Jim and Angie Anderson and Family

I was born in Butte in 1971. My mom took me skiing all over Montana when I was little, to Bridger, Big Sky and Showdown, so I probably skied Showdown for the first time around 1976 or 1977. I honestly don't remember it. When I was six or seven we moved to Colorado, near Denver.

I've known Jamie Hurd pretty much since I was born. My cousin grew up with her and Mike and went to school with them, and around 1991 or 1992 Mike and I were in a band together. In 1997 George was looking for someone to run his ski school, and Jamie told him she knew a guy. I think George was pretty skeptical, since it was Jamie's guy. It worked out okay for him.

I drove up that fall, I want to say September, and sat down with George in the living room of his house. I remember it very clearly. He asked me a bunch of questions, and then came the one about my strengths and weaknesses. I gave him the strengths. Then I told him the truth. Numbers aren't my greatest thing, and I'd even bounced my checkbook before. George looked right at me and said that wasn't going to work, because he was a CPA, and I was going to have to figure something out.

So I hit the ground running. I was scared to death George would be yelling at me, so I accounted for every dollar. Every lesson I assigned, I knew down to the dollar what that instructor was going to cost me.

George hired me straight in as ski school director, and I ran the school for three winters and started a fourth. Around my third year I became an examiner for the Professional Ski Instructors of America, Northern Rocky Mountain Division, and the division's alpine chair.

Snowboarding was taking off then, and George put me in charge of finding somebody to run a real terrain park. In the fall of 1999 we ran an ad in the Missoulian for a terrain park director, and Joe Pope drove over and hiked the mountain for his interview. We didn't have the snowmaking to give a whole run to a park, so the idea was to build features all over the mountain wherever the terrain was right for it. Joe called every ski area and board shop in the state and put together a freestyle calendar with Showdown in the middle of it, and that spring we held the first Montana Snowboard Championships. Joe tells those stories better than I can, including the year he and Joe Pinski bought their own diesel to finish the big air jump. At the volunteer dinner afterward I gave the two of them an award for it. I'll let Joe tell you what it said.

My wife Angie and I had such good times every year we worked up there. We made new friends and saw the returning ones every winter, and spending that time with those people was very special to her and to me.

I left partway through that fourth winter, in 2000. About two years later I became a police officer. My first job was in Big Timber for two years, then I went to Gallatin County and finished out my law enforcement career there, and after that I worked three years for the Montana Department of Corrections.

I never quit skiing. I worked four ten-hour shifts so I'd have three-day weekends, and I kept teaching part-time and kept my examiner status the whole way through. And I've come back to Showdown just about every winter since I left, maybe missing one, to run clinics for the instructors, and sometimes for the public and friends of Showdown. I ran that school, so I know how tight things are up there. They take care of me and I take care of them.

When old photographs started going up online, I saw one of my ski school, my very first one. I could name a lot of the people in it, but I was having too much fun watching everybody else try.

Much later in our lives, fifteen or twenty years after we'd left the mountain, Angie told me one day that we left Showdown without a thing to show for it. No retirement, not a dollar saved. But those were probably the happiest, most fun days of our whole lives together.