Dale Evenson remembers Big Mountain in rougher days

Before the conveniences of groomers, high-speed lifts and snowmobiles, Dale Evenson remembers Big Mountain as a rough-and-tumble place.

Evenson served as a volunteer and later paid patrolman in the late 1950s and early 1960s — even spending two years as patrol chief — and helped bring grooming to the slopes of Big Mountain.

Evenson was just 8 years old when the ski resort opened in 1947.

However, his skiing education didn’t come from the T-Bar on the mountain, but instead from rides down the bottom of a hill near Cow Creek and Armory Road.

He taught himself to ski at 5 before the mountain even opened.

As he remembers it, the skis were crude and the stakes were high.

“When you got to the bottom, you either had to stop or fall or run into the barbed-wire fence,” he said, noting that he never made it into the fence.

Getting to and from the hill was also a high-stakes endeavor.

The plowing of the city streets then was a far cry from their conditions today, and skiing over to the hill was the best way to be able to ski down it.

“So I’d just kind of cross-country over there to go skiing and then cross country back,” he remembered. “One time at one of the intersections, I got hit by a car. It just kind of scooted me down the road a little further. Didn’t hurt me, but probably scared the heck out of the driver of the car.”

As ski racing grew in popularity, Evenson — then a high schooler — took to it immediately.

Evenson was selected for the National Junior Championships three years in a row and raced in two of them.

He’d never given anything else any thought back then, he said. It was all about the mountain.

“I didn’t think about basketball, I didn’t even like going inside to watch it,” he said. “I’d rather just be skiing.”

Ten years after the resort opened, Evenson joined the ski patrol as a volunteer while also working for Pacific Power and Light.

By 1960 he’d worked up to a paid patrolman. His other job was tending bar in the Bierstube, which he remembers as a rowdy place.

Evenson remembers well the drinking ability of the Canadian visitors. On one particularly festive night, he said, drinkers at the ‘Stube worked through 17 kegs of beer.

“It was strictly beer, keg beer, and that place was hopping when the Canadians would come,” he said.

In 1961 Evenson moved up to patrol chief and, after two years, moved on to the job of hill manager.

Ski patrolmen were a different breed on the mountain, he recalls.

As part of their rivalry with the ski school instructors, the patrolmen gave away their response to the ski instructors “Skier of the Day” awards, handed out to students who had a good day on the slopes. The ski patrols award was — and still is — Frabert, a monkey covered in casts that went out to whoever made the bonehead move of the day.

For the ski patrolmen making just $10 a day, the free beer that came with Frabert was worth celebration.

“We would raise hell in the Bierstube when we gave away Frabert. We had guys that would stand on their head and drink a pitcher of beer, we had things like that in the old days,” Evenson said.

When he was patrol chief, some of the instructors managed to kidnap Frabert.

“So my guys — I had no part in this — they went over and stole the ski school bell, which they rang at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. to bring the ski school together. So my guys stole it, and said, ‘When we get Frabert back, you can have your bell back.’”

Karl Hinderman, the director of the ski school, wasn’t happy about the bell.

“We weren’t friends,” he said of the instructors and patrolmen.

Ski patrol in those days was tough, but Evenson loved it.

From camping out in the faults on the east side in freezing temperatures to searching the mountain after last chair for missing skiers, it was a rough job but one made for the patrolmen who committed to it.

“We did crazy things,” Evenson said. “Because it was tough, and when I say tough, I mean out there in blizzards, we were out in it. We had a motto, ‘If it’s too tough for everybody else, it’s just right for us,’ and that’s about the size of it.”

The fresh-groomed, corduroy slopes available on the mountain each and every morning these days wasn’t the case in the early 1960s.

Instead, the job of grooming came down to the patrolmen and their skis.

“We didn’t have slope grooming. We packed with our skis, side-stepping down the hill. You try that on any of these runs and see how far you get in a day,” Evenson said.

The hill also had an old roller blade that was towed on the slopes, but Evenson said that wasn’t much help either.

One day in 1964, Don Peterson from Logan, Utah, brought his Thiokol snow tractor up for a soil conservation seminar in the Valley.

“I don’t know how I got connected with Don, but he was a real nice guy and obviously he wanted to show this thing off. And we’d never seen anything like it before,” Evenson said. “[Don] said, ‘You know, if you want to use this tonight, go ahead, I’ll let you.’”

That night they groomed the Hellroaring Slalom run, now a run on Chair 2, and Evenson couldn’t believe his eyes when the work was done.

“I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life,” he remembers. “What he did with that hill had never, ever been done around here before.”

Evenson lobbied successfully to the board of directors to get the tractor for the mountain, and as he recalls, they “ran that thing to death, day and night.”

His crew also developed a hydraulic system to replace the pipe wrench that had been used to raise and lower the mogul-cutter.

After serving as hill manager, Evenson moved on to other ski hills. He worked at Mount Hood Meadows, Schweitzer Basin and Discovery Basin, before moving to Missoula to work in a pulp mill and later the mill’s storeroom.

In 2002 he and his wife Trudy opened the Wild Horse Hideaway bed-and-breakfast on Flathead Lake, and the two of them ski Blacktail Mountain and Whitefish Mountain Resort.

Being on the mountain these days can be an odd experience.

He still celebrates the old times with friends on the mountain, and gets in his turns when he can.

But he remembers things as they used to be, and some of the renamed ski runs are unfamiliar to him.

“I’m familiar with the people they were named after,” he said.

He remembers some, like co-founder and general manager Ed Schenck, just as they were back in the early days.

“I can see him sitting there with calluses on his elbows and smoking a cigarette,” he said. “‘What’s going on Evenson?’”