Chris Quinn

I was born in 1954, and the first time I went skiing was at Kings Hill in the late sixties. A church group invited me on a ski trip. I'd never really thought about skiing, but this trip included girls, so sign me up. I borrowed some classic skis from a neighbor, Head Standards with Cubco bindings, a big step up from the beartrap bindings most people had then. They belonged to the sister of Joe McKay, who was a master of the carve, the big thing at the time.

My first couple of runs went straight line, tumble, fall, say bad words and repeat the struggle. A very nice lady saw me struggling and asked if she could give me some pointers. She soon had me in a snowplow and linking turns on the old Mizpah Poma. I was twelve and she was obviously older, but we became friends, and she'd often give me a ride up to the hill. Her name was Carol "Momma" Mosher. Carol taught school, and she was famous as a ski instructor too. She taught hundreds of kids to ski, her own included, and they were some of the best skiers on the mountain.

That first day we were standing out on the deck watching, and she told me her husband was a pro patroller and probably the best skier on the mountain. About then two skiers came out of the trees, powder flying, linking turns that looked like magic to me. One was Dick Mosher. The other was about half his height, with hair bristling out from under his hat and a bushy beard about half the size of the man. Years later we'd all call him Hobbit. "Stan King, it's Stan King!" Carol said, like everybody should know who Stan King was. They skied up in their rust and blue uniforms, fanny packs and those fur gaiters up to the knee, like they were taking a stroll down the mountain. So on my very first day of skiing I met two legends of the hill.

My mom, Polly, skied too. She had a Kings Hill season pass for 1971-72, with her picture laminated right into it and her name signed across the bottom in marker.

In 1974 I had a short stint as a fry cook for Johnny K. That was George Willett's second winter, so he was still the new guy. Wayne Ellington was there, and Joe Pinski, Steve "Cobweb" Theisen, Idaho Trenberth, who was new that year too, and a new kid in maintenance named Jimmy Hoxter. I've got stories about every one of them, and especially about George. But that's another story for another time.

By the early nineties I was teaching skiing for Showdown and guiding fly-fishing in the summers, and I'd worked as an EMT in Great Falls. More than twenty years after that first day, I joined the patrol. At the start of my own thirty-plus years on it, I'd sit and listen to Dick and Stan tell how they did it in the old days.

Toni and I got married at Showdown in 1992, with Kevin Lacey as my best man and a dinner and dance up at the area afterward. The next summer Joe Blanchard and I built the Top Rock Cafe on the summit. When Joe went off to college in 1995, I took over from him as Director of the Showdown Ski Patrol.

By 2002 Stan King, Don Mendenhall and I were the pro patrollers. Showdown's website joked that between the three of us we had about 500 years of patrolling experience. That's the same Stan I watched come out of the trees on my first day. That March we held a fundraiser in the bar to help Neihart put up the visiting competitors, and when the thermometer passed $500, I had to shave off my beard. I hadn't cut it since the seventies.

Later I was Operations Manager, and I trained on the lifts so I could fill in there when they needed me. In 2018 Jesse Gregory, AJ Korslien and I helped load-test the double chair, and the next March I was on patrol for the Brock Stokke Bump Off. For years I coordinated Showdown's blood drives. When COVID shut us down on March 20, 2020, the notice went out from George, Katie, Avery, me and everyone at Showdown. AJ shadowed me in operations, and when I retired, he took it over. Not counting 1974, I worked thirty-six years up there.

Most of my Showdown stories are from the nineties until now. And when the next chapter of this book gets written, somebody will tell how they met AJ Korslien, Luke Jaraczeski and the new guy, Katie Boedecker.

Most winter Saturdays will still find me hanging with the ski patrol, telling stories of how we did it in the old days, and of patrollers, some obscure and some whose stories will always be remembered in Showdown lore.