AJ Korslien

I was born in California, but we moved to Great Falls when I was about three months old, so Great Falls is all I remember. My first winter at Showdown was 1998-99. I was nine. My mom took me up one day and I had a lesson, maybe two, and then she put me in the Kids Camp over Christmas break. I went straight to a snowboard. I've skied plenty since, but I never started on skis, and there aren't many of us up here who can say that.

I graduated from high school in Great Falls in 2008 and started school in Missoula that fall. One of my best friends from Fort Benton used to hang out with Jesse Gregory over in Butte, where Jesse was going to school, so I knew Jesse before either of us worked up here. I didn't work my freshman year. My sophomore year, the winter of 2009-10, I started at Showdown as an instructor and on the terrain park crew, under Nick Boucher. All through college I worked the whole six weeks of Christmas break and came back and forth on weekends. I always set up my spring classes so I'd have Fridays off, and by my junior and senior years I had a few weekdays free, so I was up here a lot.

After Nick, Brian Petzak ran the park for about a season, and then it was mine. I coached the freestyle team, eight weeks every winter, taking all those kids around the mountain and building that program up. At the end of the season we'd take them on a trip to a mountain they'd never ridden, along with Scott Mosher and the Team Extreme kids. That was always super fun. One winter there was even a squad with my name on it, AJ's Amplitude Squad, three Sunday afternoons in March for kids who could ride the whole mountain and wanted to learn the park.

Putting on events was the other thing I loved, and I still do. Day one of the Throwdown was big air off the waterfall, the spot in the middle of Black Diamond where it goes flat and then just drops off. It's exactly what it sounds like. It's a really big jump, and a lot of good tricks come off it. The day before the Mannequin Jump in 2014, Spencer Paul and I were still out putting the finishing touches on the jump. By 2016 I was the events coordinator too. I got to compete a little, and I won my class at the Brock Stokke Bump Off Bash in 2015 and 2016.

My office was in the old Gold Room then. Jake Parchen tells this one better than I can. One Saturday in 2016 Dave Broquist found a girl on the lift who could snowboard, and Jake asked me to take her out with all our snowboard instructors before lineup. I came back and told him I didn't know where he'd found her, but she could ride. Christie ended up teaching for us, and she married Jake a few years later.

Summers I did whatever I could find, landscaping, sprinklers, the Forest Service, and in the college summers I'd come up and do some chainsaw work on the hill. Back then Showdown only kept maybe ten people on through the summer. When they started keeping more of us all year, I finally got on full-time, year round, and that was kind of a dream come true. Summers up here now are logging projects, burning piles, maintenance and building things. Nate Schendel put the big hand-hewn counters in the lodge, and later I made some of my own to match his, and some of the tables too. They made me Employee of the Year for 2019-20.

Most falls, as soon as there was enough snow, I'd hike up for the first turns before the lifts were running, usually with my dog Marshall and sometimes with Maxx Galland. In October 2018 I got first tracks of the season, and one year Marshall and I were still hiking for turns in June. I got Marshall from Ben Demaray, our snowcat operator. I traded him a snowboard for him, and it was the best deal I ever made. He grew up on this hill, chasing snowboards and snowmobiles and bikes. Maxx and I have ridden together a lot, and in 2023 Smith and Rogue made a film of the two of us up here.

After a while I moved over to the operations side as assistant operations director, shadowing Chris Quinn, and I'd started patrolling too. I was Employee of the Year again for 2021-22. When Chris retired, I took over from him. Jared Burton runs the park now. These days I'm the mountain operations director and the pro patrol director, and in 2024 the Great Falls Ski Patrol named me its outstanding paid patroller for the 2023-24 season.

One summer Jimmy Hoxter and I went looking for the old paperwork on the double chair. We wanted the haul rope angles, and there wasn't a thing anywhere, so we went up and measured it ourselves. Joe Pinski got me over to his house once to help him with something, and I ended up looking through his photo albums for two hours. When Stan King died, I made the slideshow for his memorial. Stan always said he didn't like having his picture taken. My favorite is one of him and me at Bob's Bar, him holding a giant inflatable bottle of Fireball and me pretending to drink out of it.

It's going on seventeen years now, which is pretty wild. Looking through all the old photos, we all look so young. It doesn't seem like that long ago.