Words: Jann Eberharter. Photos and Captions: Grant Gunderson 2022-01-19 15:01:58
Duncan Howat personifies ‘hands-on’. When the Chair 3 and 4 cable was replaced in Fall 2021, he was as much a part of the process as any of the countless projects over his 53-year tenure at Mt. Baker Ski Area. There are no condos at Mt. Baker Ski Area. No high-rise hotels or luxury storefronts. And if there’s a hot tub, it’s the best kept secret since Bigfoot’s whereabouts. In the day and age of mega-resorts and conglomerate ski passes, this small, locally owned, 1,000-acre-ish ski hill at the end of Washington state’s Highway 542 is as much an anomaly as it is a rarity. Mt. Baker is not a secret. Its snowfall is mythic, breaking records and placing Baker toward the top of many powder skiers’ bucket lists. Yet perhaps its most impressive characteristic is that the ski area has remained independently owned and operated for more than half a century, staving off outside acquisition and bankruptcy, while cultivating a fiercely passionate local community. At the helm of the ship, navigating the rolling waves of an industry that has redefined itself countless times over his five decades in charge, is Duncan Howat. As Mt. Baker’s general manager from 1968 to 2019, Howat has been a part of almost every major moment of the ski area’s storied history—everything from historic storm cycles and international recognition to drought and communal tragedy. In many ways, his impact on Washington state skiing has been larger than life. In fact, when he steps away from his role this winter, three people will step in to fill his shoes. Howat represents the last guard in a generation that changed the way we ski, leaving a lasting imprint steeped in community, deep snow and an enduring family legacy. Howat represents the last guard in a generation that changed the way we ski, leaving a lasting imprint steeped in community, deep snow, and an enduring family legacy. On the mountain, Howat is hard to miss. The 77-year-old stands a slender 6 feet 2 inches tall with broad shoulders and bright white hair. His hands have been weathered by years of hard work, a practice born from a childhood spent farming, and his endurance is that of a multisport athlete. He raced motocross in the late ’70s and early ’80s, has won masters rowing regattas around the world, has piloted helicopters and airplanes, and even recently picked up wing foiling. And although Howat doesn’t ski much these days, those who know him still talk about his picturesque style on two planks. Born in Seattle and raised in Sunnyside, WA, Howat grew up doing kid things—like waterskiing in irrigation ditches—among many other outdoor activities. “We had an old ’49 Studebaker and there was this canal close to town in Sunnyside,” Howat says. “It had a road close to the edge of it, without standpipes and stuff like that… It was pretty narrow—maybe 15 feet wide—wasn’t much but it was deep enough. We set an overall [water ski] speed record. Behind the car in the canal on one straightaway, we got it up to 70 [mph].” Other times, they water skied behind the family tractor, sometimes driven by his mother. Howat’s father was an electrician and farmer by trade, but also a mountaineer and skier, a member of the Washington Alpine Club in its early days. Howat was 21 when his parents gifted him skis for Christmas and, after one run on the rope tow at White Pass Ski Area, he was hooked. He went on to work at White Pass the following season—patrolling, maintaining the lifts, teaching lessons and helping groom runs with the snowcat. “I got a lot of experience because we did everything.There were only a couple of us there,” Howat says of that year. Then, as tensions were at an all-time high in Vietnam, he joined the Marine Corps to avoid being drafted into the Army. He served for six months on active duty before going into the reserve. Toward the end of his six-year tenure, he transferred to the Air National Guard when he and his wife Gail, who was pursuing her teaching degree at Western Washington University, moved to Bellingham, WA, along with their first daughter, Gwyn. In the fall of 1968, then 24 years old, Howat walked into the Mt. Baker Recreation Company’s Bellingham office looking for a job. The president at the time happened to be there and the mountain looking to fill an opening for a general manager. Howat’s experience, though minimal, was exactly what he was looking for. The young Washingtonian was hired on the spot. “Even at a young age, I knew more than anyone else around there, that’s for sure,” Howat says. “The ski area such as it was—basically one chair and a bunch of rope tows—was really in complete chaos. They really didn’t have management in place.” A 50-plus-year career had begun somewhat serendipitously. The initial chairlift was installed at Mt. Baker in 1953 (although people had been skiing at Heather Meadows since the ’30s) and by the start of Howat’s tenure, skiing was undergoing its first technical revolution. Metal-edged skis were just hitting the market and releasable bindings were still in their early stages of development. Tracked snowcats had only been invented a few years prior and were absent from most small ski areas. “We used to go up to Austin [Ridge], where the rope tow was, and sidestep the hill—and get the customers to help too—so you could ski it when the snow was heavy or wet,” Howat says. He was no stranger to setting up rope lines, digging out chairs, or climbing into lift engine rooms, wrench in hand—all an ode to a work ethic forged on the family farm. He still cleans chairs in the morning out of habit, his form of therapeutic exercise while listening to the operations radio. Howat represents the last guard in a generation that changed the way we ski, leaving a lasting imprint steeped in community, deep snow, and an enduring family legacy. On the mountain, Howat is hard to miss. The 77-year-old stands a slender 6 feet 2 inches tall with broad shoulders and bright white hair. His hands have been weathered by years of hard work, a practice born from a childhood spent farming, and his endurance is that of a multisport athlete. He raced motocross in the late ’70s and early ’80s, has won masters rowing regattas around the world, has piloted helicopters and airplanes, and even recently picked up wing foiling. And although Howat doesn’t ski much these days, those who know him still talk about his picturesque style on two planks. Born in Seattle and raised in Sunnyside, WA, Howat grew up doing kid things—like waterskiing in irrigation ditches—among many other outdoor activities. “We had an old ’49 Studebaker and there was this canal close to town in Sunnyside,” Howat says. “It had a road close to the edge of it, without standpipes and stuff like that… It was pretty narrow—maybe 15 feet wide—wasn’t much but it was deep enough. We set an overall [water ski] speed record. Behind the car in the canal on one straightaway, we got it up to 70 [mph].” Other times, they water skied behind the family tractor, sometimes driven by his mother. Howat’s father was an electrician and farmer by trade, but also a mountaineer and skier, a member of the Washington Alpine Club in its early days. Howat was 21 when his parents gifted him skis for Christmas and, after one run on the rope tow at White Pass Ski Area, he was hooked. He went on to work at White Pass the following season—patrolling, maintaining the lifts, teaching lessons and helping groom runs with the snowcat. “I got a lot of experience because we did everything.There were only a couple of us there,” Howat says of that year. Then, as tensions were at an all-time high in Vietnam, he joined the Marine Corps to avoid being drafted into the Army. He served for six months on active duty before going into the reserve. Toward the end of his six-year tenure, he transferred to the Air National Guard when he and his wife Gail, who was pursuing her teaching degree at Western Washington University, moved to Bellingham, WA, along with their first daughter, Gwyn. In the fall of 1968, then 24 years old, Howat walked into the Mt. Baker Recreation Company’s Bellingham office looking for a job. The president at the time happened to be there and the mountain looking to fill an opening for a general manager. Howat’s experience, though minimal, was exactly what he was looking for. The young Washingtonian was hired on the spot. “Even at a young age, I knew more than anyone else around there, that’s for sure,” Howat says. “The ski area such as it was—basically one chair and a bunch of rope tows—was really in complete chaos. They really didn’t have management in place.” A 50-plus-year career had begun somewhat serendipitously. The initial chairlift was installed at Mt. Baker in 1953 (although people had been skiing at Heather Meadows since the ’30s) and by the start of Howat’s tenure, skiing was undergoing its first technical revolution. Metal-edged skis were just hitting the market and releasable bindings were still in their early stages of development. Tracked snowcats had only been invented a few years prior and were absent from most small ski areas. “We used to go up to Austin [Ridge], where the rope tow was, and sidestep the hill—and get the customers to help too—so you could ski it when the snow was heavy or wet,” Howat says. He was no stranger to setting up rope lines, digging out chairs, or climbing into lift engine rooms, wrench in hand—all an ode to a work ethic forged on the family farm. He still cleans chairs in the morning out of habit, his form of therapeutic exercise while listening to the operations radio. “His vision of how he wanted to see the area grow was probably beyond the thoughts of many people,” —Denny Espeland, Mt. Baker’s long-time operations manager. “His vision of how he wanted to see the area grow was probably beyond the thoughts of many people,” says Denny Espeland, Mt. Baker’s longtime operations manager. As the ski area expanded, Howat’s self-sufficiency solidified. He once joked to Espeland that H&E Construction—aka Howat and Espeland—was going to install a new chair. And they, along with and handful of others, did just that. In fact, most of Mt. Baker’s chairs have been installed with a crew of mostly employees rather than outside contractors as is the industry norm. “When we were building the original Chair 4,” Howat says, “we didn’t get it done until February. This was in 1968-69, and when they brought in a concrete truck with ready mix in it, the truck didn’t put chains on—even though it should have—so it got stopped on the way up and got a lot of moisture in [the mix]. So, when they went to add water to the concrete, it had already set up in the barrel. They turned the machine on and the eight yards of concrete was solid as a rock. They brought in the next truck and the same thing happened—that was tough.” Tough or not, it wasn’t enough to stop Howat’s mountain momentum. While the future of Mt. Baker was his to shape, the decision-making process has always been a communal one. Mt. Baker has some 240 shareholders, of which about five control the majority stake, while a small, six-person board of directors weighs in on major issues. Neither Howat nor his family are part of that majority, but he has been at the helm continually. His appreciation for art and history helped establish the Craftsman-style, timber-framed aesthetic of the White Salmon Lodge and Raven Hut, two of Mt. Baker’s day lodges. As a skier and snowcat operator, his input in laying out new runs to emphasize the natural contours of the mountain was invaluable. “You’ve got to have a sense for how the flow is, for what you can do with the terrain,” Howat says. “We actually groom a lot, given the terrain that’s accessible by snowcats. Some of the terrain is so steep you can’t run a snowcat down it—we tried winching it for a while, but it just didn’t work out very well. Baker is steep—it’s just the given terrain of what we’re up against.” In 1981, Mt. Baker became one of the earliest mountains to allow snowboarding, a decision that would prove prophetic. When a few sideways-standing kids from nearby Mount Vernon, WA, showed up, Duncan treated them as potential customers rather than mischievous renegades. With only a few resorts allowing snowboarders at the time, the move set Mt. Baker apart, planting a seed that flourished into a distinct and dedicated culture. Legend has it that snowboard pioneer Tom Sims showed up on Superbowl Sunday in 1985 and challenged anyone who wanted to race him down the mountain to prove the sport’s worthiness. “[Duncan] has been so passionate about having fun, from the time he was a kid,” says Amy Trowbridge, Duncan’s youngest daughter and marketing director and events coordinator at Mt. Baker. “When he saw snowboarding—I think so many other people saw lawsuits or thought, ‘This isn’t skiing.’ But my dad was like, ‘Wow, somebody came up with a great idea, this is another way to have fun on snow.’” “My whole life was shaped by knowing that you could actually create a business out of helping people be in nature and have fun—that there was value to that.” —Gwyn Howat “The terrain and snow we get really lends itself to snowboarding,” Howat says. “If you look at the amount of days we get fresh snow, plus the type of terrain we have—you’re not traversing all over the mountain necessarily—all those things make it so [snowboarding] is a really fun thing to do.” Howat endured the early ridicule of his peers and ultimately created a mecca for snowboarding. Craig Kelly and the Mt. Baker Hard Core called Mt. Baker home and the mountain’s Legendary Banked Slalom (established in part by Sims’ competitive attitude and fervent passion for speed), snowboarding’s most venerable race, and is now in its 35th year. Even Howat’s daughters have benefitted from the snowboard experiment, launching careers of their own in the snowboard world before coming back to work at Mt. Baker. The fact that Gwyn (who has taken over as Mt. Baker’s CEO) and Amy now run Mt. Baker was never planned, but they grew up spending every winter weekend at a cabin tucked away near the slopes, running wild and free on the mountain every day. They’d make the drive from Bellingham in the dark on Friday evenings, Gwyn learning to shift the family’s old Ford 150 through the highway’s hairpin turns as Duncan drove and Amy sat on Gail’s lap, all four of them on the front bench seat. Their groceries would get buried by snow in the open truck bed. “My whole life was shaped by knowing that you could actually create a business out of helping people be in nature and have fun—that there was value to that,” Gywn says. Howat knows his daughters have chosen demanding and challenging careers, but also enjoys that he gets to work with them, learn from them, and see the different viewpoints they bring to the table. At 77, Howat admits he’s stayed on at Mt. Baker longer than he thought he would, but attributes that to the good company he’s kept. Amy’s husband, Mike Trowbridge, is the ski area’s current general manager, and a handful of long-standing employees have grown with the company, creating an atmosphere that is as much a family as it is a business. “Duncan was very good about wanting input. He wanted input, he wanted people to speak up, that’s the nature of his personality,” says Angelo “Zop” Zopolos, Mt. Baker’s lift supervisor for nearly 40 years. Still, family or not, Howat has never shied away from making hard decisions—and in the ski business there are plenty of them. When it comes to any mountain environment, the reward can be great, but so is the risk. “In our career together, that’s what we did, we talked about risk,” Gwyn says. “We have learned to be comfortable with risk and the edges of risk, both business wise and in very real ways with considering people’s lives as it relates to making policy around risk.” From backcountry policy to inbounds rules, Gwyn says the homegrown management is always weighing its options. “Where is that line of risk or freedom?” she asks. Howat’s experiences with risk have given him a unique perspective on the matter. Looking back on being buried while doing avalanche control work in the ’70s, he once told Gwyn, “No powder turn was ever as much fun as the rest of my life has been.” “No powder turn was ever as much fun as the rest of my life has been.” —Duncan Howat The tragedy of February 14, 1999 will forever be etched into Mt. Baker history. On the tail end of a massive storm cycle, an avalanche released off the Beast, an out-of-bounds slope adjacent to Chair 8, leaving a 19-foot crown and claiming two lives. The event prompted an immediate response from Howat and his team. Mt. Baker became an early adopter of a new backcountry policy that required not just the appropriate avalanche equipment, but also the explicit knowledge of how to use that equipment and make judgment calls in the backcountry. At first the move was met with resistance from local skiers and riders. Yet Howat saw the value in keeping his mountain, and ultimately his mountain community, safe. “It took a little while,” Howat says, “but eventually the locals that believed in the policy would help enforce it, which to some degree is still the case today. A lot of people, they’re not aware of it, but if they’re up above and cut something off on someone that’s below, they could be liable for someone’s life… The whole backcountry [policy] was about education.” While Howat was quick to embrace changes in safety protocol, when it came to expanding and investing in infrastructure, he always took a more moderate approach. “It’s Duncan’s philosophy that Mt. Baker has to have money in the bank to do anything,” Zop says. “We have to put money in the bank, have to make a profit, pay all our bills, then we can do things, then we can buy things.” Financial debt is its own kind of risk—add in a bad snow year and it’s not a forgiving combination. From day one, staying viable was all about balancing that creative energy with the realities of fiscal responsibility. Ultimately, staying in the green has been the key to success, independence and, thus, freedom. In many ways, that’s been Howat’s life work. “Because we’re almost a community ski area,” Howat says, “that control on a very local basis is what’s important… not just some big corporation trying to come in and bleed all the money they can out of it. The way things are set up, it’s very locally owned and locally controlled. The employees all have a hand in making the decisions, which makes them feel like they have ownership also.” When asked if not being independent was ever a consideration, Howat’s answer is simple: “Nope.” The winter of 2020-2021 saw a changing of the guards at Mt. Baker. After 52 years as the ski area’s general manager, Duncan stepped slightly sideways, allowing Gwyn, Trowbridge and longtime Ski Patrol Director Sam Llobet to divvy up the many aspects of his role. Duncan is still around for big-picture stuff, but the passing of the torch is simply more proof that kinship is essential at Mt. Baker. While Gwyn and Amy carry on the Howat bloodline at the mountain, they’re in the company of countless others who have spent their lives and careers making Mt. Baker what it is today. It’s a longevity that speaks to the culture the eldest Howat has cultivated at Mt. Baker. Even when he does fully relinquish his duties, Duncan’s dynasty will live on as an alpine gathering place that means so much to so many people. Howat, however, is predictably humble about the whole thing, choosing instead to see his journey for what it is: a job well done. “I’m not real enamored by or worried about a legacy or anything like that—not at all,” he says. “We did what we did, and now other people are going to be doing it. So I don’t really think about it that much to tell you the truth. We did OK, I think.”
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