Still Going DownhillThe 1920s
Every photograph in the archive from the 1920s, oldest first. There was no ski area yet: Kings Hill opened in 1936. What the archive holds from this decade is older than the hill itself. Dated frames here run 1929.
But there were already skiers in the Little Belt Mountains. Boy Scouts were winter-camping in these mountains from December 1928, and a ski jump was built here in 1930 — six years before anybody sold a lift ticket at Kings Hill.
What made a ski area possible was the road. Getting a driveable way over Kings Hill Pass took thirty-four years and eight separate pushes, and until it was finished the mountain was somewhere you walked to.
The two photographs here come from Earl Hall's high-school yearbook. Hall would later be president of Ski Lift, Inc., the company that ran the area from 1957 — but in 1929 he is a schoolboy, a long way from the T-bar he would one day ride first.
1929
2 photographs
