Five Big Mountain skiing pioneers who had the vision and perseverance to make Whitefish Mountain Resort what it is today will be the inaugural inductees into the newly established Ski Heritage Center Hall of Fame.

An induction ceremony is planned at 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 22, at the annual Showcase of the Chefs dinner and auction at The Lodge at Whitefish Lake. 

The Hall of Fame inductions are the first official function of the Ski Heritage Center being established at the historic Saddle Club facility on Wisconsin Avenue in Whitefish.

The inductees are Ed Schenck, Lloyd “Mully” Muldown, Toni Matt, Martin Hale and Oystein Boveng.

“What great representatives of skiing in the Flathead,” Flathead Valley Ski Foundation Executive Director Tim Hinderman said. “Talk about five people that shaped the sport of skiing for our area.”

Ed Schenck

Schenck was the co-founder of Big Mountain Ski Resort in 1947 and served as president of Winter Sports Inc., the corporation that continues to operate the resort, from 1946 to 1980.

“Gruff, mustachioed Ed Schenck was Big Mountain’s boss for its first, and toughest, 30 years,” longtime local writer Jackie Adams said in a biography she wrote about Schenck. “It is fair to say that the ski resort owes its survival today to Schenck’s unflagging determination to keep it alive.”  

 Schenck and George Prentice, both members of the National and Rocky Mountain Ski associations, spent almost two years searching the western United States for an ideal spot to develop a ski resort.

“On Big Mountain they found powder snow and a great variety of excellent ski terrain,” according to the “Stump Town to Ski Town” Whitefish history book, and plans were set in motion to build a ski resort.

Winter Sports Inc. incorporated in March 1947 with $70,000 in stock authorized. The Whitefish Chamber of Commerce raised $40,000, nearly all of it local money, and the rest was financed by Schenck and Prentice.

Schenck was president and general manager when the resort opened and was relentless in his pursuit of making the place successful.

“His impressive title carried with it a string of unglamorous duties,” Adams wrote. “In the mountain’s early years, Schenck did literally everything from cooking burgers and tending bar to running the snowplow and rescuing skiers who got in trouble on the hill. One year, in return for all this, his total salary was $1,300 — scarcely enough to take care of his growing family.”

When he died in 1982, the Whitefish Pilot said, “All he did was stay up on the mountain seven days a week, and make it survive.”

Lloyd “Mully” Muldown

Considered the “Father of Big Mountain,” Muldown was a skiing pioneer in the 1930s and 1940s. He arrived on the train from his native Minnesota in 1928 carrying a pair of wooden skis and would spend a lifetime promoting the sport.

It was Mully who was instrumental in luring Schenck and Prentice to Whitefish to reveal Big Mountain’s potential for a ski resort.

A longtime teacher and later superintendent of Whitefish schools, Muldown was among the charter members of the Whitefish Ski Patrol. In the 1930s, he and a group of other early-day skiers formed the Hell Roaring Ski Club. They hiked up the undeveloped mountain and skied down.

Muldown spearheaded the club’s effort to hold the first high school interscholastic ski meet in Montana in 1939, according to Adams, before there was even a road into the area.

He coached some of the first high-school ski teams on Big Mountain and guided the Whitefish High School Ski Team to several championships in the State Interscholastic Ski Championship Races during the 1950s.

Muldown helped bring the U.S. National Ski Championships to Whitefish in 1949 and 1951. 

After retiring in 1972, he taught skiing with the Martin Hale Ski School until 1989. Muldown also served on the Winter Sports board for several years.

“Well into his 80s, the diminuitive Mully, by then nearly blind, could be seen flying down the slopes, his long coat flapping in the breeze,” Adams wrote. He died in 1993.

Toni Matt

Matt was a legendary skier from Austria and an early Ski School director on Big Mountain. In 1948 the nationally known skier, who at that time was chief ski instructor at Sun Valley, helped design the downhill course on Big Mountain for the national championship races, and then signed a contract to head the Ski School. Matt was later inducted into the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame.

A 2005 Sports Illustrated article about the Toni Matt Inferno Race on Mount Washington, N.H., told how in 1939, Matt, then a 19-year-old ski instructor, made history when he schussed the headwall of Tuckerman’s Ravine the first time he saw it. 

“Locals call Tuckerman the birthplace of extreme skiing,” Sports Illustrated noted.

“He'd intended to make a couple of turns above the lip and ski down in control. But he got stuck on his edge and was carrying too much speed to turn. He railed it. Matt finished the course in 6:29, cutting the old record nearly in half.”

Martin Hale

Born and raised in Whitefish, Hale took to the slopes of Big Mountain at an early age, working odd jobs in the sixth grade so he could cobble together the money to ski Big Mountain. By 1953 Hale was the Doug Smith Memorial champion. 

He was a member of the winning Whitefish High School Ski Team in 1954 and at age 17 in 1955 he was the outstanding boy skier at the National Junior Ski championships at Big Mountain, according to “Stump Town to Ski Town.” He became the Combined National Junior Champion for 1955.

A story from “Portrait of Whitefish” tells how Hall had his sights set on the Olympics after high school but broke his back in a training run at Sun Valley.

Hale was a coach and mentor at the Whitefish resort for three decades; he was a long-time Ski School Director and in 1970 became the proprietor of the Big Mountain Ski Shop. Hale currently lives in Whitefish.

Oystein Boveng

Born in Norway in 1932, Boveng came to the Flathead Valley in 1947 and started alpine skiing when the new Big Mountain T-bar opened.

As a member of the school ski team, he raced at various meets in the Northern Division and was a member of the division team at a Western States Legion race at Sun Valley.   

Boveng was a four-year member of the Bobcat ski team competing in all four ski disciplines. After returning to the Flathead Valley, he was a member of Whitefish Lake Ski Club and became a charter member of Kalispell Ski Club. He promoted skiing and worked on projects such as Big Mountain volunteer Ski Patrol, Nordic trail building, maintenance and track setting, ski jump construction, Kalispell-Big Mountain ski bus organization, Nordic and alpine junior programs.

He also was a Flathead High School ski coach and the Northern Division ski-jumping coach at the Junior Nationals at Soda Springs, Calif., and Middlebury, Vt.  

Boveng resides in Kalispell.

The Flathead Valley Ski Education Foundation, formed 40 years ago to help organize and fund youth skiing in the Flathead Valley, is the muscle behind the development of the Ski Heritage Center. 

Still in the formative stage, the center eventually will include a museum and hall of fame and serve as a gathering place to showcase the colorful history of local skiing.

Plans are being made to collect artifacts, design exhibits, interview surviving ski pioneers and launch a capital campaign to ultimately expand the existing facility to accommodate future growth.

For more information, contact Tim Hinderman at 406-885-2730 or visit www.fvsef.org and click on Ski Heritage Center.