Turner Mountain offers laid-back experience

Two and a half hours from Kalispell, Turner Mountain is well off the beaten path, offering a ski hill not often found by tourists.

Turner Mountain is 22 miles north of Libby on Pipe Creek Road. Very much a reflection of Libby itself, Turner Mountain has seen little business investment in the past 20 years. It seems that the hill has been cemented in a time period before high-speed chair lifts and competitive terrain parks. This fact alone drew me the 113 miles from Kalispell on Saturday morning.

Like some city slicker, I offer to pay for the $37 lift ticket with a credit card. The woman selling passes, warming up the grill and pouring coffee doesn’t mind but has to pull out a manual card imprinter from a drawer below the register.

That’s just the first sign that skiing here is not shaped to cater to high-end travelers. Turner Mountain is not about customer service, it’s about ski service. The mountain is here: Go skiing.

Turner boasts one chair lift that climbs about 2,100 feet from the parking lot (3,800 feet above sea level) up to the summit (5,900 feet).

The two-person chairs aren’t high-speed, but few things are at the simple ski area in the Cabinet Mountains. One chair has been painted to resemble the American flag. Another sports the Canadian flag colors and red maple leaves.

The ride up features an inspiring view of the terrain below. If you’re looking for more than the two snowcat-tracked runs, the mountain is mostly powder fields and tree lines. The in-bounds terrain is basically one east-facing slope, hundreds of feet wide in some places, with a lone road winding between seas of snow. These runs are insulated with tree lines and draws, all directing skiers back to the lift.

About 100 people showed up to Turner on Saturday to find 5 inches of fresh snow had come down the night before. The regular components of a small ski hill populace were all there: parents teaching their fearless children how to turn; mixed skier and snowboarder groups rifling through the troves of powder; and older, white-bearded men who reside in the Yaak, perhaps off the grid, reminding us all what pure, exemplary skiing form is supposed to look like.

The mountain doesn’t make enough money to support an entire staff — the ski patrol and lift maintenance workers volunteer their time. The Kootenai Winter Sports Ski Education Foundation, a local nonprofit group, operates the hill.

“They are very dedicated to keeping a local ski operation going,” said Bruce Zwang, a board member for the Foundation. “When Turner opened in the 1960s there were all kinds of mom-and-pop-style ski areas around and most of them didn’t survive.”

Despite the lack of enforcement on the mountain, there’s never a sense of anarchy.

When one skier decided not to risk the black-diamond run on which he found himself, another stopped and offered the carry the skis while the first skier walked down. In the parking lot, the regulars have set up camping chairs around the pickup tailgate to share stories, lunch and a few beers before hopping back on the lift 20 feet away.

“It’s a very relaxed atmosphere,” Zwang said. “Everybody knows everybody.”

From the top of the hill, the view of the Cabinet Mountains to the south is blurred by a crowd of clouds floating by. Before long, it becomes a full-blown storm and drops another two inches of snow during the second half of the day.

Near the top of Sundance Bowl, I stopped to catch my breath and felt grateful to be on such a wide slope where the snow is up to my ankles. I felt like I was near the equilibrium of what makes skiing (in my case, snowboarding) great: slopes and snow. No need for the extras if the community has exactly what it needs to continue generations of great skiing.

“I think it’s the town of Libby that really supports Turner,” Zwang said. “It’s such a long-term asset to the community and it helps support other local businesses. Whether you’re a skier or not, we get a lot of support for the town.”

Before the drive back to Kalispell, we drove 22 miles farther up the Yaak to The Dirty Shame. The revived biker-style bar is about 15 miles south of the Canadian border and frequented by those who chose to leave most of society behind. John Runkle, the establishment’s proprietor, is proud to announce to the patrons that he’s recently debunked a rumor of an ISIS sleeper cell hiding out in the Yaak.

After exchanging contact information with a retired teacher who lives nearby, I vow to return to the Yaak in a few months and embark in whatever summer recreation is available.

Reporter Seaborn Larson may be reached at 758-4441 or by email at slarson@dailyinterlake.com.