Search the photographs

The 1980s

Showdown Ski Area

Every photograph in the archive from the 1980s, oldest first. In this decade the ski area was called Showdown Ski Area. Dated frames here run 1981–1989, and 121 more carry the decade but not a year.

With two chairlifts in and the T-bar gone, the 1980s were about the ground rather than the machinery. A learn-to-ski bench was cut in the summer of 1981 and the last rope tow on the mountain was moved onto it — 600 feet, fifty feet of rise, with its vertical painted on the machine itself. It is the beginners' hill that generations of Montana children remember as their first.

A weekly race series ran through the decade, and the archive can now show it had a name before it ever had a sponsor. Ski instructors were being certified here; a professional class taught at Showdown turns out, on reading, to have been a Neihart class. Down the canyon, the Juntunens took over Bob's Bar in Neihart in 1982 and kept it for thirty-six years, which is as much a part of a Showdown weekend as anything on the hill.

The 1984-85 trail map carries two things that never happened: a proposed lift drawn in the upper right, and PROPOSED REOPENING lettered along the Poma's line. The lift was never built. The map is evidence of the plan, not of the outcome.

1 of these came out of Showdown's own Facebook page, and are placed here by the date the post went up — which is not always the day the photograph was taken. An older picture posted in a Throwback Thursday sits in the decade it was posted, not the decade it shows. The archive records the post date on every one of them; where a reader knows better, tell us.

448 photographs9 years represented12 collections