Jim and Pam Gold

I was born in 1958, a year before my brother Mike, and we grew up in Great Falls with our sister Sue. I was about seven when we got skis for Christmas. Dad rigged up bindings with screen-door springs on our little snow boots, and it did not work. We were back the next week with real cable bindings. The rope tow we learned on was the Kinderhorn, about where the helicopter pad is now, and it felt steep. There were no lessons. You grabbed the rope, which burned right through your mittens, and made a pizza like everybody else.

The T-bar was five or six bucks, so we little kids didn't ride it. The lift that got us was the detachable Poma, about where the triple is now. The operator would snap a Poma onto the cable while you stood there, and you went from zero to full speed all at once, into big bumps nobody ever shoveled. We'd fall over backwards, fall off, swim back to firmer snow and get in the long line again. It was awful. But I remember the first time I finally made it past the bumps. It was so quiet going up, and I thought, where am I going to go? Now I'm on an adventure.

By fourth and fifth grade the neighborhood parents took turns driving, and we'd pile into station wagons. Later we rode the T-bar and caught the old rope tow down where Dick's Ditch is. Skiers had to be tough. The double chair came in 1970, when I was eleven or twelve. In high school Idaho was working in the ski shop. If you broke a safety strap, he was the guy you could mooch a spare off of.

My senior year, the winter of 1975-76, the ski school hired me. Lyle Cigler was teaching too, and over Christmas break we'd carpool up from Great Falls. But I was a band geek, and pep band kept me busy almost every weekend from January into March. When I finally showed up for the last couple of weekends in April, Scott Bartelt, who ran the ski school, asked me where I'd been. Sorry, busy.

At MSU I studied engineering and hardly skied. When they were building the triple chair, I cobbled together a thin little resume and mailed it up, then forgot about it. On spring break I was up skiing and George Willett called me by name. I didn't even really know who he was. He thanked me for the letter and said they were going to build the chairlift themselves. How does he know who I am? I think that's what George has done all his life. He cares about the people who show up. We see him now and then at the Monday meetings at the Club Cigar, and he's always asking about people and their stories.

I started in the ski school in December 1983, and I've taught every winter since. Summers I went back to engineering. My first five years or so, we'd have training days in early December. You're excited because you get to ski before anybody else, and then about two or three in the afternoon they'd say they had one last surprise, head over to Glory Hole, line up tip to tail and stomp it down. After my first year Rick Hodas left for Bridger, the school needed people, and somebody went down and knocked on Idaho's door and told him he ought to come up and teach. He said, yeah, okay.

I met Pam on a Wednesday, because she never really worked Wednesdays. It was storming and the school buses didn't come, so a bunch of us from the ski school had the afternoon free. At the bottom of the double there was this girl by herself in a two-piece powder-blue suit, and I just hopped on the chair with her. Of course I had to tell her I'd just jumped the cliff at the bottom of the double. Pam would say I was a bit of an ass. At the top I asked her to ski with us, and she said no and skied off. But I kept seeing her and trying to get a run in with her, and eventually it worked out. We got married in 1987. Taylor came along in 1993 and Chris in 1995.

In the eighties I raced the pro class, and I set the pace twice, in March 1986, the day my brother Mike was second, and in January 1987, the day after Phil Mahre set it on the same course. In 1989 I was one of two instructors teaching snowboarding. I told the paper that little fad wasn't going away, so we'd better learn how to teach it. By 1992 I was fully certified, and on weekends I helped Kevin Lacey teach the other instructors. In 1993 our team, the Ricepatties, won the Belt Creek Headwaters Relay, with Dave Broquist, Jeff Agamenoni and John Melvin, and we had the fastest time in the race. For years I've taught Peak Performance, the class for the ski-league parents. Aaron Weissman says he took it every year for more than ten years, and he wouldn't be a patroller or an instructor without it.

Dave Elmquist tells the band story best. At an after-season party at the old Bob's he had his guitar out, so I went home for mine, and the two of us played sitting on Bob's pool table. We've been the We Ski Cousins ever since. Tony Lucas joined us in 1995, we played the grand opening of the new Bob's Bar in 1996, and we put out our first CD in 2007.

Pam has put in plenty of her own time up there. In 1989 she was playing Skolf, golf on skis, in a pink visor, and in 2010 she was on the women's team that won the Belt Creek relay. In 2002 we gave a free bed and breakfast at our cabin to the auction. Chris grew up in the bump-offs, and in 2015 he had the fastest run of the day.

Every decade up there has had about ten key people who were always around. In the nineties it was Lyle Cigler, Scott Dvorak, Scott Dimke, Scott Mosher. There were a lot of Scotts. This season will be my forty-fourth. If you count my pep-band winter, that's forty-five of Showdown's ninety.