Joe and Kyle Pope

I didn't grow up a downhiller. I was a cross-country skier, and the first chairlift I ever rode was in 1993, on a snowboard. By the mid-nineties I was in Missoula, and I did a season or two at Marshall Mountain shoveling jumps. We knew about Showdown, but hardly any of us had cars.

In the fall of 1999 my roommate showed me an ad in the Missoulian. Showdown wanted a terrain park director. I called, and Margie answered, very professional and pleasant, and then she said, sir, you know this isn't a Forest Service job. She thought I meant a park you walk around in. No, I said, I mean building jumps. Oh yes, she said, that's what we're looking for. That's how new it all was.

So I drove over, interviewed with Jim Anderson, who ran the ski school, and hiked the mountain as part of it. That was the first time I was ever on Showdown. I was the right person at the right time in just the right place, and I'm forever grateful. Kyle came the winter after me.

George had told Jim to go find one of these terrain park people, and Jim had a plan. We didn't have the snowmaking to give a whole run to a park, so we'd build features all over the mountain wherever the terrain was right. I built them with Joe Pinski, the head groomer. I remember standing out there with colored pencils, drawing things so the two of us could understand each other. The best shape we ever had was a tabletop right where you turn off to Midway. When a rider complained on the area's message board that the landings went flat, I wrote back that I felt those landings too. Stop by and say hi, I said. I'm the one in the red coat.

I was in my twenties, working for George and Pinski, two absolute Adonises of the ski industry. They were different, but they were really the same.

Jim wanted a calendar of every freestyle event in Montana with Showdown at the center, and George would pay for the printing. So I called every ski area and board shop that would pick up the phone. I think I still have one of those calendars somewhere.

Then we needed a spring event. George told me to let him know in the morning, and that night I thought, I've got it, the Montana Snowboard Championships. The next day George asked how I'd come up with that. I made it up last night, George. All right, he said, we're doing it. The first one was in March 2000. Every good event needs a charity, and ours went to White Sulphur Springs. After the first day of racing we'd hold a Calcutta in the bar, and you'd bid on the top ten riders. If you've seen a photo of me standing on a table with a microphone, that was probably a Calcutta.

Then came the question of what was next, and I said let's do a pond skim. There hadn't been one in a lot of years. Baron Noble had some engineering background, and we bought a tarp and went for it. Filling it was the big deal. I asked Neihart about the water truck, and the fire chief called back and said sure, Joe, and then Neihart won't have any water to fight a fire. Whoops. I think it was Dave Broquist who worked out what a garden hose puts out, about a gallon and a half a minute, so we started the hose at one in the afternoon the day before. I was on the radio from Neihart asking Dick Nebel how the pond was going, and down at Bob's Bar everybody wanted to know how many inches we were at. Diane Carter was there with her camera for so much of it. Sweet, sweet Diane.

For one of the championships we were building a big air jump on Big Seven, and Pinski winched the landing for two or three days to get the knuckle on the second headwall just right. A landing doesn't look like much while you build it, and all George could see was that winch burning diesel, so he told us we were done. That weekend George and Margie were away, and Pinski and I bought our own diesel and finished the job. George was not happy with us. But the event went off without a hitch, and people went home to Big Sky and everywhere else saying Showdown knows how to build a jump. At the volunteer dinner at Bob's, Jim Anderson handed the two of us a frame. It said Kiss my ass, I'll buy my own gas, Joe Pinski, Joe Pope. Last I knew it was hanging up on the left as you walk into the bar. George had his hands full with us too.

At Showdown you were included from day one. A lot of us shoveled in the morning before we went to our other job, and since I had my Level 1, on busy days I'd get called to teach snowboarding. Kyle and I were in our twenties, with friends in their twenties and no kids. Nobody had rules for what we were doing, so we followed the golden rule. After a week around people like Jan Alltucker and Chris Quinn, a bunch of us, Kyle, Tyrel Johnson, Sammi Alltucker, Derek Whittenberg, Ryan Shively, would take our two MSAA passes to another ski area and find snowboarders to crash with. You found the instructors in the bar at five. At four they're not there.

I did three winters at Showdown, 1999-2000 through 2001-02. Eventually I became Big Sky's park director for a lot of years, and then I spent seven years at The Summit at Snoqualmie. That's thirty years of this, something like forty thousand hours in snowcats, and it's hard to catch that lightning in a bottle twice.

I understand George completely now. Kyle and I have tried to buy three ski areas, and we know our way around the books. But parks are to ski areas like pools are to hotels. You don't have to have one, but if you want to entertain the kids, you build it. We were lucky to land at Showdown when we did, how we did, and with the people we did.