Beef Trail Ski Area

Beef Trail Ski Area southwest of Butte, Montana, was the home hill of the Butte Ski Club for half a century. The club formed in 1937, with many Norwegian immigrants and mine workers among its members, and that year it bought a 960-acre tract on the ridge known as the Beef Trail. The name came from the cattle drives between Dillon and Butte, which brought herds over a low pass south of town. Members built the area themselves, hauling rock, cutting trails and putting up buildings and roads with their own labor and money, and the hill opened to the public in 1939.

The first lift was a 900-foot rope tow driven by a Model A Ford engine. More rope tows followed, three of them by the late 1940s and four in later years, and a T-bar arrived in 1970, along with lights for night skiing and snowmaking. Runs on the open, pine-dotted slopes went by names such as Main Hill, South Slope, Clark Hill, Copper Bowl, Anaconda Run and the Chute, and the area had a jumping hill, a bunny hill, an early warming hut and later a chalet at the base. High school ski racing kept the hill busy through the 1950s, and Butte Ski Club members pushed to make skiing a varsity high school sport in Montana, which it became.

The Beef Trail was run as a nonprofit club hill, and Bridger Bowl near Bozeman later borrowed that model. In the 1970s and 1980s the hill lost ground to larger areas within driving distance, Discovery Basin above all, along with Maverick Mountain and Bridger Bowl, and several winters with too little snow kept it closed. The last season came in 1988, and the club sold the land in 1990. The sale money set up the Butte Ski Club Charitable Foundation, which pays for Butte schoolchildren to ski at Discovery. Montana PBS told the area's story in a 2003 documentary.