On opening day, December 4, 1963, Schweitzer Basin had exactly one way up: a mile-long double chairlift that carried skiers from the new day lodge at 4,700 feet to 1,700 feet of vertical above. A T-bar was added a month later, and that was the whole mountain. Dr. Jack Fowler of Spokane, the avid skier whose idea it was, had spent the late 1950s driving to The Big Mountain in Whitefish, Montana, eyeing a closer alternative on every trip past the snow-laden Selkirk slopes.
The idea caught on fast. By its fourth season the young ski area was tallying 55,000 visits, and the rope tows and T-bars began to feel like a line forming at a one-screen theater. A second T-bar went up in 1965, a third in 1967, and still the crowds came.
Then came the fall of 1968, and Schweitzer had its coming-of-age summer. Three new chairlifts rose on the mountain, and somebody with a storybook sense of humor named them Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear. The T-bars and rope tows were relocated to make room. In a single season, the hill that had opened with one double chair had grown into a genuine little resort with chairlift service on the front side.
The Bears were only the start of the building years. In 1971 the resort pushed into Colburn Basin on the back side with two more chairlifts, numbered 5 and 6, plus a small day lodge called the Out Back Inn. The next year brought a base area restaurant, a 36-unit overnight lodge, and a 20-unit condominium building. The road to the resort was paved in 1973, and in the summer of 1974 Chairlift number 7 went up to add capacity on the front side and eliminate the old uphill trek to Chair number 1.
Here is a detail worth savoring: for its first two decades, this growing mountain was a non-profit corporation, owned by hundreds of local stockholders, before co-founder Jim Brown Jr., a Sandpoint sawmill owner, took it private in the early 1980s. The next time you ride a modern detachable quad at Schweitzer, think of Papa, Mama, and Baby Bear, the three storybook lifts that taught a one-chair hill how to grow up.