Mel Carnahan

I grew up in Great Falls and got out of high school in 1977. I'd never had skis on. In 1979 I started skiing at Showdown, at twenty, so everything I know about skiing I learned up there.

Chris and I had known each other a long time, and a couple of years out of high school we started seeing each other. We got married in September 1980, so this September made forty-six years. I always tell people that if she didn't ski, we probably wouldn't have gotten married. She loves it.

Back then I worked for Buttrey Foods in Great Falls. A few people I knew through the store were on the Great Falls Ski Patrol, and they're the ones who brought me in. I joined as a trainee in 1986, started patrolling in 1987, and I've been doing it ever since. Not long after I joined, I left Buttrey's and went into business with my dad. That's Carnahan Towing, and it's been my business for most of my time on the patrol.

We raised our family in Neihart, and Showdown was a big part of it. Anybody will tell you, you could drop your kid off in the morning and pick them up that evening and never worry. My son grew up on the hill on a snowboard. My daughter skied with the race team and Team Extreme, and she's still a skier. Most of our family pictures are ski pictures. In the wintertime, that's what we did.

When you join the patrol, you just become a family. Bill Lay, Allan Rabbit, Terry Stevenson, those guys have been such a big part of my life.

Stan King had already been up there twenty-some years when I came along. He was my little hobbit friend. We ended up giving him a place to live in Neihart, and he became a grandfather to my kids. I always said if Stan cut himself he'd bleed rust and blue, because the ski patrol was his life. One of the guys used to say Stan had been on the patrol sixty years and never agreed with a single change we made. That was Stan.

Mike Bell was on the patrol forty-one years. When he died in the summer of 1996, Allan, Dave Mountain and I, with a lot of help from other patrollers and friends, built his memorial on top, the one with the bell. In 2017 the patrol gave me the Mike Bell Lifetime Service Award, so my name's on that bell now too.

Fireworks have always been kind of a part of me. New Year's Eve at Showdown used to be the torchlight parade. About twenty-five years ago Allan and I got talking and figured maybe we could do fireworks. We took it to George, and George said yeah, that'd be great. That first show was pretty small, but it was a start, and I took it on myself to keep it going. Then George came on board paying for it, which was awesome.

Back then the shells were the kind you lit and dropped in a tube, and there were only five of us. One night one went up, spun around and came right back down into the bucket where we kept the rest. Stan kicked it away, and when it went off, Diane Carter got a picture of it. It's Stan in silhouette, running downhill from the flash. Nobody got hurt. But that's exactly why safety is at the top of my list. We got away from those mortars, and I got my Class B license so we could buy the bigger fireworks. Knock on wood, we've never had anybody hurt. I talk to the crew pretty straight. Be safe. Don't put your head over a firework. And when they're done, don't count on them being done, because we've had some late bloomers.

When Katie and Avery came along, they came on board too, and the last five years it's turned into quite the show, about twice what it was. There are ten of us on the Boom Crew now, and I keep it at ten so I can keep an eye on everybody. Even a patrol from another hill comes over to help. Mike at Liberty Fireworks, who sold to a few other ski areas, told me one day we buy more than any of those big resorts.

When Stan died in 2024, I cleaned out his garage. He'd held on to a lot of skis, and those skis are a bench on the mountain now.

Not long ago we had our first trouble with trees. I always order shells that break higher than any tree we've got. That night two went up, one hit the other and pushed it down into a couple of dead trees, and they caught fire. We watched it afterward on video. Jimmy Hoxter said those trees were dead and needed to go anyway. AJ took a piece of one and built me an award out of it.

This year the National Ski Patrol is honoring me for forty years, and Bill Lay for fifty. Chris and I live in Neihart full time now, and I'm on the QRU and the fire department down in the valley. You give back to the community you live in. Charley says he still sees me up there wiping down tables.

I've always thought it's kind of nice to give back to the people who are up at Showdown. I can't say there's ever been a negative up there for me. It's always been positive. It's as family-oriented as it ever was, and I think all of us cherish that.