Jesse Gregory

I was born in White Sulphur Springs in 1989. The first time I skied Showdown I was in the fourth grade, the winter of 1998-99.

I graduated from high school in 2008 and went to school in Butte for a while. That's where I first met AJ Korslien, through a buddy of his from Fort Benton, before he ever worked at Showdown.

In 2009 I went to work up there on the lifts. Jerry Solberg had retired a couple of years before, so I worked for Jay Zehntner. I ran a lift for one season, and then they moved me to the rental shop. I was in the rental shop about ten years, and by the winter of 2018-19 I was the lift supervisor too.

The rental shop was only the winter. I was up there year-round on the maintenance crew, and I've done pretty much every job on that mountain you can think of. I'm sort of a jack of all trades.

My first summer work was cutting trees, in 2011. The pine beetles had killed a lot of timber, much of it right beside the runs, and that spring we were out with chainsaws while there was still snow on the ground, dragging the logs down behind the snowcat. My brother Jamie was on that crew with me, with Ben Haugan, Spencer Paul and Dave Hunt.

Jamie and I are identical twins. One Labor Day, Showdown's Facebook called us the Infamous Gregory Twins. He was on the ski patrol. If you find a picture with one of our names on it, look twice.

In June 2012 a power line came down and threw sparks into dry timber. Spencer smelled the smoke and saw it first. He and Jake Parchen and I had the fire out before the Neihart Fire Department got there.

In August 2013 Ben and I took a chainsaw to a standing tree at the bottom of the Prospector chair and carved PROSPECTOR into it. We did it in a day. That was a good one. The next September I was on the crew that spliced the haul rope, with Jay, Jimmy Hoxter and Rob Hagus. In August 2018, when the double got a new motor, I helped the maintenance crew with the load test.

In January 2020 Showdown made me Employee of the Week. I'd forgotten all about it, parking spot, free lunches and all. The card said I came in as a rough, funny little scalawag and turned into a leader over ten years.

Katie Boedecker and Avery Gold bought Showdown that fall, and the first season under them I was Manager of the Year. The next summer we fed the crews fighting the Divide Complex fire. One morning we cooked breakfast at four for more than two hundred people with no power. I was in the kitchen for that.

When the old All Seasons Inn in White Sulphur became The Edith, I was on that project from day one. It opened in August 2022. These days I'm the facility manager, about two years now. I look after the crews at The Edith and at Showdown and make sure the work gets done. Some days that means I'm plumbing.

I've been at it about seventeen seasons. People ask me for a favorite memory. They've all been pretty good. I'm still thinking about that one.