DRIVING UP BEARTOOTH PASS from the campsite this morning, a lack of snow made great skiing seem un-likely, especially considering forecasted highs of 98 degrees in nearby Red Lodge, MT. As my buddy Adam Watson—a roommate from my long-lost ski bum days—and I climbed the switchbacks, dwindling snowfields, melting remnants of roadside kickers and trailheads of skiers gearing up to hike to towering couloirs offered us renewed confidence. We crossed green tundra into Wyoming, rounded a curve toward the top of the pass and the 1,000-foot, snow-covered Twin Lakes Headwall appeared before us like a mirage. People have been summertime skiing this headwall in the Shoshone National Forest since the 1960s when Pepi Gram-shammer, Erich Sailer and Anderl Molterer started the Red Lodge International Summer Racing Camp. In those days, racers ascended the hill by gripping some of the steepest rope tows imaginable. Nowadays, uphill travel is a little friendlier, assisted by two platter Poma lifts that grant access to 600 acres of high-angle, north-facing terrain. In a tiny dirt lot atop the headwall, a gray-haired guy in a dirty old Fila vest directed traffic, squeezing in as many trucks, vans and sticker-clad wagons as possible. But the lot attendant doesn’t just wear a single hat. He’s also one of Beartooth Ba-sin’s owners, Kurt Hallock. As a kid, Hallock made sandwiches for the race campers of the 1960s. Now he’s part of a small and ever-evolving ownership group of Red Lodge locals that took over operations of the ski area in 2002. Despite its laid-back character, Beartooth Basin’s opera-tional challenges are immense. Much of it comes down to the sheer remoteness of the place and the short window for a ski season. Most years, Beartooth Highway doesn’t get plowed until around Memorial Day, which is Beartooth Basin’s tar-geted opening. Even when the road is open for the summer, it is often shut down by storms, and nearby Yellowstone National Park gets top priority from Forest Service plows. Therefore, for the month or so of preseason work that goes into getting the place open, a small, dedicated crew has to snowmobile in 20-something miles from the closed highway gate near Red Lodge. Prep work includes avalanche mitigation, chipping and blasting away at the massive cornice topping the headwall, farming snow, and annual maintenance of the two Poma lifts, which were built in the ’80s. The Cummins 4BT biodiesel-fueled generator used to power the lifts can’t be towed up until after the road is open—nor can the generator’s fuel tank, the vintage Argosy trailer that acts as ski area headquar-ters or the ice-cream-truck-turned-ticket-office. On top of all that, before the place opens to the public, it has to pass the same lift inspections and protocols as the big resorts. The area’s four primary owners bring a varied skill set to the hill—there’s expertise among them in welding, ski patrol-ling, engine repair, cat driving, mountain guiding and geo-physics among other things. What few skills the owners don’t possess, they supplement by employing a small group of about a half dozen loyal ski-bum friends per day. Hallock’s day job as a lawyer helps with the administrative work of the ski area’s licensing and operations, but during Beartooth Basin’s short season, he also parks cars. On tailgates and outside truck campers, an eclectic crowd geared up—racers in GS suits, park kids in baggy hoodies and old hippies in duct-taped pants. Across the parking lot, Hal-lock’s wife, Jimena, sold lift tickets from a vintage GMC ice cream truck that once peddled popsicles to Little Leaguers in Billings, MT. Adam had been unable to turn down a foray into this weirdness and drove out from Wisconsin on a day’s notice. He and I nipped from a whiskey flask for a bit of courage after checking out the only way to begin a run: dropping a cornice onto a 50-degree face. Not all the terrain is steep, Hallock told me—the pitch is gentler toward the bottom. I pointed out that the parking lot is at the top of the hill, meaning we’d have to ski the steepest lines to get down to the easier stuff before taking the Poma back up to our cars. He shrugged. The guy parked next to us chatted eagerly about his many years skiing at Beartooth as he globbed SPF 100 onto his cheeks. After five minutes of chatter, he unzipped his coat to reveal his pet kitten. Non-skiers hung out as well, many dragging lawn chairs onto the dirty snow—parents of skiers, maybe, or just people who wanted to soak up the scene and get a tan despite the occasionally intense wind gusts. Others passing by on the highway bound for Yellowstone—random Winnebago retirees and leather-clad bikers—stopped to check out the novelty of midsummer skiing up here in the middle of nowhere. 056 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 15, Issue 4: Page 56
