Nate Schendel

I'm from White Sulphur Springs, and the first time I went skiing at Showdown I was five or six, so about 1990 or 1991. It was the ski P.E. program, and they put us on a bus and drove us up Kings Hill. I didn't know what I was getting into, but there was so much snow on the way up that I knew something special was about to happen. I fell in love with it that very first day.

For the first couple of years I only went up with the school. After that I started finding rides with whoever was going, and I skied a fair amount. When I was twelve I got a snowboard for Christmas. I'd never been on one, but I had to try it, and I fell for that too. I didn't stop snowboarding until a couple of years into teaching.

I started working at Showdown in 2004, teaching in the ski school. My first year I worked under Chris and Beth Leatham. Some of my best friends, the closest people in my life, I met that first year up there.

By my second or third year I was kind of a part of everything. I'd go run lifts if they needed an extra body, and I started doing a lot of work with patrol.

I'm actually one of the guys who talked Ben Haugan into coming up. He had just graduated from college and he didn't want to be a ski bum. He figured he'd be wasting his time. Eric Held was patrolling and teaching in the ski school back then, at the beginning, and the two of us convinced Ben to come up and try it for one season. He fell in love with it. We created a monster.

I ran the ski school for one season. I was twenty-four, so I want to say 2009. I was also the guy in the Yeti suit, so if your kids ever chased the Yeti around at Kids Camp, there's a good chance it was me.

I've been in construction a long time, and summers I worked on the building crew. When I started at Showdown, the line for food used to go right out of the lodge. The old kitchen sat in the middle with a line on each side, and it was about the least efficient way you could lay one out. When the kitchen got redone, I did the tile floor.

The hand-hewn tables in the lodge are mostly mine. There are a couple I wasn't part of, but I started that whole look, the rustic, rough-cut timbers, the slabs and the blue pine. I built the big hand-hewn counters out in the lodge too, and later AJ Korslien made some to match them.

For a while Charley and I lived up in the old maintenance building, and that was our little wood shop. We were friends before all that, but honestly more like acquaintances. Working up there together and doing everything we did is what made us close.

For Showdown's 75th, Charley and I made a film together, Glorious Snowfields. We did it all in house, the filming and the editing, and it came out on DVD in March 2012.

I've watched the place grow every single year since I first started skiing up there, and especially these last five years. People come up to Showdown from all over the state now.

This winter I'm coming back to work up there as a mountain host. A couple of years ago Katie and I had talked about it, so I called her, and she said yes right away. She told me it's my home and my family, and they'd love to have me back.

She's right. It's a family. Showdown is my second home, and I thought of it that way long before I ever worked there.