sure that it was not for me. It had all the danger of aerobatic flying, but none of the glamour, unless you call sitting in a cloud of dust and pulling levers glamorous.” When we bought a tractor for the mountain, he insisted that we hire someone to run it.

Story continued next week.