Every new ski area needs more than a good idea and a snowy bowl. It needs someone who can clear the runs, get power up the mountain, hire a crew, sell the tickets and greet the first skiers at the door. For Schweitzer Basin, that person was Sam Wormington, a tall, lean Canadian from Kimberley, British Columbia, who became so identified with the place that locals simply called him Schweitzer Sam.
Wormington brought real experience to a mountain that, in the summer of 1963, was still mostly plans and timber. A World War II Canadian Army veteran, he had built and managed the North Star ski area at Kimberley. Spokane's Dr. Merritt Stiles, one of Schweitzer's earliest cheerleaders, travelled to Kimberley to urge him to apply for the manager's job. He was named manager before construction began, and the job, as Sandpoint Magazine later put it, involved supervising everything from clearing timber for ski runs and installing power to organizing ticket sales, hiring staff and marketing a ski area most people had never heard of.
What his small team built came together remarkably fast. Schweitzer opened on December 4, 1963, with a day lodge at 4,700 feet and a mile-long double chairlift giving 1,700 feet of vertical drop. A T-bar followed a month later, helped along, Wormington remembered, by road contractor Russell Oliver's trick of running a bulldozer up the snowy slope, letting the track freeze and covering it with sand so cement trucks could reach the top in January 1964. There was no grooming in those first days. Early ski patrol volunteer Dutch Miedema remembered it plainly: it was all basic, starting from scratch.
Wormington also made an early call that shaped Schweitzer's character. The area had been planned as a weekend-only operation, but he insisted it run seven days a week. The 1960s were lean — Schweitzer made a profit in only one year of that decade — yet the mountain was immediately popular with regional skiers and tallied 55,000 visits by its fourth season. Behind the scenes he leaned on a loyal local crew that included meticulous bookkeeper Delores Kelly and ticket seller Patti Parkins McGovern, and he answered directly to co-founder Jim Brown Jr., of whom he later wrote in his 1980 book The Ski Race that much of the credit for Schweitzer Basin's success went to Brown for his foresight and faith.
When Wormington left in 1977 for Mt. Spokane, succeeded by Pierre Huguenin, Schweitzer was a very different place from the one-lift hill he had opened fourteen winters earlier: seven chairlifts, overnight accommodations and a settled reputation as a popular Northwest ski resort. He stayed in the ski business until 2003, after more than fifty years managing Kimberley, Schweitzer and Mt. Spokane and installing lifts in the United States and Canada. The lifts and lodges have changed many times since, but every Schweitzer morning still runs on the foundation Schweitzer Sam laid in 1963 — a mountain staffed, powered and welcomed into life, seven days a week.