Last patrol for veteran of Big Mountain

John Gray carves turns just below lift towers on the backside of the Big Mountain, when something typical happens for a guy who wears a red coat with a white cross on the back - some kids yell at him from their lift chair, "there's someone hurt down there."

Gray gets crude directions and within minutes he's kneeling next to a youngster who is in obvious pain. Gray asks some precise questions, determines he's dealing with an injured shoulder and radios to the patrol shack for help.

The young skier is soon wearing a sling, with his right arm splinted snugly to his torso. Another patroller arrives on a snowmobile towing a sled. Within 20 minutes of Gray arriving on the scene, the young skier is bundled in the sled and heading for the Big Mountain's base area.

"That was pretty routine," said Gray, who retired as chief of the Big Mountain Ski Patrol when the ski area closed on Sunday.

For every 1,000 skier visits, Gray has calculated, there are 1.8 injuries that the patrol responds to. Considering the mountain averages well over 1,000 skier visits a day and can peak in the range of 4,500 to 6,000 skiers a day, Gray has seen plenty of routine as well as unusual injuries in his 33 years of patrolling on Big Mountain.

The patrol shack, a tiny low-profile cabin at the top of the mountain, is the bustling command center for ski patrollers. At times it can be quiet, but usually there is activity, sometimes lots of activity.

Gray recalled one busy day when it seemed there were five accidents going on at one time, with patrollers at the base area preparing to send an injured skier off on the ALERT helicopter. The patrollers heard a loud cracking noise coming from the ski school deck at the Outpost lodge.

"Some beginner skier didn't know how to stop and went right across the deck through the railing," Gray said. The skier fell a good 15 feet into the Outpost parking lot, and "walked away" from it all with a broken rib.

Medical response is just one part of a job that can throw plenty of curveballs on any given day. There is avalanche control. There is 10 miles of rope marking the ski area's boundaries that must be routinely checked. There are the police duties, aimed at reckless or inconsiderate skiers. And the wild card in it all that comes into play every day is the weather.

"We live and die by the weather," Gray said. "It affects everything we do."

If there's any more than six inches of new snow, avalanche control becomes a sudden priority. If there's fog, as there often is on the mountain, skiers slow down but it can also get skiers lost. Subzero temperatures can cause frostbite. Rime, the frostlike buildup that turns trees into "snow ghosts," also tends to cover signs, boundary markers and other things that the ski patrol has to maintain.

The varying conditions and duties for a ski patroller go on and on, and Gray has pretty much experienced them all.

At 61, Gray is ready to dive full-time into building greenhouses at his home between Whitefish and Columbia Falls, and growing plants and flowers as a hobby and business. It's the latest in a string of enterprising efforts that Gray has pursued since arriving in the Flathead Valley at the age of 18, in 1962, reporting for duty as a trail worker in Glacier National Park.

He worked on trail crew for 11 summers, attended the University of Montana, and started as a lift operator on the Big Mountain in 1971. The following year, he switched to the ski patrol.

"The patrol is way better than running a lift," he says. "You get to get out and ski around."

Gray owned the Polebridge Mercantile for a while in the mid-1970s. He worked as a bartender at the Bierstube for several years. He built ski lifts across the West for eight years, and most recently he was a co-owner of Glacier Wilderness Guides. The only constant over the last 33 years has been the Ski Patrol.

"I'm just going into something else now," Gray says. "Sometimes it just feels right to do that. I'm going to miss it. It's going to be hard. I'm going to miss the people I work with."

At the same time, Gray has complete confidence that the patrol staff will do just fine without him. The average age on the patrol is 41, and most of the patrollers are seasoned veterans.

"They take pride in the patrol. They spur each other on. There's no slacking off," Gray said.

Patrollers on the mountain say Gray has a lot to do with the work ethic, capabilities and camaraderie that have developed with the Big Mountain Patrol.

"This is the seventh year I've worked with John," said patroller Charisse Duchardt. "He's great to work with. He's a wealth of knowledge… It's going to be strange when he leaves, there is definitely going to be a gap."

Mike Block has worked with Gray on the patrol for 14 years, and he's worked with him at Glacier Wilderness Guides for many summers.

"On each end, he's been the best boss," Block said. "We've shared a lot over the winters and the summers."

Block noted that Gray's cumulative knowledge has rubbed off on most of the patrol.

"Patrolling has a pretty long learning curve," he said. "You don't just put on a red jacket and become a patroller. It's cumulative, and 33 years is a lot of accumulation."

"He's a good teacher, and he's not afraid to give you responsibility," added Seth Settles, who's been with the patrol since 1989. "Once you've proven you can do the job, he relies on you, which is a great compliment coming from John."

For the last 33 years, Gray has presided over a venerable patrol tradition: issuing the weekly Frabert Award. Frabert is a tattered, stuffed monkey that resides in the Bierstube and is given once a week to guests, to Big Mountain employees and sometimes to patrollers to commemorate embrarrasing events.

One patroller got it for taking a flight to Great Falls, and after arriving at his destination, having to call a friend to turn off his car, which he had left running at Glacier Park International Airport.

Gray himself received the award recently after getting on a lift chair with bamboo poles that got tangled up, causing Gray and the poles to spill out of the chair in the loading area.

"I was everywhere, bamboo was everywhere," Gray said with a smile.

Gray received a serious honor from his fellow patrollers in 1997, when the Hellroaring Basin was opened to skiing. The patrol played a big part in securing "Gray's Golf Course" as the name for one of the basin's runs. When the Hellroaring Basin was outside the ski area's boundaries, it was referred to as the "golf course." And the name fit with Gray's fondness for golfing.

"That kind of took him by surprise," Block said of the ski run.

Gray says he has witnessed "tremendous" changes on the mountain over the last three decades. The mountain has become a busier, more developed resort, but skiing opportunities have improved considerably, with the addition of new terrain and better, faster lifts.

Changes at the mountain have naturally led to changes for the patrol.

"Our outfit has grown, and it's had to change. And it's become more of a job too," Gray says.

Over time, patrollers have been getting more formal training than they used to, and most importantly, better communications.

"We didn't have radios when I first got here," Grays said.

The availability of the ALERT helicopter and the Big Mountain Ambulance have improved medical response on the mountain, too.

"Back when I started, we used to see more broken bones," Gray said. But equipment improvements have made skiing somewhat safer. Old leather boots and cable bindings on plank-like skis have been replaced by high-tech bindings and boots and short, shaped skis.

The shorter skis, in particular, have changed how the mountain is used. More people are now skiing on the resort's more remote, tree-studded areas, Gray said.

"Hellroaring used to be terrain just for experts, but with shorter skis, it seems like everyone can ski everywhere," he said.

Duchardt said Gray represents a connection with the Big Mountain's past.

"He bridges the gap from the people who were here from the very beginning to the people who are here now," she said. "It's just nice to be able to ask him about how things were 30 years ago."

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com