Allan Rabbit

I was born in Hampton, Iowa, in 1961, and my family moved out to Montana in 1968. We went back to the Midwest for about three years and then came back for good. Before Showdown I'd been on skis maybe five times, day tickets here and there when we visited relatives in Minnesota and a few other places. So I really learned to ski up here.

My first trip to Showdown was about 1971. I came up with the Murphys, Joe and Matt and their sister Maureen, and their family. By 1976 I was skiing up there regularly, just as a customer.

In 1979 I joined the Great Falls Ski Patrol. I volunteered for a couple of years, and then I went to work as a professional patroller, full time. I did that for nine years, all of it at Showdown. My first boss was Wayne Ellington, and there was a whole cast of characters after him. Wayne was a great boss and a good person, and he was always fair. In the years Showdown ran seven days a week, I took over on Wayne's day off so he could have one. I guess you'd have called me the assistant director. I found out it was the most fun way there is to starve to death.

I learned a lot from George Willett. Over the years I did routine maintenance around the lodge for him, and different smaller projects whenever he needed something done. When George and Margie brought Charley up the hill for the first time, in 1983, I was one of the people there to meet him, along with John Metrione and Idaho. Margie still brings it up.

The patrol turned fifty the winter of 1987–88, and that February five of us from the Great Falls patrol worked the Winter Olympics in Calgary. George Stean, Bill Lay, Dale Sivumaki and I patrolled the alpine events at Nakiska, and Stan King worked the ski jumping. We raised $700 from businesses in town for the tryouts and paid our own way after that. Showdown said it would give us a dollar from every paid lift ticket one Saturday that January.

In 1989 I went back to college, so I left the paid patrol and went back to the volunteers. I've been with them ever since.

Mike Bell was on the patrol up there for forty-one years, and he died in the summer of 1996. That same year Mel Carnahan, Dave Mountain and I, with help from other patrollers and friends, built his memorial on top of Porphyry Peak, by the Top Rock. It's a twenty-foot frame of fir timbers with a metal skier by Bob Olds on top and the bell hanging underneath. People ring it on their way past. Every time the patrol gives out the Mike Bell Lifetime Service Award it adds a disc to the bell, and some years later one of those discs had my name on it.

Around 2002 Mel came to me with an idea. Up to then New Year's Eve was always the torchlight parade, and Mel wanted fireworks. It was his idea, and I was the first guy he brought in. We took it to George, and George said yeah, that'd be great. Mel's been running the show ever since.

I've been director of the volunteer side of the patrol three different times, seven years in all. The patrol's one real fundraiser is the Banff Mountain Film Festival we put on in Great Falls every fall. That money has bought radios, tower pads for the lifts and two weather stations, one at the top of the mountain and one at the bottom, and the gear goes out with us for cross-country skiers and snowmobilers in the Little Belts too.

One thing the patrol has given me is ski days I'd never have had otherwise. Some mornings the only reason I got out of bed was that it was my duty day. Then you drive up out of Great Falls and the weather's completely different up there, warmer or whatever it is, and you end up having a wonderful day you'd otherwise have missed.

In August 2021, when Showdown took in the crews fighting the Divide Complex fire and fed and housed them, I was one of the people helping in the kitchen. Some of those breakfasts were at four in the morning, for two hundred people, with no power. That year the National Ski Patrol gave me its Distinguished Award.

On opening day of the 2021–22 season the snowcat went through the old deck. The crew packed the hole with snow, and we got through the whole winter like that. The next summer we built a new deck, and I was the lead engineer on it. It's the biggest job I've done for Showdown.

In 2022 the National Ski Patrol gave me the Gold Merit Star, and it named ours the outstanding large alpine patrol in North America for that year. I can't think of a better bunch of people to be around. In 2025 somebody called me a chair evac training superstar, and I'll take it.

That makes forty-seven years on the patrol, and I'm sixty-five. Showdown has always been my happy place. I go up to see my friends, have some fun, have a beer and relax. After a week of work it puts everything back straight in my head, and I still have something to do while I'm there. The patrol is one of the best groups of people I've ever been around. The folks I've met on it have become a lot more than patrol family. They're close family and friends. And when somebody's having a bad day on the hill, it's good to be the one who can give them a hand and get them down to whatever help they need.