Skiing the nation ... and Bear Paw

A Hi-Line native who has taken on the task of skiing every ski mountain in North America recently stopped at Bear Paw Ski Bowl to finish his Montana list.

John Andrews lives in the Seattle area now, and since he retired 18 years ago, he has skied 526 ski areas in North America. Over the weekend, he knocked Bear Paw Ski Bowl and Cypress Hills in Alberta off his list.

He usually travels with his wife, but she did not come with him on this trip back to his stomping grounds.

"We try to allocate one day per 1,000 feet of vertical," Andrews said. Bear Paw, being just under that, was a one-day hill.

"I don't mean that we just ski once," he explained. "We go up and down the mountain. If you took every ski hill and you stacked them on top of one another, you would have, I think, 690,000 feet of vertical in North America."

He said he does not keep track of how many of those feet his skis have slid down, but if he had to guess, it would be around 590,000 feet. He wants to ski every groomed slope in the continent, but the problem is the smaller ski areas.

"The ones I've got left are not the big ones," Andrews said. "I have about 150 left. ... Of course, they're not all open on the same day. Some of them are open on weekends. I found one that is only open on Tuesday and Thursday night. So it's the little ones that are tough to ski."

According to Andrews, there are about 670 active ski areas in the continent, but that is not a static number. Slopes are constantly changing - being created and closed, opening late or missing seasons - but he said he feels confident about that number.

Out east, the "gravel pits," he describes the small slopes forged on low mountain ranges like the Appalacians, one can ski three in a day and get their 1,000 feet of vertical.

"I don't know if I'll make it," Andrews said. "I'm 83 years old."

He said coming back to Havre was a trip of remembrance for him.

"I came by train here because I could, and it was kind of nostalgic for me because I left Havre by train 65 years ago," he said.

He attended Northern Montana College and left in 1950. He grew up on the northern plains of Montana around Shelby and went to high school in Columbia Falls.

"I know what it's like here," he said. "I left at 25 below zero in January of 1950. I came back in January of 2015 by train and it was 40 above. The temperature has gone up one degree per year."

While he was here, he visited the wife of Louis Hagener, one of his professors at Northern. He and Antoinette Hagener talked about Havre of old, he said, and spent a pleasant morning together.

He said he likes slopes like Bear Paw and taking trips to them because of the people he meets along the way.

"Bear Paw is a volunteer mountain," he said "Every person is there for the kids, for their community. ... That's what's nice about skiing the little areas. They're all run by good people. They're always interested in what I am doing."

This is his first trip of the season, which has had a late start for him. He plans on going to a new resort in Utah, Cherry Peak, to reseal his conquering of Utah and putting the finishing blow on Wyoming at Plain Creek.

"I have to go where I haven't skied and they're all very scattered," he said.

He lacks about 30 areas in Quebec, three in Fairbanks, one in the Yukon, another in Labrador - in addition to many small hills in the eastern half of the United States.

He said in his travels, he has heard of others who are trying to do the same thing as him, but he has not met anyone who has skied more slopes than he has.

"The problem is you're going to die on the trail," he said. "I've been at this 18 years and I have some ways to go."

The reason he took this post-retirement quest is not because he is very passionate about skiing, he said.

"Skiing is not important to me," he said. He said he just does it to give himself something to do to keep sane in retirement. "It's just something to do."