Search the photographs

The 1930s

Kings Hill

Every photograph in the archive from the 1930s, oldest first. This is the founding decade — Kings Hill opened in the Little Belt Mountains in 1936. Dated frames here run 1935–1939, and 2 more carry the decade but not a year.

The Great Falls Ski Club that ran the new area perfected its organisation on Tuesday 1 February 1938. Skiers came up from Great Falls by rail — the Great Northern ski train, following a pattern that was putting Montanans on trains to the snow all over the state that winter.

The first lift went in for the winter of 1938-39: a rope tow on the Bovey Slope, driven by a reconditioned ninety-horsepower automobile engine, with a tire rim bolted to a telephone pole doing duty as a sheave. A second tow, about 2,600 feet of it, followed in the fall of 1939. The Civilian Conservation Corps worked on the mountain in these years, and two runs still carry names from that time.

Most of the photographs below come from the Jack Throckmorton collection, now held by The History Museum in Great Falls — men and a mule building a tow house, the first run down the Neihart side, a ski jump, and Throckmorton himself on the hill in the winter of 1936.

61 photographs5 years represented7 collections