After the Marshall Mountain ski resort closed in 2002, hundreds of skis, boots and snowboards in the shuttered gear rental shop sat largely untouched — until last week.
Silas Phillips, park ranger for the now county-owned site, said figuring out what to do with the old equipment was one of his first tasks in preparing the buildings for county use. Although people may have wanted the equipment, it was too old to use safely, Phillips said.
“The next viable option when you Google what to do with a bunch of old skis is to turn them into furniture,” he said.
Rather than trying to “make a buck” off the equipment, Phillips contacted the building trades teacher at Hellgate High School, Chip Rinehart, whose students regularly repurpose skis in their projects.
I think Hellgate just has the hands to process the 500-odd skis, and it’s kind of a win-win,” Phillips said. “Those kids get experience working with those materials and building with a special project material.”
Rinehart’s students have used skis to build Adirondack chairs and benches for years, he said. Organizers of the annual SOS Fair winter gear swap donate old or unsafe skis to the program, providing them for students who are interested, but there is typically not enough material to go “full bore” on a class project, Rinehart said.
It was a no-brainer to meet with Phillips and visit the old rental shop, Rinehart said.
“Even if I didn’t get any equipment, I learned to ski at Marshall Mountain, and all my friends learned to ski there, so it’s a special place anyway,” he said. “I went and checked it out and it’s amazing. It’s a time capsule in there.”
On Jan. 27, Rinehart, along with Hellgate welding teacher Corey Lind, custodian Bill Fischer, three students, Chris Rinehart of Abatement Contractors of Montana and Mike Kaptur cleaned the equipment out of the shop.
“We really turned into a factory last week,” Chip Rinehart said.
After bringing the approximately 550 skis, 75 to 80 snowboards and hundreds of boots back to the shop, the students organized them and removed the bindings, Rinehart said. They then sorted the skis by color on pallets in groups of 100 to 120 to use for years to come, he said.
Within the span of nearly a century, inconsistent snow, financial hardships and even a fire eroded the viability of Marshall Mountain ski area just a short drive from Missoula. But, now, thanks to the intervention of local governments, there is hope again that the mountain’s legacy will continue.
Rinehart said when he first started as a shop teacher, he was cleaning out peoples’ garages and taking any donation of materials he could get. Community partners have allowed students to take the class and make projects without paying for them, he said. Instead of selling projects just to keep the program running, students can keep them, Rinehart said. The classes often donate projects for auctions to give back to the community, he said.
“It’s because of everybody that helps out that the program continues to grow, continues to get more and more opportunities for these kids to get them excited about using their hands and building,” Rinehart said. “There are so many good careers in construction trades just to get them interested in it.”
The old rental shop has a lot of potential future uses, including storing gear for current children’s programs or housing a carpentry shop, said Phillips, the Marshall Mountain Park ranger.
A lot of work is on the docket for Marshall Mountain as it transitions from a privately owned site to a county park, Phillips said. A volunteer day is planned for this spring to help clean up the base building and surrounding area, he said. Staff will also tackle landscaping and irrigation work to prepare for events, mostly in May and June, Phillips said.
Jackson Lee, the Marshall Mountain Park manager, told the Missoula County commissioners on Monday that cleaning up the base area is the beginning of work outlined in the park’s master plan. That includes removing the lodge building, restoring the events lawn, upgrading the water system, doing trail work, and making other improvements.
While it’s not included in the master plan, the staff recommended turning the lift terminal into a pavilion, potentially with a replica of the lodge’s clock tower, Lee said. The structure would provide needed shade for events, programs and public use, he said.
The county is working with the nonprofit Friends of Marshall Mountain to raise money for immediate improvements called out in the master plan, Lee said. That money will likely be used as a local match for a federal Land and Water Conservation Fund recreation grant, he said.
Some of the projects, including cleaning out the ski rental shop, will be documented for a multimedia project, Lee said. The county has been diligent about recognizing the history of the site and community interest in it, he said.
“The great value we see is the evolution,” Lee said. “People learned to ski up there and now have kids learning to mountain bike.”
Phillips said almost everyone he interacts with at Marshall Mountain, whether they’re there to recreate or work on the site, has a history with the park.
“It’s been so wholesome,” he said. “It’s an awesome balance between trying to improve it for its current iteration as a county park and truly honoring and uplifting the story of its use, honoring its history as a Missoula institution. There are so many ways to do that, so it’s been awesome to incorporate that into changes we’re making.”
This story was originally published by Montana Free Press at montanafreepress.org.
