Jake Parchen

My first memory up at Showdown, I was four or five. I'm from Fort Benton, born and raised, but my family has always had ties to Monarch. My grandmother's grandparents mined up here. In the forties my grandmother would come up on the train on weekends and stay with her grandmother at their cabin, right where the Forest Service is now, and they made sure she was home Sunday night for school. My dad remembers going over the pass before it was paved. They paved it in '55, so he'd have been five or six. My folks are retired up here now, and I live up here too, with my wife and our two kids.

I applied at the ski school in 1999. I think Jim Anderson was running it then. I skipped out on it, though, and never taught that year. I think it was the winter of 2002-03 when I gave my first real lesson. I was twenty-one. My first P.E. lesson was with Rick Jacobs, and it blew my mind. We split the group up and I had seventy-five blue skiers by myself. I was scared. When I came back in, I'd lost my voice.

I'm a golf course guy. I've got a degree in golf course management from Rutgers, and for a while I worked on a golf course in New York. All those years I'd come home on my two- or three-week vacation, stay up here at the cabin, and teach skiing. It works out perfect, really. You're busier than hell all summer, and all winter you've got the snow.

I moved back from New York in 2008, and 2008-09 was my first real season. Ben Haugan was there by then, the new sheriff in town, kind of doing everything. Chris Leatham was just about on his way out.

I'd been there enough years and taught enough lessons that I just kind of fell into running the ski school. Ben had the title, but he had the whole mountain on his plate, so a lot of the day-to-day landed on me. Nate Schendel ran it for a season in there too. And I still believe the best instructors teach the beginners. I'd try to give my crew the upper-level lessons, but the good ones teach from the bottom up. There are rules you never forget, too. Never turn your back on the magic carpet.

Spencer Paul and I ran the Christmas camp back when it was still small. By Christmas of 2009 it had gorillas and bananas and a Yeti running around in the trees. Nate was the Yeti. If a penguin taught your kid to ski that week, that was me.

Those were the years the school really started growing. I don't want to take credit for it. It was probably Ben's idea, together with George, but we got the Great Falls Public Schools coming back up, and that was a really big thing. The YSL camp grew too. It went from not so many kids to climbing every year, and you can still see that climb today.

Some of those fourth graders had never been outside of Great Falls. They'd see cows out the bus window and ask what the heck those were, and the bus driver would have to tell them. Jared Burton and I once had a lesson of over 150 beginners. We took them all up the Goose and brought them back down, and they had the best time. It's probably turned into a fishing story by now. Might have been 200.

On opening day in December 2014 everybody was so excited. My instructors were geared up. They'd had their training, and they were ready to test their skills.

I met my wife up there in 2016. It was a Saturday morning, mid-season, and I was in my office doing about a hundred million time cards, because we had so many part-time people helping with all the groups. Dave Broquist walks in and says he found this gal on the lift. She'd taught before, she skied and snowboarded, and she had a snowboard on her feet. AJ Korslien's office was right across from mine, in the old Gold Room. Those were cool days. I told AJ to take her out with all the snowboard instructors before lineup and see how she could ride. Lineup came and went. AJ finally comes back in and tells me he doesn't know where I found her, but she can ride. I went looking for everybody else and found them in the lounge, dead beat. She'd run them all into the ground. That was Christie. Eventually we started dating, and she worked for us at Showdown part-time too.

My last season on staff was 2019-20. It ended in March of 2020, right before Katie Boedecker took over.

Now we try to ski every Sunday. The kids are so into it. I love to tele. It's a dying art, and it's easier on the knees. So now I'm making Christie learn to tele, and then she'll have all three. And I still can't walk past a pint glass or a tray up there without picking it up. It's in your blood.

When you step up there, I don't care if you worked there a day, an hour or a minute, you're still family, because somebody's going to recognize you and ask how you're doing. I haven't gone far from Showdown, because I don't want to. I'm honored to be a Legend, though I'm not sure I should be one. It's been my second family for a very long time.