Charlie and Bill Lay

My dad is Charlie Lay, and he was a phone man. He started as a lineman up in Glasgow in 1954, the year I was born, came to Great Falls a couple of years later, and retired in 1990 after thirty-six years with the phone company. Pinky Mathews worked at the phone company with him, and in the mid-to-late sixties Pinky got Dad to come up to Kings Hill to ski. I think it was also to learn how to run the phone system up there.

I came up because Dad did. I was just a kid. We used to stay up there in campers, alongside Pinky and Vera, or on our own sometimes, until Dad bought the cabin.

When the double chair went up in 1970, Pinky hooked up the electronics and got the phones going. Summers, he and Dad would come up and go through all the communications and the wiring for every one of the lift shacks. They enjoyed it, and they did it for years. When Pinky couldn't do it anymore, Dad kept it going, and I was along with him, taking care of stuff.

I never worked for Showdown. I joined the Great Falls Ski Patrol in September of 1977, as a volunteer. National later moved my start back to January of '77. I fought them on that for years, and finally I had to give up.

Mike Bell was probably my mentor. He'd been patrolling up there better than twenty years by the time I came along. Dick Mosher went back a long way before me too. When Dick quit the pro patrol, Wayne Ellington, who was national, told me to put him on as a team leader. I did, and Dick said yes, and that blew me away. He led for quite a few years after that.

In the middle of the eighties, five of us from the Great Falls patrol, George Stean, Dale Sivumaki, Stan King, Allan Rabbit and I, spent two years making trips up to Canada for training and tryouts for the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Going into the last tryout, the only other American still in the running was a fellow from Wisconsin. We paid our own way. People and businesses in Great Falls chipped in $700 toward that last tryout. All five of us made it, and the next January Showdown said it would give us a dollar from every all-lift ticket it sold one Saturday.

In February 1988, George, Dale, Allan and I worked the alpine events at Nakiska, and Stan worked the ski jumping at Canada Olympic Park. With all the postponements we were putting in twelve- and fourteen-hour days, almost every day. The wind was bad, but I'd seen wind just as bad in Montana, and most of what we dealt with wasn't much different from a day at Showdown. None of us had tickets to anything, but we were all going to the closing ceremonies. I took a bunch of pictures while I was up there. Mostly racers.

Before a school brought its kids up for Ski P.E., the patrol would send somebody out to the classroom to talk about what to expect and how to stay safe. For a while that was me. And for a few years, if you wanted to join the patrol, I was the one you called.

In 2008 I got the Mike Bell Lifetime Service Award. The names go on discs on the bell the patrol put up on top for Mike, so mine hangs there with the others.

I keep the patrol's records. I've got a database of everybody I know of who's patrolled since about '77, plus names other people have given me. Some of them have passed away, and some I've lost track of. Where I have it, there's the year they joined, their national, divisional and patrol awards, and who's led the Great Falls Ski Patrol. Most of the awards and the national appointments are in the shadow box on the wall up at Showdown, and there are more in the hallway outside the patrol room door.

Ryan Smith, Tyler Haffner, Lee Van Berg, Allan and I got named Chair Evac Training Superstars at the patrol's banquet in July 2025.

By my count it's forty-nine years now, but National's calling it fifty, and this year they're celebrating me at fifty and Mel Carnahan at forty. When I think of the legends up there, it's guys like Wayne Ellington, Terry Stevenson, Mike Bell, Allan Rabbit, Mel and Dick Mosher.

Dad doesn't ski anymore. He quit about ten years ago. There's a picture of him and George Willett, the two of them sitting there in the bar. It's a pretty good one.