Mike Gold

I grew up in Great Falls. I was born in 1959, a year after my brother Jim, and we have a sister, Sue. The first time I went up the hill was probably second grade, and it was still Kings Hill then. By fourth grade I was up there all the time, and there was no chairlift yet. The double chair didn't go in until 1970. By the time I was in junior high George Willett had bought the place, but when you're a kid you aren't paying much attention to who owns it.

In seventh grade, if I couldn't find a ride, I'd tell my mom I was going down to 10th Avenue to hitchhike. After a while I got smarter about it. I'd walk out to the stoplight on 49th Street, and when a big bunch of ski cars was coming, I'd hit the don't-walk button. That stopped them. When they're already sitting there at the light, they'll pull in and pick you up a lot quicker. Once they're doing forty-five or fifty on the way out of town, they don't want to stop. I was just this poor pathetic kid looking for a ride, and it worked. I can't imagine letting my own kids do that.

High school was skiing, and skiing with pretty girls. I graduated in 1977.

My first winter out of college, about 1982, I went to work in the Showdown ski school full time. I stayed seven winters and had a ball. I lived in Neihart in the big white house with five other instructors, and the rent was twelve dollars a month. Summers I painted houses, and in the fall I went elk hunting. Rick Hodas was running the ski school when I started, then Dave Broquist, then Idaho. Somewhere along the way I also taught at Teton Pass and at Big Mountain.

The instructors took turns writing a weekly ski tips column for the Tribune, and in February 1986 it was my turn. I wrote about moguls. I raced, too. That March I was second in the pro class of the Coca-Cola slalom, and my brother Jim set the pace that day.

In the fall of 1988 I married Katie Willett, George's daughter. We moved to Minneapolis for a couple of years while I was in school out there. It was cool to see a big city, but I was really glad to come home. Avery was born in 1990, and when she was two weeks old we moved back to Great Falls.

When Avery was little, her uncle Charley and I taught her to ski together, out by the rope tow. He was about nine and very serious about being a good teacher. Our twin boys, George and Will, came along a few years after Avery. The picture I sent Charley of their first day on skis is from 1997, the two of them holding hands in the learning area.

All those years the kids were skiing, they were racing and doing the snowboard stuff, and I didn't want to be tied down with a job up there. I skied with them. We had a cabin in Neihart then. At the end of the day, getting them out of the lodge was like chasing chickens, so I quit trying. When they were done, usually about five-thirty, they'd come find me and we'd head down to Neihart. Scott Mosher says our kids and his ran around together for years, and they're all still friends. He calls it one big family.

I built mannequins for the mannequin jump with the boys. They'd take a day off school and we'd work on it out in the backyard. My rule was no tape measure. You just built it close enough. Some of those guys get so particular, but it's going to wreck anyway. Charley and Dave Elmquist both remember the one I kept trying to get to flip. I had a new mechanism every year, and it never did flip.

I kept competing, too. In 2011 I was in the bump-offs, and the Tribune got a picture of me on Glory Hole trying to follow my son and my nephew down the line. In 2015 I was third among the men forty and over at the Brock Stokke Bump Off, and in 2019 I won the fifty-and-over.

If something's going on up there and they need a hand, I'm usually around. One Labor Day I rode around the parking lot in the horse wagon. The last three or four years I've gone up and taught the school kids. Avery is one of the owners now. I taught my kids to ski up there, and now I ski with my grandkids.

Charley says Jim, Sue and I are some of the longest-running people on the hill. I don't know about that. But it's been almost sixty years, and what a great sixty years.