Snowbowl is a place that people in this town love or hate, with little in between. A horrifying incident last spring, when a chair on the Snow Park lift broke apart and a 4-year-old fell several feet to the slope below, followed by an apparently lackluster response from Snowbowl staff, amplified the debate between the camps to high volume. The incident spurred a flurry of coverage unlike anything Snowbowl had been subject to in recent years, and the operation’s safety updates and compliance with Forest Service regulations have been in the media spotlight ever since.
Full disclosure: I’m of the camp that loves skiing at that mountain. I learned to ski at the Bowl, as the locals call it, at the ripe age of 25, when you could participate in the six-week, women-only clinic and receive an afternoon’s worth of instruction, rental gear, and a free drink in the bar at the end of the day for only $200. I once met a boyfriend there when the Lavelle chair broke down two minutes after we introduced ourselves, and we were the last two evacuated off it. That one didn’t work out, but I got married to the one who did up at the Last Run Inn. I buy a season pass, and I take advantage of the mountain’s uphill policy to skin up it on my backcountry gear.
So, I love skiing there. And I’m horrified by the March chairlift incident (we often have a hard time using “and” instead of “but” in our increasingly polarized society; “and” is a good one to bring back into the lexicon). For the camp that hates it, Snowbowl is the sum of its failures, and always has been since it opened in the 1950s. While we can’t excuse the failures, especially when they result in terrifying accidents that should never have happened and most certainly should never happen again, I and others continue to ski there because there’s more to the equation. The inherent joy in the pointless activity of sliding on snow only 30 minutes from town. The community that feels more like a family, weird relatives and all. The land itself. Even the melt-freeze southern exposure that forces one to get creative in seeking out acceptable snow, the treasure hunt for a consistent fall line, the slow two-person chairlifts and the people you meet on them when you yell “Single!” in the lift line.
In the wake of the community’s loss of Snowbowl regular Greg Seitz in September, I find myself returning to the words of a long-ago essay he wrote about the Bowl:
“I prefer to love the place for the sum of its parts. It’s like giving broken instruments to an orchestra, which proceeds to play Mozart. The performance might not be perfect, but it’s unique.”
“Unique” may be one of the few descriptors everyone with a love-hate relationship with Snowbowl will agree on. (And, of course, the orchestra metaphor only applies if the instruments are safe and don’t result in children falling from chairlifts.)
In any case, with the Forest Service giving Snowbowl the green light to open less than two weeks ago, and as we wait—pray!—for snow to finally fall around Missoula, a lot of us are still wondering what the heck is going on up there. So I sat down with Sarah Duncan, Snowbowl’s base area manager, to ask for a little clarity.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What kinds of improvements have been done over the years under the Morris family?
In 1984, Snowbowl had two buildings: the A-frame lodge still in use today, and the bar, which was half the size; and one chairlift, the Griz chair, and a T-bar where Lavelle stands now. The group of six who originally bought the mountain wasted zero time with improvements and were able to foster a deal that replaced the T-bar at the top of the mountain with an actual chair lift, which was a much-needed expansion for the mountain. Then in 1996, the Gelendesprung Lodge was built, which included a new rental shop, and a small hotel. The bar was remodeled and doubled in capacity, the Snowbowl Road rerouted to create a more efficient and easier ride, and snowmaking capabilities and solar power installed. In the past four years we have exponentially increased our skiable terrain and created more variety in our terrain by installing two separate chair lifts, and luckily it isn’t going to stop there. We have plans for further expansions, and improvements are constantly being worked on.
[A little more background on Snowbowl’s ownership: In 1984, Brad Morris, then a surgeon in Missoula, and a group of five other doctors bought Snowbowl when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. After a series of poor snow years, the other doctors had all bowed out of the partnership by 1992, leaving Brad and his wife Ronnie the sole owners keeping the ski hill going.]
So what happened with the chairlift incident?
It wasn’t a freak accident, in the sense that things lined up for it to have happened. But they’re not common things that often line up. Because of that, they’re easy for us to rectify to make sure that we do everything in our capacity to ensure it never happens again.
Part of the reason the chair fell apart was that the halo on the lift had been modified, as tall riders were hitting their heads on it. There was a rumor that staff did that without an engineer?
That’s incorrect. Modifying the halo was overseen by an engineer, our annual inspector who inspects all our lifts.
Why didn’t Snowbowl have to go through all of these safety inspections and updates in 2020, when a chair broke off the Lavelle lift just after two skiers unloaded from it?
We did have another inspection with our engineer and make repairs at that time before letting the public back on the lift. I think in the past, people just haven’t necessarily been as interested or thought of asking us about inspections and repairs.
So who inspects the lifts on a yearly basis to check for safety?
The Forest Service and Snowbowl have a third-party engineer who’s certified and follows codes that every single lift in the world has to abide by to ensure they’re safe for the public to ride and for employees to work around. Typically the Forest Service joins that inspection, although sometimes they just ask for a report; it depends on if they have personnel that can join at the time.
The Missoulian coverage notes that several issues were identified with the lifts during the recent annual inspection. So are those things that had malfunctioned over the winter since the previous inspection?
Those were very small things like needing to add a sign, or to label our stop button. There was nothing major. A lot of the coverage referenced out-of-date information. For example, one November article referenced a report from August, so it was out of date when the article was published.
The March chair malfunction saw a breakdown in safety protocols. Are there any new safety precautions in place now, including with ski patrol and lift operators?
Yes. In past years, we’ve loaded the heavier rider on the outside of the chair so lifties can boost a kiddo up into the chair. This year, we’ve added different controls on both sides of the lift so that lifties can load kiddos on the outside to help balance chairs better. There are more procedures with slowing lifts down. So this year, we might see a little bit slower lifts to be sure we have the reaction time to hit the stop button, whether someone drops a ski pole or someone fumbled sitting down. We’ve clarified our lines of communication all the way up the chain. And we redesigned our training to emphasize safety even more.
The Bowl has always been notorious for poor communication with the public (with the exception of the snow phone updated daily), but it seems like there’s been a conscious effort to improve that starting this season?
Absolutely. We know we’ve been lacking in that, and we definitely heard the public say they wanted more communication. We’re doing our best to abide by that.
In that vein, why did the Bowl sell discounted season passes in the spring with a non-refundable deposit, without disclosing what the full price of passes would be?
That’s industry standard for resorts not to be able to set their pass and ticket prices until the fall, because they don’t know what their insurance costs are going to be. And with inflation, insurance rates were skyrocketing; a lot of small resorts have had to close because of insurance pricing. But we want to be able to give people an opportunity to get a discount on their season passes through a spring sale with deposits.
There are accusations that the management doesn’t take criticism well, including an incident in 2012 of refusing to sell a season pass to a longtime passholder after he brought up safety concerns. What’s up with that?
I think if our management didn’t take criticism well, we wouldn’t have implemented the changes that we did this year. We do listen to the public and we take that into account when we’re looking at changing policies and plans.
What can skiers expect this season in terms of base area lines and parking?
We know that there are days in the past when our lines were horrendous. We’ve updated our ticket system to a scanner instead of having to call your pass number out to the checker, which will make things move much faster.
In terms of parking: carpool, carpool, carpool. Save your gas money, save the planet, and drive with your friends. We’re in a tough situation with our parking lot in that there’s no possible way to expand. [Currently, a shuttle bus operates Saturday and Sunday, going up at 8:45am and back down at 4:15pm.] Back in the 2010 era, we’d offered more of a shuttle system. But no one used it—which makes it hard to bring it back. So it’s just finding that middle ground of maybe adding more times on the weekend and going from there.
Sooooo, it’s been a dry early season. What’s the status on opening more of the mountain?
We’re going to try to offer as much as we safely can to the community while we wait for Mother Nature to fill in the rest, even if it’s just running the rope tow and opening up our ski shop and bar.
Anything you want the backcountry community to know?
Yes, please stick to our uphill policy, which is to access through Lot 2 during non-operating hours. That’s not to make our backcountry users suffer, it’s for safety. Right now we have snow machines all over the base area, snowmaking equipment with electrical wires and high pressure hoses running off it—stuff that it’s not safe to ski over the top of. As long as our temperatures are low, we’re going to be blowing as much snow as we can to get ready to open. We are all for the public utilizing our public lands, we just have to make sure they’re safe and using that uphill route.
