The view that makes it all worth it. Photo: Geoff Perna
Geoff Perna was cruising at breakneck speed through a powdery tree line, snow sticking to his unkempt beard. He was having the time of his life… until the trees grew thicker. An overgrown forest soon loomed overhead, brush and fallen trees now obscuring those sweet caches of untouched powder.
“I had to kind of stop and have a safety meeting with myself,” he recalls. No stranger to adventure, Geoff is equal parts bashful and excited as he recounts an early experience at Montana Snowbowl, a ski area 12 miles north of Missoula, infamous among locals for its checkered (recent) past.
That day, Montana local Tim Langford had taken Geoff to Snowbowl to show him some of the mountain’s best kept secrets. They were riding with another friend, who Tim calls “a scurvy, old pro telemark skier,” the kind who knows every inch of Snowbowl, considers no part of it off-limits and “turns super tight, dipping and dodging in and out of trees.” Tim kept up, but Geoff, who had just moved to Montana, lost track of his in-the-know friends and missed the path back to the groomed trail. “If you don’t hit that little goat track that you need to get out of there,” Tim recounts, “ If you blow past that thing? Yeah. You’re going to the bottom.”
The bottom was more or less where Geoff wound up. He found himself crawling over logs, with limited cell service and no luck reaching his friends. “I had to climb over a tree and push through some brush,” he says, “and then unstrap and crawl out of a little hole (or valley), and I’m like, ‘Okay, this is definitely not where I’m supposed to be.’”
After a rugged 20 minutes, Geoff finally found a skin track he recognized. It was about half a mile up the road from Snowbowl’s entrance, where diehard riders craving an early morning run pull over, attach synthetic snow-gripping skins to their skis or splitboards, and climb their way to the top of the mountain. Geoff rode down the skin track, popped out on the road and started walking. “I called Tim and told him to meet me at the bar,” Geoff chuckles. Tim shakes his head, remembering Geoff’s tail-between-the-legs arrival, “All of a sudden here comes Geoffrey, dragging his gear.”
It was the kind of haphazard experience you’d only get at a place like Snowbowl. The intimate, four-lift resort is akin to the Action Park of Montana ski resorts, fueled by a slapdash, laissez-faire attitude shared by riders and staffers alike.
Take the notoriously faulty lifts, for instance. This past season, Snowbowl was required by the Lolo National Forest to undergo significant maintenance before being allowed to open. The mandate was prompted by a mechanical failure the season prior that resulted in a four-year-old child being violently flung from a malfunctioning lift. The boy survived, but his father, Nathan, told HuffPost he was left furious when attendants immediately restarted the lift, post-incident. A bystander reportedly laughed and said, “Yeah, that’s Snowbowl.”
Still, Snowbowl has endured, though it’s a dying breed. Without the huge population, out-of-state draw, or influx of tourism ticket sales needed to elevate it to the likes of destination ski resorts like Vail or Park City, Snowbowl has remained largely unchanged over the years. Even with the mechanical failures, Snowbowl’s comparatively cheap ticket prices make it worthwhile, particularly for the off-season fire workers living around Missoula that make up a good chunk of its clientele.
Local town mountains like Snowbowl are key to the survival of skiing and snowboarding. They allow young people to get into the sport without the exorbitant prices of major destination resorts like Vail, Aspen, or Palisades Tahoe. But they’re a dying breed. According to a National Ski Area Association report, some 45 resorts have closed over the last 20 years, most of them smaller hills like Snowbowl.
And there’s often more freedom found at these small, out-of-the-way town mountains.
Take Snowbowl’s bootpacking culture as an example, an activity that’s nearly impossible to get away with at resorts with more oversight. Instead of being ferried to prime powder by high-speed lifts, in-the-know locals will take Snowbowl’s faulty lifts as far and high as they’ll go, detach from their skis or boards, and hike uphill with their gear in tow. Bootpacking takes riders out of bounds, where they’re able to reach backcountry style powder. Tim calls it sidecountry skiing. “All you do is exit the marked terrain at a gate and go for a little hike,” he says, in a tradition similar to that of Bridger Bowl, another town hill in nearby Bozeman.
Take a wrong turn and you could end up in a basin you definitely won’t recognize. Photo: Tim Langford
The hikes take a good while, as much as 15 to 30 minutes to earn a three- to four-minute run. In the end, though, bootpackers are rewarded with a quality ride others might pay a premium for, complete with incredible views.
Nevertheless, the reward isn’t without risk. Snowbowl’s trail maps warn against exiting the ski area, as journeying into the sidecountry without a seasoned local can mean getting lost beyond recovery. Beyond that, bootpacking is arduous in and of itself. “If you’re just breaking a virgin path through the snow, you experience what we call post-holing,” says Tim.“That’s where every step your entire leg goes through the snow, and you’re up to your waist.”
It’s led to a local culture of “earning your turns,” where quality runs are accessed through hard work. There’s an element of pride to it. Tenacious riders strive to find coveted caches of powder, eventually forging semi-permanent hiking paths up the mountain. “As people come behind you over the course of the day, and throughout the season, [the snow] gets busted in and you’ve kind of established a little bit of a path,” continues Tim. “That becomes the bootpack.”
Snowbowl’s frequent mechanical failures, oddly, also have their place in the local earn-your-turn culture. Tim and Geoff describe a magical season, where one of the resort’s main lifts was down for the duration. Without the lift, the only way to reach the top after taking backside runs was to skin uphill, something that is typically only allowed at Snowbowl in the early morning, before lifts are operational (otherwise there would be too many collisions with skiers skinning up and riding down simultaneously). However, that season an entire portion of the mountain was available for skinning all day long, and the pair spent their days accessing officially sanctioned runs untouched by the masses.
This is how you earn your turns. Photo: Geoff Perna
The mountain is changing, though, for better or for worse. Since the lift incident, Snowbowl PR representative Sarah Duncan stated that more in-depth inspections were required than Snowbowl’s regular annual inspection, though that’s as far as any pressure from the Forest Service went. Snowbowl has also made an effort to bolster awareness about its pre-existing annual inspections, which include pre-and-post-season meetings and safety checks from engineers. She dispelled rumors of a looming threat of permanent shutdown as “mainly all a lot of speculation,” though. Duncan added that Snowbowl is “fully partnered” with the Forest Service – the mountain can’t operate without them.
On the other hand, other improvements might come at the cost of some of Snowbowl’s scrappy allure. In recent years, the ski area has added new lifts that climb to spots locals would often bootpack to. Of the formerly hidden areas, Tim figures 70 percent are now accessible by lift. “There’s still kind of two little areas that aren’t quite accessed yet,” he says, but Tim’s tone suggests that may not be the case for much longer.
On top of that, locals are finding themselves getting priced out. Though Snowbowl is a quick drive and comparatively cheaper than big-name resorts, the cost has steadily increased over the past 10 years. It’s a far cry from the $300-$400 season passes of Tim’s youth. “Now, I think a daily lift ticket is like 75 bucks and their season passes (are nearly $800),” he says, “So is it worth the money to go bootpack?”
When asked about whether Snowbowl was going to go big-time, eschewing local town mountains status for big-money real estate opportunities to draw the rich and famous, Duncan stressed that the things that make Snowbowl unique aren’t going away. “It’s not a goal of ours to become an Alta or a Snowbird… the small community feel is what we want. We want our community and [the mountain] to be hand in hand and work tightly together.”
That’s exactly how the locals want it, too. For diehards, putting up with less-than-ideal conditions, passing down hidden routes and runs to the next generation, and perpetuating earn-your-turn culture is what makes Snowbowl, Snowbowl. “It’s an institutional thing,” says Tim. Despite the mishaps and changes, they’ll stand by the mountain ‘til the bitter end.
