The Mosher Family

My first winter up there was 1968, back when it was still Kings Hill. I was ten. We lived in Great Falls then, and there were three of us boys, me, Mark and Mike. Somebody at Showdown once wrote that we were some of the cutest boys on the mountain, and I'll take it. I spent most of that first winter on the rope tow that used to sit where the helipad is now. Nobody I knew called it the Kinderhorn. It was the dope slope. Dad just let me roll, and I worked my way up to the Poma, then the T-bar and the other Poma. I haven't missed a winter since. That's fifty-eight now.

Dad was already on the ski patrol. He did twenty-three years in the Air Force as a civil engineer and then twenty-two with the Forest Service, and he patrolled the whole time we were growing up. He was a pro patroller for a few seasons back when Wayne Ellington was up there, and later he led a team on the volunteer patrol for years.

Mom was a schoolteacher, and she'd teach anybody's kid to ski, us included. Chris Quinn tells this one better than I can. He was twelve and having a rough time on the old Mizpah Poma when Mom asked if she could give him a few pointers. Pretty soon she had him snowplowing and linking turns, and after that she gave him rides up to the hill for years. That first day she told him Dad was probably the best skier on the mountain, and right about then Dad and Stan King came out of the trees with the powder flying, in their rust and blue uniforms and those fur gaiters up to the knee, skiing like they were out for a stroll. Chris ended up patrolling thirty-some years himself, listening to Dad and Stan tell how they did it in the old days.

By the time I was twelve we had a cabin in Neihart, and we were up every weekend. Summers, Mark and I worked on the mountain to pay our race fees. We were twelve or thirteen, out on Big Seven and the Hollow cutting trees for the race team and doing whatever Joe Pinski wanted us to do. I still can't keep those two runs straight. I did my share of trees, and I still blame my back on it. Dad put in some summers up there with Joe too.

Up on the hill everybody called them Mama Carol and Papa Dick. They had a lot of friends at Showdown and a lot of people stayed with them, and they took them in like their own kids. Mom's teacher friends would come up and stay and go skiing too. Mom was the one in the bright red lipstick. Dad didn't miss much, so if you were a kid up there you weren't getting away with anything, and he loved giving everybody a hard time. He was just a fun guy.

I got into the ski business at Great Falls Sporting Goods in 1975. From there I went to Wu Tung's, the ski and tennis shop downtown, and Idaho Trenberth and I ended up buying it. Wu Tung's had a shop up at Showdown too, so that's really when I started on the Showdown side of things. A year or two later we closed it, and I went to work for Showdown and ran the ski shop for about twenty years, first next to the rental shop and later downstairs. There was no deck back then. There was a road, and we used to drive right through where the deck is now. Sherry and I got married up on the mountain in 1984, and that's one of my three best days up there.

Another one was with George. Before the hill opened he'd run me up to the top on the snowmobile and then go down below with his camera. One year we had enough snow to ski the Glory Hole before we opened. This was before fat skis, and those skis wanted to dive. The whole way down I couldn't see and I couldn't breathe, and I didn't care. Some of those pictures went in the paper, and one ended up on a big poster at the airport, me in that green suit. Back then there were days when it was just George, Margie and me in the lodge, with Charley running around as a little guy.

In 1989 Showdown opened a second ski shop, in Times Square downtown, and I ran both. Boot fitting was always my thing. When George sold the shop to Skier's Edge in 1992 I managed it for them a couple of years, then worked it weekends while I had another job during the week. That same spring Dad got his National Appointment, which is the biggest honor the National Ski Patrol gives out, for twenty-four years of patrolling. By then Mom was teaching the little ones in SKIwee. She did that a few years. She liked the kids.

Our girls, Carley and Amy, started skiing at six or seven. When they were twelve and thirteen and on Team Extreme, I coached it. Then all of a sudden I was running the whole Youth Ski League, and I've been at it twenty-some years now. It's eight weeks every winter and we take the kids all over the mountain. It went from about a hundred kids when I started to almost three hundred one year, and since COVID it's been running a little over two hundred. The three-day Kids Camp used to be about thirty kids, and now we get close to eighty. The first time I had to get them all down the hill together I thought, how am I going to do this? So I put them in colored bibs and called it the parade of colors, and we still do it. Some of my instructors tell me they can't ski very well. That's fine. We'll teach you. All you really need is to like kids.

Our girls grew up running around the mountain with Katie and Mike Gold's kids, and they're all still good friends. Dad rebuilt the cabin in Neihart, and he and Mom moved up there when they retired. We lost Mom first. Dad put in more than thirty-five years on the patrol, and they gave him the Mike Bell Lifetime Service Award, so his name's up on Mike's Bell at the top. He passed in April 2021. He was eighty-seven. My third best day was in 2023, when Amy married Jakob up at Showdown and I got to dance with her out on the deck. Mom and Dad ended up with four grandkids, Matthew, Michael, Carley and Amy, and now two great-grandkids, Rylee and Blakely. It's one big family. I see Showdown as my family, and it's a good place for me.