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The 1940s

Kings Hill

Every photograph in the archive from the 1940s, oldest first. In this decade the ski area was called Kings Hill. Dated frames here run 1940–1949, and 51 more carry the decade but not a year.

The decade opened with the tow broken. In January 1940 water was left standing in the engine block, the block cracked in the cold, and the club replaced the motor by subscription — passing the hat around Great Falls to get the hill turning again. By the 1940-41 season Kings Hill was a real ski area, with two tows and a following.

Then the war closed it. 1942 is the first of only two times in ninety years that a world event has shut this mountain — the second was 2020. The club's men went into the services and the hill went quiet.

It came back. By January 1947 the Great Falls Ski Club could describe its own plant in the paper again, and it had added something no other machine in this archive can claim: a portable rope tow, an 800-foot pull that could be picked up and put down where the snow was. An upper tow followed in 1949, and the lodge began its long change from a shelter into a building people actually stayed in.

141 photographs9 years represented10 collections