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Show (Continued from cover) o one would build it today, yet Beaver Mountain endures. Having long since paid its start-up costs, its owners now sell enough lift tickets to pay for upkeep on the mountain, but not enough to fund many large-scale improvements. So Beaver Mountain stays much the same from year to year, a throwback to when skiing was slower, quieter, less polished, and—maybe, just maybe—more fun. That Beaver Mountain endures is no surprise to the Seeholzers, a large, closeknit Mormon family who have run it since its inception in 1946. To explain the ski . area’s survival, they all point to their own hard labor. For Beaver Mountain’s matriarch, the late Luella Seeholzer, the work became her lifeblood, and she passed it on like a dominant gene. All four of her children have worked there, as have dozens of her grandchildren ahd §téat-grandchildren. — , | ees THE FIRST GENERATION first met Luella Seeholzer, who was 90 at the time, at her modest home in Logan on an early summer day in 1995. When asked about the ski area, Luella, who died last month at age 93, Tu} AUuUS! VU, 177U | 8vE8 talked instead about her late husband, Harry Seeholzer. Her memories of the mountain, | learned, were inseparable from her memories of family. She recalléd some of their first dates, in the late 1910’s, when she and Harry had wandered the foothills around Logan on skis that had leather toe straps for bind- ings. Harry was a wilder skier than she was. He would sometimes shuss downhill, then brake himself by pulling back on a tree limb which he dragged between his legs. “It just got in his blood,” said Luella, who skied until age 80. “And he taught it to his children, and to me. My mother didn’t want me to ski when | was going with Harry. She said you’re going to get your leg broke and won't get to school.” When the Logan Winter Sports Club wanted to sell its skiing operation in the mid-1940s, Harry offered to take it over, mostly because he thought skiing was good for young people. Instead of the club’s wind-scoured spot, he chose a new location on a mountain 8,860 feet high with long, sheltered northeast-facing slopes. “I could see it would be a great place,” Luella recalled of Beaver Mountain. “There were steep hills and there were easy hills. There were so many places you could turn.” ae = ey a Besseleeteteteteteos essesvaneeatctet ene By Me bs & Siena oes er “se %. aeceeceecetecece LE senna ancora cen cena arabs Beaten aarti s. Well Alex ss a a & i % 3 - s bo ae om i i % | = 3 a | x et eis. be so tired. I’d say, ‘Couldn’t | lay down for maybe 10 minutes?’ Then | would get up and go.” without a transit. Luella’s favorite memory of the ski area, she says, was “just working together. We were a team, and it was our life.” | Because the Seeholzers owed $400 a month on Beaver Mountain, the children were never paid. The family lived off the wages that Harry and Luella earned from their full-time second jobs—Harry worked THE SECOND GENERATION f Luella’s children, Ted has played as a lather, Luella as a salesperson at a the most prominent role at the ski area, managing it since Harry’s dress shop. On winter weekends, they invited their death in 1968. He and his wife, Marge, recently bought out his siblings to become sole owners of Beaver Mountain: neighbors from Logan to the hill. Harry taught skiing, free of charge, while standing at the bottom. He would watch the kids Ted says he never gave much thought come downhill, then tell them what to do. to whether he liked the work. He needed a Bundled in an alpaca-lined overcoat and job after graduating from Utah State in army boots, her hands warmed by hot1968, and one waited at Beaver Mountain. water bottles, Luella stood outside the Now he has mixed feelings about it. Catch warming hut and sold punch cards good him when he’s doing paperwork, and he for lift rides. Often, she would take the may seem angry. In the office one day, he money out of the customers’ pockets hergrouses that “the government control over self, so that they wouldn’t have to remove everything has made this extremely burThe first lift at Beaver Mountain, a their gloves..Other times she helped the densome. It’s not a labor of love anymore.” 1,000-foot-long rope tow powered by a | youngsters stay warm. “Sometimes the kids But a few weeks later, working on a 3/4-ton Dodge milk truck, may have rivaled - would come into the [warming hut], and I’d chairlift on a perfect fall afternoon, he ~: today’s detachable chairlifts for speed. To take their mittens and their boots off, and seems at peace. Standing alongside Jeff. build it, Harry towed the truck up a short, their little hands and feet would be so West, the second-in-charge at the hill, he gentle slope, then strung a rope around cold,” she said. “| would hold their feet or clangs each chair with a hammer, listening | one rear wheel and a series of pulleys. The their fingers up around my neck to thaw for broken or loose slats. When he finds truck not only cost next to nothing, it let the them out.” one, they stop the lift so that West can lift operator accelerate like a driver. Since customers were like family, they weld the chair. Ted grinds off the slag, then Sometimes the operator would shift to had to work too. Until Beaver Mountain slaps on a coat of rust-proofing paint. Each fourth gear; meanwhile, the kids using the bought its first snow-grooming machine in chair glides slowly away, fixed. To him, this rope tow held contests to see how far past 1963, they had to sidestep downhill to is how work should be. the top they could slide. pack the snow at the beginning of each As he works, he explains the chores of Harry and Luella’s four children— day. Those who didn’t pack were “shamed” lift maintenance: “You look and see what Loyal, Dixie, Ted, and Nancy—helped build by their peers, said Luella. rubber liners need to be replaced. You the next lifts. While the boys lugged 40Although she never complained, check all your electrical outfittings. You — pound wheels uphill in rucksacks, the girls Luella, as an old lady, did recall how drain oil out of the gearboxes...” At this dragged wooden lift poles on horseback. A exhausting the work could be. She told one point Ted clangs the wrong chair, and a gifted mechanic, Harry could sit at the botinterviewer, “It would be dark when we wasp stings him. He mutters two obscenitom of the hill and align the poles by eye, would come home. Sometimes you would ties, shakes his stung hand once, then con¢ |