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The 2010s

Showdown Montana

Every photograph in the archive from the 2010s, oldest first. In this decade the ski area was called Showdown Montana. Dated frames here run 2010–2019, and 10 more carry the decade but not a year.

On 27 April 2011 Showdown started a Facebook page, and nine minutes later posted to it. That page is the longest continuous first-person record the mountain has ever kept of itself — thousands of posts, self-dated, in its own voice — and a great many of the photographs on this page come from it.

The area turned seventy-five that December, and the Great Falls Tribune marked it with the article that dates more of this archive than any other single newspaper story. It is also where the phrase on the front of this website comes from. "Seventy-five years of skiing and still going downhill," quipped George Willett, general manager and co-owner. The book takes its title from his line, moved on by fifteen years.

A longer conveyor went in for 2012-13. In September 2014 the Prospector's haul rope was spliced, photographed step by step. And through the decade Showdown kept doing something most ski areas stopped doing: it makes no snow, and has never made any.

2,663 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.

2,974 photographs10 years represented7 collections