The Ski Journal • Volume 16, Issue 3 • THE SPOKANE FIVER

They don’t call it Foggy Bottom Lounge for nothing. Mt. Spokane Ski & Snowboard Park at night, just outside of Spokane, WA.

Every once in a while, the question comes up: Is Spokane a ski town? A few miles west of the Idaho border and nestled on the western edge of the Northern Rockies, Washington state’s second-largest city is about as far from Seattle as you can get geographically and culturally, but it’s within 90 minutes of a handful of beloved ski areas, each with its own charm—and some downright decent turns. Ski town? That phrase tends to elicit eye rolls in a community that identifies as the gritty smaller sibling of the Emerald City, a home to 300,000 souls that’s perhaps best known as the home base of Gonzaga University’s men’s basketball team. Perhaps more accurately, we’re a town that skis.

For nearly a decade, my friends and I have tried to game a road trip wrapping all five of the region’s ski areas—Mount Spokane, 49 Degrees North, Silver Mountain, Lookout Pass, and Schweitzer—into one long day. Pulled up to the bar at Mogul’s in Kellogg, ID, I threw out the idea to Brandon Byquist and Damian-Eachan Dilley. Four hundred miles, three states, two time zones: Was it possible to hit them all in a single push? A trip like that would require the planets aligning—late enough in the season that we wouldn’t hit a traffic-snarling storm, but not so late that night skiing at Mount Spokane, our final stop, was finished for the year. That’s to say nothing of work and family obligations, nor the desire to take ski trips where we would actually get to ski a lot.

It would take years and a global pandemic for that to happen, but on a March morning in 2022, a scrum of hazy clouds and mild temperatures inaugurates our mission from a grocery store parking lot at the east end of Spokane.

Opting to pack light and save time, we pile our skis into the back of Dilley’s Toyota 4Runner rather than fiddle with racks or roof boxes at every stop. I’ve seen Brandon and Dilley pack 12 pairs of skis between them for a three-day trip, so this operation has a minimalist feel. We’ve still got three days’ worth of snacks though—a box of doughnuts, an entire day-old pizza and a case of beer, give or take. Pulling out of the lot, our rig looks—and smells—like a college dorm room.

Spokane sits at the meeting point of the arid Columbia Basin and the Northern Rockies. An hour west of the city receives just 11 inches of precipitation a year in the Cascade Range’s long rain shadow, but an hour east amasses an annual average of 300 inches of snow and a relatively stable mix of maritime and continental snowpacks.

It’s an hour’s drive from Spokane to Kellogg in Idaho’s Silver Valley and, passing around boxes of greasy spoils, we joke about the bingo game we’d come up with during prior seasons: points for spotting a homebrew monoski and a bonus for anyone skiing in a NASCAR jacket or jeans. It’s a nod to the blue-collar roots of the region, which, despite its massive growth in recent years, has brushed aside the corporate hand of the ski industry.

The ski resort now known as Silver Mountain Resort was originally Jackass Ski Bowl, named for the apocryphal animal that literally stumbled onto the Bunker Hill silver lode, a lode that subsequently became Idaho’s largest mining operation, Bunker Hill Mining Company. Eventually the company even took over the ski hill when it fell into bankruptcy in the early ’70s.

The modern incarnation of Silver opened in 1990, replacing a terrifying drive up the side of Kellogg Peak to the old base area with a 3.1-mile gondola ride from the valley bottom to the shoulder of Kellogg Peak—North America’s longest winter people mover. If the wind isn’t blowing, the ride takes approximately 22 minutes.

The gondola is going to be one of two pinch points on the trip; it’s a serious chunk of time over which we have no control. Fortunately, with no recent snow, there’s no powder frenzy to contend with and we snag first gondy box.

At 8:40 a.m., we hop off the gondola and scoot over to Chair 3 where there’s an even shorter route down a steep south-facing trail to Chair 1. Even with our time constraints, the 400 feet of vert seems like cheating. We carve fat, fast turns on the firm groomers of Collateral. At the bottom the lift attendant seems surprised to see us. So are the attendants loading the gondola back down to the base area.

“Gondie beers”—often a to-go cup for a drink unfinished at Mogul’s—have become a tradition for us and countless other skiers over the years. But the early morning variety felt like something new, even for me. Downloading the gondola at 8:55 a.m., beers in hand, my buddies and I receive looks that border on disgust from guests just beginning their ski day. We’re the car driving the wrong way down the interstate, but we’ve got other mountains to ski today. Four of them, to be exact. Twenty-two minutes later, we’re leaving a parking lot that hasn’t filled up yet, with our eyes on Lookout Pass 25 miles away.

Straddling Idaho and Montana as well as two time zones, Lookout Pass Ski Area lives in a world all its own. First used by Scandinavian locals who hopped freight cars over the pass to access the treed ski terrain, the mountain officially opened in 1935. A year later, Lookout Pass installed a tow rope constructed from car parts salvaged from an abandoned highway wreck. Constructed in part by the Civilian Conservation Corps prior to World War II, the base lodge is the second oldest in the Northwest.

The area was financed in part by Silver Valley mining companies interested in providing recreational opportunities for their employees, and the mountain has remained true to those make-do roots ever since. Its first chairlift wasn’t installed until 1980 and normal day tickets have yet to crest $60. The winter of 2022-2023 will finally see the ski area expand beyond Runt Mountain to nearby Eagle Peak, effectively doubling its footprint to 1,100 acres.

It’s a bit of a weather vortex too, averaging more than 400 inches of snow a year, funneled up through the Bitterroot Mountains. Snow gets so deep it can often swamp the low-angle slopes. But the mellow terrain has a major beneficiary: Lookout’s Free Ski School. Founded in 1942, the program has introduced nearly 80,000 children ages 6 to 17 to snow sports, completely free of charge—the longest-running ski school of its kind in the United States.

Lookout has recently expanded its parking, and while I’m grabbing tickets, Brandon and Dilley are getting a grand tour trying to find a spot. It’s race day for the region’s youth programs and the lot is packed with carpoolers. Back in line, I’m sweating (and trying not to swear too loudly while surrounded by kids). We’ve spent years gaming out the time cutoffs required to make this work—Brandon has logged data for every one of his ski days ever and has a spreadsheet, for god’s sake—and nowhere in that plan did we account for taking 20 minutes to find parking at Lookout Pass of all places.

The boys finally show up, red-faced. Looking to make up for valuable lost time, we straight-line the moguled-out Montana Face at reckless speed. It’s a popular run for chairlift hecklers, but the groms are too focused on their race preparation to care about our style-free run.

The two-hour-and-fifteen-minute drive from Lookout to Schweitzer backtracks west to Coeur d’Alene, then north along Lake Pend Oreille to the artsy enclave of Sandpoint. This is the second crux of the trip and we’re stuck with some immovable math—the drive from Lookout Pass to Schweitzer is long in the best of conditions, and traffic or mechanical issues could easily sink the trip. Fortunately, it goes smoothly, and we cruise to the base of our third ski destination, auguring into a parking spot by 1:15 p.m. We’ve now driven a little over 200 miles, skied approximately 1,500 vertical feet, and still seem to like each other. In many ways we are living our best-case scenario.

Allegedly named after the Swiss hermit who took up residence at the base of the mountain (“Schweitzer” is German for “Swiss man”), Schweitzer Mountain attracted local skiers and, ultimately, local timber money to develop the ski area in 1963. While the resort has grown considerably in the intervening decades, it’s still independently owned. Today it’s one of the 20 largest ski areas in America, sprawling over 2,900 acres, 1,200 of which snake through trees overlooking Lake Pend Oreille.

We board the Basin Express and, because we’re feeling punchy (and because we’ve realized the few minutes on chairlifts and skis are not what is going to make or break this trip), we take the extra bump up the Lakeview Triple to Schweitzer’s summit ridge. Our typical Schweitzer stomping grounds—Pucci’s Chutes and the steep lines of Outback Bowl on the back of the mountain—will have to wait another day. Dilley dips into the wedge of off-piste trees next to the frontside fall-line corduroy on the Face and immediately regrets it; although the sky is clear enough that Lake Pend Oreille is visible—a rarity in the often-socked-in Selkirks—it’s not sunny enough to have softened up the snow. We stick to straight-lining the groomers back to the base area, whooping as we launch off the low-angle rolls back to the car.

Google Maps puts us at our next stop, 49 Degrees North, at about 3:30 p.m.—a solid cushion to hit last chair at 4 p.m. The drive west from Schweitzer to 49 Degrees North follows two-lane highway along the slow-moving Pend Oreille River where it crosses from north Idaho into Washington, before twisting up a little-maintained backdoor route to the ski area. Woodsmoke spices the air and settles in over rural ranches and tree farms. I doze in the back seat, pretending to look through the day’s photos while Dilley straightens every hairpin curve at high speed.

We arrive at the ski area with more than an hour of lift operation left. For once our relentless mental math has erred in our favor—Brandon’s spreadsheet has not accounted for Dilley’s lead foot. Parking is not an issue as once again our schedule is the inverse of everyone else’s; we’re arriving just as most patrons are leaving.

Named for the Canadian border some 50 miles north at the 49th Parallel, 49 Degrees North occupies 2,300 acres amid thick timber in the Colville National Forest. Timber has long been the lifeblood of rural northeast Washington. It’s fitting, then, that the glades—Peacemaker, Tombstone and Cy’s, among others—are where we spend our ski days.

In 2019, the private entity that owns Silver Mountain Resort purchased 49 Degrees North, replacing the old workhorse double with a new high-speed quad that cuts the summit commute from 18 minutes to eight.

“It’s fast enough now that I almost can’t finish a beer,” Dilley says. “Almost.”

The lift also makes it easier to hot lap Peacemaker glades, our first off-piste skiing of the day. Fortunately, our knees, other than feeling stiff from sitting in the car, are otherwise fresh. We ski until last chair, racking up about 7,500 feet of vert on chopped-up chalk, and then make our way to the lounge. We’ve got time to burn before our final drive to Mount Spokane, so we head into the dimly lit Boomtown Bar. Inside we run into my friend Josie whose family has skied at 49 Degrees North for decades. She tells her brother Brady our plan.

“To see if it could be done,” I reply. It seems like a facile answer, but after some 300 miles in the car I don’t know that I have a better one at this point.

Before we get lost in the bar vortex, we opt to shove off. By the time the 4Runner rolls into the parking lot at Mount Spokane Ski and Snowboard Park an hour and a half later, the sun has set and the area’s floodlights stitch the slopes. We’ve exceeded 300 miles of driving on the day and are buoyed by the certainty of our success (and a playlist of late-’90s hip-hop).

The southernmost peak in the Selkirk Mountains, which straddle the Washington and Idaho borders and reach north into British Columbia, Mount Spokane tops out at roughly half the elevation of the highest reaches of the range. The largest state park in Washington encompasses nearly 14,000 acres of the peak, with the privately run Mount Spokane Ski and Snowboard Park accounting for about a tenth of that terrain, offering 2,000 vertical feet of skiing.

Not surprisingly, Spokane’s northern skyline is tied closely to the region’s ski history. Just after World War II, the Riblet Tramway Company installed an old mining ore tramway here, reputedly the world’s first double chairlift. And for a short time beginning in the mid ’70s, Riblet owned Mount Spokane after bankruptcy forced the then-owner to sell the ski area.

In 2018, the current owners completed an expansion on its north aspect, adding a new triple chairlift accessing large sections of wide rollercoasting runs and doghair timber. But it’s still got small-hill vibes, with toddlers in ski bibs tumbling down Ego Flats while their parents watch from Foggy Bottoms Lounge with Bloody Marys in hand.

Night skiing is a mixture of high schoolers and first timers, both lured by the $32 twilight ticket. We alternate cruisy groomers with runs down Two Face and its steep knees-to-teeth moguls, and trips to Foggy Bottoms.

In the bar, a band plays reggae covers of early-aughts R&B while we tally up our stats: 15,000 feet of vert and roughly the same amount of calories in pizza, doughnuts and beer. We laugh about the ski areas we could have driven to in the equivalent amount of time: Revelstoke, Mt. Baker, Mt. Bachelor. But for a few local skiers, the pride of having connected Spokane’s disparate ski areas—the collection of quirks, idiosyncrasies and secret stashes that have brought us together—is tangible.

“You don’t know how much of my life I devoted to sketching out how long each chairlift ran, how long it’d take in different weather conditions,” Byquist says, admiring our day’s work.

As the text messages begin to blow up my phone—a few friends had been following the digital breadcrumbs—that old nagging question comes back up: Why?

We’d always been curious to see if a trip like this could be done, proof of the concept that Spokane truly is a town for skiers, a love letter to our region. This place is full of secret stashes, inside jokes, broken-down chairlifts and blower powder days. Skiing in the Inland Northwest has also got its quirks—both maddening and endearing—that keep us buying season passes year after year. In the end it’s our home and we’ve got nothing left to prove.

The Ski Journal - Volume 16, Issue 3

THE SPOKANE FIVER

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