Schweitzer: The Swiss Hermit's Mountain Becomes a Ski Resort
Near Sandpoint, Idaho
The mountain has a name that predates the resort by many decades. Local people called it Schweitzer, the German word for Swiss man, after a story told about a hermit from Switzerland who took shelter on the mountain in the early twentieth century. Whether the story is strictly true or not, the name stuck, and the mountain kept it when the ski resort was built.
The man behind the resort's creation was a Spokane businessman named Jack Fowler, who had become convinced that the mountain's snowy basin and open bowls could become a premier ski destination. Fowler gathered investors, sold shares to local residents, and put together a non-profit corporation to build and operate the ski area. By late fall of nineteen sixty-three, twelve hundred acres of terrain were groomed with three runs from timberline to a new day lodge, and parking for five hundred cars.
On December fourth, nineteen sixty-three, the first chairlift opened to the public and Schweitzer Mountain Resort was born. For its first two decades, the ski area operated as a non-profit cooperative with hundreds of stockholders, one of the more unusual ownership structures in American ski resort history. It was eventually taken private in the early nineteen eighties by Jim Brown, a sawmill owner from Sandpoint who had been one of the resort's co-founders.
Schweitzer today is one of the largest ski resorts in the Pacific Northwest, receiving an average of three hundred inches of snow annually across more than two thousand six hundred acres.
