Rick Hodas

My Montana memories began in the fall of 1975, when four of us rode our bicycles from Seattle to Vermont, east across Highway 2. My Showdown story began in the spring of 1980, at a wedding in Bozeman full of ski instructors. Somebody mentioned a ski area north of Bozeman that was looking for a ski school director. There was no internet to search, and it took a while to work out that it was the King's Hill Ski Area, now called Showdown. I called George Willett, drove up, and met George and Margie. The job was ski school director and marketing director both. I'd grown up skiing in Vermont, worked in New Zealand, and created the Snowbird Mountain Experience in Utah, so the marketing side intrigued me.

First my wife and I had to find a place to live, which is still a challenge for anyone working at Showdown. We found an 1893 house in Neihart that needed a lot of work. I still own it, and I'm still fixing it up. One spring I was in a back room at the Forest Service reading Showdown's old files, mostly pencil drawings, and never noticed Neihart was flooding until they came looking for me.

I wanted to raise the bar for the ski school. There's a saying that amateurs teach amateurs to be amateurs. We did ongoing training, and I made a locker room in the attic above the rental shop so the instructors had a place to swap what worked and what didn't. I designed the ski school jacket too, red with the black-and-white band across the chest, and had them made in Salt Lake City. Dave Broquist and Jim Gold were two of my instructors, and I still keep in touch with both.

A big part of the midweek business was a program for Montana schools called Ski for Life. I renamed it Ski Physical Education. Almost every school has a P.E. program, so Ski P.E. fit right into their curriculum. By 1982 we had about three thousand kids coming up from schools around north-central Montana, and Showdown covered the kids whose families couldn't pay. Nobody was making any money on it. It was a service for the kids. The Belt principal kept turning me down, and that was the school the Neihart kids went to. So I invited him and his family up on a Saturday and gave his wife and two kids rentals, tickets and lessons. They were all smiles at the end of the day, and he signed up.

I'd worked for Alpentech, a ski area planning company, and I used that to design a new beginner slope. I told Joe Pinski and Jim Hoxter it needed an eight percent grade. Not seven, not nine. Eight percent lets you glide down slowly and stop on the flat at the bottom. Joe got to rent a big D-9 Cat, which he loved, Jim did the fine grading, and Joe designed a rope tow that adjusted to the snow depth. I overheard George say, if this beginner slope doesn't work, Hodas is going to be a goat. It worked. A Magic Carpet is there now.

I also helped design the extension of what was then Lower Ripley, so the downhill course could use most of the vertical. Joe and Jim cut it, and in January 1984 the Showdown Downhill ran more than a mile on it. Today it's Ski Bums Way.

Part of marketing is giving people a reason to come up. We hosted the Montana Fireman's Slalom, teams of four firemen skiing a slalom carrying fifty feet of fire hose. It's not as easy as it looks. We created the Coca-Cola Sport Slalom, where an experienced racer set the pace and you won a bronze, silver or gold pin. A.J. Buskirk, in his buckskins, fired his rifle to start the Belt Creek Headwaters Relay. A TV station from Lethbridge covered it, because so many Lethbridge people skied at Showdown.

When we hosted the Special Olympics in 1983, E.T. was in the theaters, and we got the Montana National Guard to fly a helicopter in and drop off E.T. That was Cindy Polich, one of our instructors, in the costume. So many of the athletes believed she was really E.T. that she had to walk away for a bit. One girl won a gold ribbon and didn't want it. She wanted a brown one.

I remember the day the computer age came to Showdown, about 1982. George, Margie and I were in the office, and Margie said that when she pressed this key, the paychecks should start coming out of that printer. One fall after an early storm I took a picture of a skier kicking up snow, drove it to Great Falls to get it developed, and dropped it at the Tribune on a Saturday. Sunday I couldn't find it in the paper at the Neihart Store. Helen Wright asked me if I'd looked at the front page. There it was, above the fold.

Some days you had to make it up. One rainy midweek day, with seventy Ski P.E. students sitting in the lodge in their rentals, George asked me what we were going to do. We cut arm and head holes in big garbage bags and everybody had a raincoat. Another day our instructors couldn't get up in time, so I set out bamboo stations the way we did in New Zealand and ran from one to the next. By the end every kid could ski the rope tow slope.

Then there was the day it was forty below with no wind, and every other ski area in Montana had closed. Joe said his chairlift grease was good to fifty below, Wayne Ellington said run the triple and keep track of frostbite, and Tilly had enough chili. I said we should open, so I had to go take a run. I skied the Big Seven, now Hall-O, with the whole staff watching from the lodge windows, and the snow was like sandpaper. So I took another run. Four people showed up, we ran the triple for them, and we got free radio and TV for being the only ski area open in Montana. That day I learned the warmth of zero degrees.

I left in 1984 for Bridger Bowl, where I ran the ski school. I teach part-time now at Canyons Village in Park City. Every year I still buy a Showdown season pass, and every time I tell George, he says, What good are you, if you never ski at Showdown, you never buy lunch.