Uphill Both Ways
- Shane Johnson
- Dec 18, 2025
- 5 min read
The summit of Big Mountain has always beckoned to those longing for adventure and sweet powder, but the way to the top hasn’t always been as easy as it is today. Join us as we explore some of the first methods to get to the top.
The year was 1933, and Ole Dalen and Lloyd “Mully” Muldown first met while searching for a way up the mountain. At the time, there was only a rudimentary road that ended at Whitey Hendersen’s mine, near Eagle’s Nest today. To simply get above the tree line took a grueling four hours or more of hiking in the deep snows of the Whitefish Range. While this may be a daunting and impossible task for many of us in 2025, the promise of adventure was too much to resist for Dalen and Mully, and in 1934 they finally made their way to the summit of Big Mountain, breaking trail the entire way.
Within a few years of this fateful meeting, the Hell-Roaring Ski Club was formed (later changed to the Whitefish Lake Ski Club in 1945 at the urging of locals with “delicate sensibilities”), a winter cabin was built, and the quiet railroad town of Whitefish would never be the same.
Rope Tow Season
In the summer of 1938, the first alternative to climbing the mountain was hauled up the mountain on horseback. It was a gerryrigged towrope mechanism that would make a safety engineer cry. Fred Hotel, Chuck Creon, and other early members of the Hell-Roaring Ski Club, built it out of two or three Model T wheels, an old car engine, the transmission and frame from an old Dodge, and the front end of a Willy’s Knight car. When this was all connected with a tow rope to the back end of another car, these early skiers could finally make their way up in newfound comfort–when compared to trudging up the mountain, of course.
WWII took many members of the Hell-Roaring Ski Club away from the slopes, stalling any further development, but the club and the increasing public interest made up for lost time when the war was finally concluded. After being passed over by the Great Northern Railway, the Whitefish Chamber of Commerce seized on to the likes of Ed Schenck and George Prentice to develop Big Mountain into a resort to rival Sun Valley. Schenck and Prentice saw the mountain for the gem that was, and set to work installing the first T-bar lift in 1947 after the incorporation of Winter Sports, Inc (WSI) earlier that year.
In the cab or grabbing the rope: The Tucker
The $30,000 T-bar was a boon for Big Mountain that year, although it wasn’t without problems. Lyle Rutherford recalls attempting to ride the T-Bar the night before Big Mountain opened. Instead of gliding up the track, he says that, “I was swinging up there like an ape. The darn cable wouldn’t let you down. It picked you right up until you were sitting on it like a chicken on a roof with skis dangling below.” Chuck Creon quickly went to work to make the ride a little more enjoyable for paying customers.
While the T-bar would run until 1969, WSI needed to find other ways to get folks up to the summit as the lift didn’t run that far. In 1956, they made the purchase of a Tucker Sno-Cat for $8,000. The Sno-Cat could fit 5 to 6 skiers inside and up to 10 skiers could be pulled behind on two ropes. At $4.50 a trip for a cabin seat, most people opted to spend $1.50 to be pulled up on a rope.
Moving Faster
In 1958, the addition of a POMA lift added greater options to reach the increasing number of runs on the mountain. While the T-bar and POMA lift were never as comfortable as the chair lifts, they were certainly an improvement on hiking up the mountain like in early years. However, it was quickly determined that the T-bar, POMA, tow line, and Sno-Cat were simply not enough if Big Mountain ever wanted to establish its place as a destination resort. The resort needed a true chair lift to compete.
So it was that the installation of Chair One in 1960 truly elevated Big Mountain to a world class resort. For the first time ever, skiers could ride all the way to the top of the mountain and back down on a double chairlift. Chair One was considered one of the longest lifts in the United States at the time with a 6,800 foot-long Heron rising over 2,000-foot spread out over 31 lift towers. With a capacity of 450 skiers per hour, Chair One faithfully carried countless thousands of skiers until its replacement in 1989 with a high-speed quad chair and gondola cars.
Bigger, Faster, Stronger
Like the T-bar, Chair One had some initial hiccups during installation. Norm Kurtz, General Manager and general employee for multiple decades, tells the story of J.D. Pike, one of the workers installing the cable for Chair One: “About the time we had the cable on one of the upper support towers just below the Big Drift, the big wire rope caught on a fallen snag. Pike went to get it loose, and about the time he pulled it away from the snag, the cat pulled on the cable, and up went Pike with the cable, more than 120 feet in the air,” says Kurtz. Pike was eventually lowered down, but still had to make a twenty-foot drop to the ground. He survived with only a tear in his pants. “Toughest guy I ever met,” states Kurtz.
As Big Mountain has evolved over the years, so too has all the ways to get to the top of the mountain. Today, skiers can ski in luxury with 11 chairlifts, a T-bar, and two conveyor carpets. Long gone are the days of hiking to the top and gerryrigged tow ropes, but the allure of Big Mountain will never cease to attract those looking for adventure and powder.
And if you ever have the time and want to see that gerryrigged tow rope, feel free to visit the Whitefish Ski Heritage Museum for a peek at what remains. While this author may have been born the year that the original Chair One was replaced, the sight of that contraption makes him long for a simpler time of daring adventure and lack of safety protocols.
Sources used in this month’s newsletter:
Hellroaring: Fifty Years on The Big Mountain by Jean Arthur
Stump Town to Ski Town: The Story of Whitefish, Montana by Betty Schafer and Mable Engelter
Chair One by Norm Kurtz
The Whitefish Pilot
Thank you for reading this Stumptown Story about the hikes, rope tows, snow cats, poma lifts, and chair lifts that got us to the top of the Big!
-The team at the Stumptown Historical Society
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