Lyle Cigler

My dad was in the Air Force, and in 1973 he got stationed at Malmstrom in Great Falls. That November my two brothers and I took a toboggan up to Showdown before the area opened. We didn't know the name of anything. We just hiked up the hill right in front of the lodge, which turned out to be the Big Seven, and rode the toboggan down.

I told my parents it was so much fun we ought to come back and try skiing once it opened. So for Christmas my mom gave my brothers and me the ski program, five Saturdays in a row. They didn't take to it the way I did. At the end of the fifth Saturday my instructor, Greg Burton, dismissed the class, everybody except me. I thought I was in trouble. It was about three in the afternoon, and he wanted to know if I had time for one more run.

He took me to the top of the mountain and over to Glory Hole. I looked down it and told him there was no way we were going down that. He said I could handle it. It was my fifth day on skis. I put a hand down once on the side, but I never fell, and I made it all the way down through those Volkswagen-sized bumps.

Then Greg skied me over to the ski school meeting area and told Scott, the ski school director at the time, that I was the kid he'd told him about. Scott said he was looking for some young kids, and asked if I could come up the next few weekends and see whether the ski school was something I'd like. I told him it was kind of expensive. He said he'd give me a lift ticket and get me on the ski bus. In the mornings I'd shadow a class, and in the afternoons I'd ski and clinic with the instructors.

I was fifteen, a freshman in high school. Pretty soon one instructor gave me a better pair of goggles, another one a better pair of gloves, and somebody had me try their skis instead of my rentals. My fifth time shadowing, Scott gave me two eleven-year-olds of my own. Back then the Poma went up by the maintenance shack. They had the rope tow down already, and by the end of my two hours they were riding the Poma and turning their way down into the rope tow area.

Scott told me to come into his office when I was done. He had paperwork for me and asked for my Social Security number, and I didn't know if I even had one. That's when I got hired on the ski school. My tenth time on skis was my first time teaching a lesson.

That crew took care of you. Bill Showen gave me a pair of skis. Terry Bistodeau was on the early, early ski school. After a clinic somebody would say let's go take some runs, and they'd work with you one on one. All of a sudden you were a member of the group, and they'd see you every weekend. Then you meet Johnny K in the cook shack and Johnny Metrione in the bar. And Buzz Adolfson, who looked like the Showdown character of the old days, with the bushy beard and the Hannibal mustache. He ran the Poma, and the Poma was the first lift you ever had to learn. Then Roy Steele and Archie and Tillie. It was family.

I was always ski school, never ski patrol. I did run clinics for the patrollers on their skiing, and when the National Ski Patrol held a convention at Showdown, they had me take a group of ten of them out to work on their stance and have some fun.

By the time I was about 25 I was still at Showdown and had my level one and level two. Rick Hodas had run our ski school since 1980, and around the time he left, about 1985, I moved to Bozeman to teach at Bridger under their director, Joe Wagner. Then Joe went to Snowbird, and who's my new boss at Bridger? Rick Hodas.

I taught at Bridger for five years while I went to MSU, and then I came back to Showdown as Idaho's assistant for the 1989-90 season. Idaho actually moved into my spare bedroom. That fall he went off to study engineering at MSU, and in October 1990 I took over the ski school.

That first fall I was hiring instructors from all over the state, people I knew through the PSIA. What I cared about most was education, and especially Ski P.E., school kids from all over central Montana learning a sport they could keep their whole lives. I taught the Over the Hill Gang too, eight Saturdays for grown-ups. It got started because a Buddy Werner parent asked why the kids should have all the fun. Kevin Lacey, my assistant, spent his afternoons on the hill training the instructors, and over three years our people passed 98 percent of their PSIA exams, when the national rate was 68 percent.

George sent me up to Canada to sell Showdown on the ski show tour, the one that travels with the Warren Miller movie. We'd be in a different town every night, Lethbridge, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, and I'd do my ski show and hand out the brochures. My third tour was in November 1992.

After that tour I was back at Showdown, living in a cabin in Neihart and hiring the season's staff over the phone. On Thanksgiving weekend I woke up to two feet of snow around the cabin, everything buried. I walked out to the highway, caught a ride up the hill and borrowed the rental shop's snowblower to dig my car out.

I ran the school for five seasons. Later on, when my son was six months old, I zipped him into my old Nordica Showdown jacket with his head out the front and we skied the Golden Goose. Every time I turned, he'd swing his head right back down the fall line. Those were his first runs.

We still try to get up to Showdown about once a year, and I always bring a group of Bridger Bowl people with me.

All told it was 35 years of teaching, Instructor of the Year at Bridger Bowl and my race coaching certifications. And I was never a racer. I just skied with people like Baron Noble, Joe Murphy and Scott Mosher, and it was always, hey, keep up with us.