Ski shop celebrates milestone anniversary in seasonal business
Ed Docter is celebrating 20 years of running the Tamarack Ski Shop after moving here from Colorado. (Daniel McKay/Whitefish Pilot)
Ed Docter is celebrating 20 years of running the Tamarack Ski Shop, which sits adjacent to Montana Taphouse on Wisconsin Avenue. (Daniel McKay/Whitefish Pilot)
Ed Docter is celebrating 20 years of running the Tamarack Ski Shop, which sits adjacent to Montana Taphouse on Wisconsin Avenue. (Daniel McKay/Whitefish Pilot)
Skies lined up along the wall of the Tamarack Ski Shop. (Daniel McKay/Whitefish Pilot)
Whitefish was a different ski town 20 years ago.
The hill was still the Big Mountain Ski Resort, the season started around Thanksgiving, and Whitefish had yet to become the destination it is today.
And since opening the Tamarack Ski Shop, Ed Docter has seen it all happen.
Tamarack is celebrating its 20th anniversary this month, having started in what's now the Powderhound T-Shirts store next to Good Medicine Lodge before moving to its current location four years ago. The shop opened Dec. 31, 1999, and will celebrate the anniversary and the new year during a New Year's Eve party at the Taphouse.
Originally from Wisconsin, Docter said he spent four years in Colorado before packing up and moving to Whitefish.
“I could not stomach the lift lines, or all the sunshine, to be honest. High pressure was a drag, icy every day,” he said. “I've been pretty happy, I've been skiing here 20 years and no thought of leaving. It's nice and mellow and it's cool, and Canada is right there.”
Around the time he moved to Whitefish, the popular local ski shop the Snowfrog closed its doors for good, leaving a gap in the town that Docter was quick to fill.
He jumped into it headfirst, he said, using his ski connections to get things up and running.
“At that point, I had been in the ski industry for 12 years. I'd been in the Snowsports Industries America show in Las Vegas and developed a lot of relationships with companies, and I got everything on credit,” he said. “I was 26 years old and they're like, ‘Yeah, here's $30,000 worth of stuff.'”
A lot has changed for the shop in 20 years, he says.
The store has gone from limited to merchandise to a much larger stock of new and rental products, and they also offer mountain bikes and water sport rentals during the summer.
“We went from being only $8-a-day basic ski rentals to now having a demo fleet of over a hundred from seven brands. It's amazing,” Docter said. “That's probably the biggest change, getting more into the retail aspect, but very carefully. I've seen shops go down, you spend too much and have a bad snow year.”
“Ski shops are hard to keep in business,” he added. “You have very long off-seasons. We have always believed in being more busy and giving people a better value than your typical ski shop. We're definitely not as expensive [as others], and we've been that way for a long time and it keeps us really busy.”
The shop also works in conjunction with the adjacent Montana Taphouse, which opened in 2016. Since February of this year, Docter owns both Tamarack and the Taphouse, which has been a big jump for him, he says.
The two entities work together, with deals ranging from a ski waxing with a beer to a free pizza with a purchase of new skis.
From behind the counter at Tamarack, Docter said it's been both good and bad watching Whitefish turn into a resort destination over the past two decades.
On one hand, business is booming. Docter said months he used to dread, like October and November, are now beating out months like September at the Taphouse, which to him is mind-blowing.
But he's also seen ski towns change like this before, he said.
“Growing up skiing in Big Sky, Jackson Hole, Sun Valley — those places in the 70s and 80s were really special and really small, and now they make me sick. Jackson Hole used to have a dozen bars. It's got like two. Sun Valley really doesn't have any, it's all art galleries,” he said. “Watching it happen here kind of sucks deep inside, I guess I'd say, because you see a lot of your friends getting priced out. A lot of people haven't been as fortunate as I have, and you've got to say goodbye to a lot of good friends.”
Nevertheless, he says he's happy for those friends that do pop into the bar or shop every day, and he's happy to have put himself in a position to ski every day too.
“It's fun. It's a great atmosphere and it's fun to be around all these people,” he said. “We get to do great music outside in the summer, our trivia nights are off the hook. Everything's just a lot of fun.”
For more information, visit https://www.loc8nearme.com/montana/whitefish/tamarack-ski-and-lake-shop-bike-rentals/5044514/