The Great Falls Ski Club announces the

Official Dedication of the Kings Hill Course

Sunday · January 21 · 1940

Porphyry Peak · Neihart, Montana · Programme begins at Noon

✦ ✦ ✦
500+Skiers & spectators
4Mayors in attendance
1Casualty — a sprained ankle

The caravan left Great Falls at a quarter past nine in the morning, a line of cars and a chartered bus running the sixty-eight miles south under highway-patrol escort. At the mountain, sleigh service carried spectators up from the car park and warming ovens had been set along the course. More than five hundred people came — for a ski area that, two winters earlier, had not existed.

Russell Hubbard was master of ceremonies and John Rice ran the special events. At noon a bomb gave the signal to send a skier through a tape stretched across the head of the new run, and Kings Hill was open.

“A bomb will give the signal to send a skier through the tape at the beginning of the new run and officially open it.” Great Falls newspaper, the week before · SCRAP-HASTERLIK-01
Addresses from the platform
  • Dedication address — C. Edgar “Eddie” Schenck, president of the Great Falls Ski Club
  • Mayor Julius Wuerthner — Great Falls
  • The Mayor of Neihart
  • The Mayor of Belt
  • The Mayor of White Sulphur Springs

Programme of Events

As printed in advance · and as reported after

  1. Noon The Dedication. The bomb, the tape, and the first skier down the new course.
  2. Following Midget Slalom — for children under four feet tall. The first children’s race on this mountain, and it is written into the programme ahead of the adults.
  3. Following Comedy Skiing by “Oscar Sitzmark” — in the person of Bob McKenna, the club treasurer. Reported afterwards as the highlight of the day.
  4. Following Men’s Slalom Race. Won by Danny Thorson, the club’s first champion.
  5. Following Women’s Slalom Race.
  6. Following Bathing Beauty Contest — in red flannels. [[ Recorded exactly as the newspapers of January 1940 describe it. ]]
  7. To close Presentation of Awards.
An older man in an overcoat, plaid cap and spectacles standing on skis in a crowd of skiers
A man in a topcoat, necktie, plaid cap and spectacles — on skis, in a crowd, gripping his poles like a handrail. Not dressed to ski. Dressed to be photographed skiing. InferredFiled as “Mayor on Skiis.” Undated and uncaptioned; a dedication-day identification is plausible but unproven · PH-SKICLUB
Two young men on skis in front of snow-laden conifers, one in a felt hat
Two skiers, wool trousers, cable bindings, bamboo poles, one in a soft felt hat. The man who gave the dedication address was a Neihart boy: C. Edgar Schenck, born Great Falls 1914, schooled at Neihart. FilenameIdentified as Ed Schenck by the filename only · PH-SKICLUB

What the day was for. Six weeks earlier the club had run “Ski Club Week” in Great Falls — downtown window displays, a fashion show at the Liberty theatre, a Sun Valley colour film at the Junior High. The committee chairman, C. B. Anderson, said what the whole exercise was aimed at:

“This should be a real skiing center… It now numbers 200 and we hope to make it 1,000.” C. B. Anderson, Ski Club Week, December 3–9 1939

The dedication was the closing argument. And it worked well enough that within the year Kings Hill was listed in Ski West, the U.S. Travel Bureau’s federal winter-sports publication — one of twenty-five Montana points across eleven western states, entered by the Great Falls Chamber of Commerce from information supplied by club president Alden Lohrke and by R. T. Ferguson, supervisor of the Lewis and Clark National Forest.

The only casualty of the day was Jim McMahon, who sprained an ankle.

Compiled from contemporary clippings in Jim Hasterlik’s ski scrapbook · SCRAP-HASTERLIK-01
Names and spellings as printed in 1940 · A design mock-up for the Showdown Montana history project