Flathead native aiming to visit every ski hill in North America

Should you happen to bump into John Andrew, it’s pretty likely he’ll be at a ski hill, chatting with a stranger and cracking one-liners.

The 85-year-old Columbia Falls native swung through the valley this weekend, taking a few hours to visit Blacktail Mountain before heading north on his quest to ski at every ski hill in North America.

Out of his list of about 700, he’s currently at 528 and expects to pick up about 20 more in the next few weeks as his travels take him into Canada. But that didn’t start until he retired, and if you’d asked him about the sport back when he still lived in the Flathead, the answer would have been different.

“We thought the skiers were nuts,” he says. “My idea of winter sports was to strap on snowshoes, put a .30-06 over my shoulder and go out hunting elk.”

Living in the valley in the 1940s and ‘50s, Andrew often worked for the storied founder of the Hungry Horse News, Mel Ruder. He says he carried the film plates for Ruder when Going-to-the-Sun Road opened in Glacier National Park, as well as when the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and editor shot the grand opening of Hungry Horse Dam. The job also took him to the ill-fated, first-ever downhill races on Big Mountain, held the year after the ski area officially opened in 1947.

“A lot of guys got hurt; they still had stumps in the way,” he remembers “Guys were carried off in stretchers. It was pretty treacherous.”

As it was, Andrew avoided skiing until he was 39. During that time, he graduated valedictorian from Columbia Falls High School in 1949, studied at Montana University-Northern before completing his civil engineering degree at Gonzaga and earned a degree in business administration from Harvard.

He wound up working for Boeing for nearly 30 years, and his career included the conceptual design, engineering and construction supervision of what remains the world’s largest building by volume, the Boeing Everett Factory. Completed in 1967, the nearly 100-acre building has been the birthplace of thousands of jets from 747s to the 787 Dreamliners.

But Andrew is more interested in talking about skiing, which became his real passion when he retired 20 years ago. He said he was hooked after a trip to Discovery Ski Area between Missoula and Butte, where he hired a ski instructor to take him down the technical backside.

Soon thereafter, he resigned from the Gonzaga board of trustees and began traveling to ski resorts throughout the country.

Later on, his son bought him a book that listed all the ski areas in the continent, and he took it as a challenge.

“I looked at that and said, ‘Hey, I gotta do a lot of skiing before I figure out where I want a condo,’” he joked.

He has respect for Big Mountain, but it’s the smaller ski areas, like Blacktail, that he truly loves. As he makes his way up into northern Alberta and British Columbia, Andrew said he’s looking forward to getting some turns at Whitecourt, which boasts a total of 92 vertical feet.

“The places I love to go are in rural North America. I just love it. I grew up there,” he says. “I lived six years on the plains north of Shelby. I tell ya, I loved it. Windswept cold, tiny shacks we used to live in the Depression.”

Beyond the scenery, though, he said it’s the people that make the experience.

“It’s because you meet people. You meet the volunteers. You meet the managers,” he said. “[Blacktail owner] Steve Spencer, he’s running a ski hill that lives in the shadow of Big Mountain, and he’s been doing this for a long time. He’s great to talk to.”

He added, “I’m not done yet. Maybe when I’m 90 or when I’m 95. ... Every day I’m alive, I laugh at life. And every time I get on the slopes, I get to laugh at life.”

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or swilson@dailyinterlake.com.