Ron Hall

I was born in 1935, a year before Showdown. Dad was a doctor, and there were two openings for him, one in Arizona and one in Montana. We left Michigan and tried Arizona first. Dad didn't like it. I didn't have anything to do with it. We came north through the desert with a canvas water bag hanging on the front of the car, and I kept wanting a drink.

Dad heard there was a ski area south of Great Falls that nobody was using, because most of the men were away at the war. So in 1942 he went up to look at it with the manager of the Great Falls Clinic. You parked at the top of the pass and walked up the road, close to a mile. There was a little warming shack, and down in its basement was a Buick car engine with a hand crank. It took them quite a while to learn how to get it started.

The first day we skied there were four of us, two grown-ups and two kids, me and a boy named Roger. The men cranked for two hours and more, and Roger and I played in the snow. That's where I learned to snowplow. After that Dad and his friend came up all winter and started that engine for whoever showed up. It was a couple of hours' drive from town, and then you had to park on top and climb over to the lodge. As a seven-year-old, that drove me nuts.

When I was nine or ten the older fellows, the ones who thought they were hot dogs, decided our hill wasn't fast enough. They went across the highway, climbed to the top of the power line and set a course up there, and they invited us kids to race. We were supposed to go first. When we got to the top they decided we'd wreck the course, so they went first and left us standing up there in the cold for about four hours. That only happened once.

After the war the men came back and more people skied. Dad said we shouldn't have to crank the thing to get it going. He knew the bankers, and they bought two diesel engines, one for Bovey Slope and one for the run to the top. What a change. No more cranking. Dad skied with no gloves and no hat and his pipe in his mouth. Was he a good skier? He thought he was.

The upper tow was steep, and where the grade changed the rope would come off the wheel. A good skier held it and put it back on. Everybody else took their skis off and walked. The girls had a hard time with it, so we boys got to put the girls in front of us. I was fifteen or sixteen and didn't mind that one bit. In March 1953 the club ran its first giant slalom on Throckmorton's Mile, and I won the high school race. Larry Ginnaty says I'm the one who took him skiing the first time, about then, when we were in school together. He hasn't stopped since.

Dad got tired of rope tows. He went and looked at a Poma and talked the bank into it, and it went straight up the main run. It opened in January 1957, and that spring the club named the run for him, the Hall-O. That Poma was a doozy of a ride. It would lift the little kids right off the ground.

In December 1960 the company started a certified ski school, with Floyd Dupuis running it, and I was one of the teachers. I was twenty-five. I was on the club board that year too, and did the publicity for Ski Lift, Inc. In 1962 I passed my exams, and that February I bought a pair of Head Standards at Allsports Supply. In January 1964 I wrote the ski tips for the Kings Crier, on carving a turn. You edge the ski and put your weight on it, and it carves an arc in the snow.

Dad still wasn't satisfied. The Poma pulled one person at a time. He and Jim Thompson went and looked at T-bars, and John Rice and a couple of others helped with the money. It went in the summer of 1963, and Governor Tim Babcock came up for it. There were so many people. We had years on that T-bar, not just two, before the double chair came in 1970.

I taught biology at Great Falls High for thirty-one years, and I coached there, football and golf and the ski team. Sherry raced too. In April 1961 she won the women's senior class in the club giant slalom. Our four girls, Leslie, Cindy, Kim and Lynn, all raced, and Eleanor Bennett, out of St. Regis, trained them. They grew up around that lodge while I was out coaching. In the spring of 1971 the Halls and the Murphys took four trophies each at the club races, and the Kings Crier noticed that their coaches, Joe Murphy and me, didn't win a thing.

My brothers Dave and Dick were twins, ten years younger than me. In 1974 Dick married Claudia Willett, George's sister. So the year after George bought the mountain, the Halls and the Willetts were family. Nobody planned that.

Summers I ran a sprinkler business, and I wanted my crew to have work in the winter. In 1988 we started tuning skis in my garage, and in the fall of 1989 we opened Skier's Edge on 9th Street South. Darryl Baggett and I are still fifty-fifty partners. In May 1992 we bought Showdown's pro shop, and Showdown moved its town office into our store, where it stayed for years. It's a tough business, but what you're really selling is fun. I always told people Showdown has the best snow in the country. Cheating snow, I called it, because it's so easy to ski on. By 1996 I was following my grandkids to races all over the state.

Dad took pictures of this mountain for thirty years. I kept them, and I gave two hundred and fifty-one of them for this book. In 2022 Showdown renamed Big Seven. It's the Hall-O again, for Dad, Dick and me. I'm the only one of us four kids still here. I skied from seven to eighty-nine. That's a pretty good run. By the end I could almost ski as well as my dog.