Rick Jacobs Family

I'm a Great Falls kid. In 1963, when I was twelve, I got a learn-to-ski package, five lessons and lift tickets, and started out on the old rope tow between the parking lot and where the triple is now. We rode the ski bus up from the Buttrey's lot on 10th Avenue South.

My uncle, Jim Jordan, was good friends with a lot of the ski patrollers, and they talked me into racing. By 1966 I was fifteen, going to Great Falls High, and on the race team. The week before a race we'd walk up the Mile and side-slip down, walk up and side-slip down, all week, packing the course, because nobody could groom it the way they can now. The downhill came right over the top, under the chair and down the south side of Throckmorton's Mile. Joe Taylor was always grabbing me by the ear and telling me to slow down, and at the end of the day his table was always full of people. I won the downhill at Big Mountain once. My grandmother's cousin was Ed Schenck, who was here at the very beginning and then went to Whitefish and started Big Mountain, and when we went up to race he gave me my own room and let me order steak for dinner. He treated me like a little prince, and I was sixteen.

I shot Super 8 movies in high school, the old Fun Days, the banked turn on big inner tubes. We built a training jump in the coulee right off the corner of the exit, logs piled up against two trees. I'm still sore that the high school teams went away.

In 1976 I moved to White Sulphur Springs a year ahead of the rest of the family, because the people we bought the ranch from were teaching me how to irrigate, and Susan and the family came over in 1977. When you're making payments on a ranch, you do a hundred different things to make ends meet. I was a paramedic for eighteen years, so the ski patrol called on me to help them quite often.

I started in the ski school in 1989, when Jolene was eleven, and I was up there thirty-some years. In the nineties Harlan Cory would show up too crippled up to put on his own boots, so I'd go over and boot him up. I still think I hold the record for the biggest class, fifty-three kids. I took out fifty-three and came back with fifty-three.

Ty started racing first. Susan was terrified, until one of the race moms, whose family had a nursery in town, told her we're all good people up here and we all look out for each other's kids. That tipped the scale. I didn't coach until Ty had raced for quite a while. In April 1998 Jolene, Ty, Katie and I won the family race at the Corporate Cup. That same year George asked me to put the freestyle team back together, so I got a bunch of corporate sponsors and we bought team coats, and about 2000 I took over the race team. I supervised the ski instructors for a while, got certified to teach the ski bikes, and coached racers into 2012.

Jolene's best friend is Melissa Eggehorn. She was Melissa Goulet when she worked up there, and she's a year older than Jolene. When she was fourteen she walked right up to Lyle Cigler and asked him how she could work there. He told her she had to be older and to come talk to him next year, and she did. She says it's one of her proudest moments. She started about 1993 and Jolene came on a year later, and the two of them used to ride the Poma up into the trees on their lunch break and sit up there and talk. Jolene studied for her Level 1 with Joan Rostad, and she taught snowboarding too. Our youngest, Katie, raced all the way to her Junior Olympic racer's coat and then told me, Dad, now we're going to rodeo.

Melissa worked up there seven or eight years, then married an Air Force man and spent twenty-five years all over the country. When she moved back, she saw George sitting at a table full of old men at Electric City Coffee. He got up, walked across the room and hugged her. She asked him how he could possibly remember her, and he said, I signed your paycheck. That's George. He has the most incredible memory for people.

Mike Gold and I used to give George fits on the radio. I'd call from the mountain, Mikey, what are you doing? I'm in my office. Can you come out and play? And then George would come on, you guys get off that radio.

George and I were standing at the bottom of the old rope tow one day, and there was this little cowboy skier in a pair of Carhartt bibs making hot laps, up and down, up and down. All of a sudden he's going sideways. George says, what's he doing? I said, he has to pee, George. George says, no, he's not going to do that. I said, you watch. He skied off to the side, took care of business and got right back on the rope. Too late, George. There's not a thing you can do about it.

We sold the ranch in 2019 and moved back to Great Falls. Ty has my old gear up in Kalispell, and he's the one skimming the pond in the pictures with half the mountain watching. There's a real sense of family on this mountain.