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The 1990s

Showdown Ski Area

Every photograph in the archive from the 1990s, oldest first. In this decade the ski area was called Showdown Ski Area. Dated frames here run 1990–1999, and 717 more carry the decade but not a year.

Snowboarding arrived and Showdown built for it. The terrain park of the 1990s has a builder, a date and a price in the archive, and by 18 March 1999 it was good enough that the Great Falls Tribune gave its whole outdoors section front to it — five photographs, datelined KINGS HILL, with riders in the frames who had come from Havre, Florida, Alabama and Missouri. The paper could not decide whether to call it a terrain park or a terrain garden and used both on the same page.

Racing was organised and serious. The Showdown Race Team had a written constitution, a coaching staff and its own trophies by 1991-92, and in February 1993 Showdown hosted the regional championship. That same year runners took on a sixteen-mile relay from the headwaters of Belt Creek — an event nobody in the archive knew had been run until the newspapers gave it up.

The area turned sixty in 1996. The following year the coffee bar in the old lodge was named the T-Bar, after a lift that had been gone for nineteen years — and it carries the name still.

1,162 photographs10 years represented10 collections