Bill "Idaho" Trenberth

I grew up in Idaho Springs, Colorado, and that's where the nickname came from. I went to school in Leadville, at Colorado Mountain College, which had a brand-new program in ski area and resort management. In that program I met a fellow from Great Falls who knew George Willett. George had told him he was looking for somebody to run the rental shop and the pro shop.

I came to work at Showdown in August 1974. George hadn't had the place long. My first job wasn't in the shop at all. I was putting the addition on the A-frame that later became the rental shop, and at the same time we were building the addition on the lodge. That's the second half of what's now the T-bar room.

That first winter I worked the rental and pro shop. It was all in one building, right where the rental shop is now, and it was called Wu Tung's. I was in that shop seven or eight years, I'd guess. Jim Gold was in high school then. He says if you broke a safety strap, I was the guy in the shop you could mooch a spare off of.

Summers, if there was a project going at Showdown, I worked on it, and if there wasn't, I found other work. In 1978 I was on the crew that built the triple chair. Joe Pinski ran most of that job, and Jimmy Hoxter and Steve Theisen were on it too. Later Scott Mosher and I bought Wu Tung's. By then it was a ski and tennis shop downtown, and it still had the shop up at the hill. A year or two after that we closed it down.

Margie likes to say I was one of the first people to meet Charley when they brought him up the hill as a baby, in 1983.

After the shop I worked as a carpenter in Neihart, and for a while I was the mayor. Then, the way Jim Gold tells it, somebody from the ski school came down to my house, knocked on the door and said I ought to come up and teach skiing. And I said, yeah, okay. My first boss in the ski school was Dave Broquist. He ran it one year, fresh out of college. I'd say my first winter teaching was '84.

By the next December I was running the ski school. That was the month the Tribune started a weekly ski tips column written by the Showdown instructors, and I wrote the first one. It was about the first few days of the season. Find your comfort zone and stay in it. In January 1987 Showdown was one of more than two hundred areas that put on the first national Free Learn-to-Ski Day. A hundred and nineteen beginners came up, and we moved them through learning stations, one skill to the next. That December the paper ran a picture of me throwing a snowball at somebody I worked with. My last winter as director, Lyle Cigler was my assistant.

In the summer of 1990 I pounded nails. The biggest job was the women's bathroom. The stalls got bigger, every one got a shelf, and all the doors locked. The newsletter gave that last part an exclamation point. We painted the race shacks and finished the insides, and we put new siding on the top shack of the triple. Joe Pinski was the mountain manager by then, and a good friend, and we got some water skiing in that summer too.

That October I went to Bozeman to study engineering at Montana State. Lyle took over the ski school, and I moved into the spare bedroom in his apartment. These days I'm a civil engineer.

Debbie Halverson first came up with Susan Broquist around 1990. She says she saw a tall, dark and handsome guy walking across the snow, and she was hooked. We got married on July 1, 1995. Somewhere between three hundred fifty and four hundred people came, a lot of them the old Showdown crew from twenty years back, and the party ran from Friday to sometime Monday morning. Joe Pinski was my best man, in a tux. Debbie never had an official job up there. She helped in the lodge, did a lot of running around, and kept everybody in her chocolate oatmeal bars.

I came back to teaching later on. I've built my share of mannequins for the spring mannequin jump. One year the Broquist and Trenberth team took Crowd Pleaser, Distance and Engineering with Bunny Blaster 2, and in 2014 one of the mannequins was named the Spudinator, in my honor. In 2019 I was one of the judges at the Brock Stokke Bump Off. Aaron Weissman says it was Jim Gold and me who really taught him to ski.

Charley says he's seen me in just about every coat Showdown ever made. I've only got one left. By my count that's fifty-one years on the hill, and I'm still teaching.