Search the photographs

The 2020s

Showdown Montana

Every photograph in the archive from the 2020s, oldest first. In this decade the ski area was called Showdown Montana. Dated frames here run 2020–2026, and 1 more carries the decade but not a year.

On Friday 20 March 2020 Showdown closed for the season. "Today will be our last day." The notice went up on the mountain's own Facebook page the same day Montana's statewide restrictions took effect, and it was signed collectively — George, Katie, Avery, Chris and the Showdown team: three generations of the family and, beside them, the ski patrol director. It was the second time in ninety years that a world event closed this mountain. The first was 1942.

Later that year the area changed hands, to Katie Boedecker and Avery Gold, and the family line that began when George Willett drove up in April 1973 carried on into a fourth generation of people who grew up here.

In 2024 the Sluice Goose Caboose became the Hoxter Express. In 2026 the mountain turns ninety — Montana's oldest continuously operating ski area, by its own long-standing claim and the one an outside historian has backed. This page is where the newest photographs land.

1,739 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.

1,992 photographs7 years represented4 collections