Since ‘73: The Peterson family

The story of a couple that grew up in the Midwest, discovered skiing in the East and loved Big Sky from the start.

By Mario Carr EBS CONTRIBUTOR 

Fans of Chet Huntley and self-proclaimed nightly news addicts, Marvin and Sarah Peterson heard about Big Sky and hit the road from Michigan in 1973. These two educators and their daughters were among the first families to own a condo at the base of the ski resort. 

Marv grew up on a cattle farm in Illinois, and met Sarah on the East Coast while they were in college. There, Marv learned to ski and then taught Sarah in the late 1950s. They were hooked from the start and throughout the first half of the 1960s—when they both began their careers as educators—the two skied all over the East. In 1966, they moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., and began driving out West for their ski trips. By the early 1970s, they were looking for their own condo. They saw prices at Grand Targhee Resort jump from $30,000 to $40,000 between 1971 and 1972 and decided to act fast.  

Marv has written extensively about his early life on the farm, and his family’s experiences in Big Sky. In an interview with EBS, Sarah described watching him sit at the computer, typing for hours, with a smile on her face. 

Prospecting Big Sky 

In early June of 1973, the Petersons drove west with their daughters, six-year-old Julie and three-month-old Jessica. 

They reached Billings and started asking around about this new “Big Sky” place, and were met with blank stares. They stopped at Red Lodge and camped amidst the snow banks. After seeing  lilacs blooming in the middle of June—they’d bloomed months earlier in Michigan—Sarah told her husband, “We’ve got a lot to learn about summer in Montana.”  

The family ended up in Bozeman, where locals sent them to Four Corners. There, they were told to follow the construction trucks into Gallatin Canyon. 

“You drive in and there’s Lone Peak, and you fall in love,” Sarah recalled. 

A kind salesman drove the Petersons from the meadow up to the ski resort, although his name has escaped their memory.  

“We didn’t want a condo on the golf course because we weren’t golfers. The road up to the mountain was a dirt road, bumpy as all hell, and our three-month-old barfed on the back seat [of the salesman’s car],” Marv remembered, laughing. He explained how the guilt they felt from this incident and the trouble it caused the salesmen further encouraged them to purchase a condo.  

After viewing the floor plan, the family went to a restaurant, The Corral, to consider their options. Marv used the pay phone to call his friend, Mike, who worked for Chrysler Realty, a company that would be investing in the soon to be Big Sky Resort. 

Mike told the Petersons, “You should know that when they go on the market publicly next week, I’m going to buy two.”   

Marv thanked him for the straightforward answer. The Petersons decided to purchase a Stillwater condo for $30,000.  

That day, the family was delighted by a surprise meeting with Chet Huntley himself.  

“At the time he was meeting all new buyers,” Marv wrote in his reflective essay. “We were delighted to meet our favorite national TV commentator and had a delightful 10-minute conversation…. We were now owners of a ski condo in Montana and committed to what would become 50 years of annual winter and summer trips to Montana.”  

A journey worth taking 

In 1973, the Petersons decided to fly from Ann Arbor for their first Christmas vacation to Big Sky. With a seven-year-old and nine-month-old in tow, the family flew from Detroit to Minneapolis, to Jamestown (N.D.), then to Billings, then to Great Falls due to a snowstorm in Bozeman. The next morning they rode from Great Falls to Big Sky in minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit in a van with a door that wouldn’t close. Their condo was not yet fully built, so for their Christmas trip, the resort provided a temporary place to stay in Meadow Village along with rides to and from the mountain every day. The couple understood the construction delays—they were after the skiing, anyway.  

With 200 inches of snow on the ground and only a few hundred skiers to pack it down, the Petersons were skiing powder like never before. Marv and Sarah were thankful to have the ability to put their children in ski school and daycare at the resort. The couple explained that having their young children with them for this first trip helped them make meaningful relationships with the local business owners and workers of Big Sky. 

“They had a holiday party that first year that was for the workers only, but we got invited,” Marv explained, still grateful for this gesture 50 years later.  At the party, the locals were watching a homemade movie of the first descent of the Big Couloir. 

Friends and family in Michigan asked the Petersons why they would buy a vacation home nearly 2,000 miles away when many Michganders were content buying lake houses in their own state. Sarah would respond, “Well ….  There’s no skiing,” with a smile and a shrug.  

Their 4,000 mile round-trip journeys to Big Sky were challenging. For their second Christmas trip in 1974, the family actually made it to the Bozeman airport where they marveled at how the “baggage claim” area was a snowbank. As their Karst Stage bus meandered up the canyon, they came across a jackknifed semi-truck that delayed their arrival by another five hours. But the Petersons’ love of skiing and Big Sky would always trump the obstacles. 

Marv wrote about the early challenges. The design failures in their condo—that led to leaky roofs and lawsuits—along with the original ski resort investors disbanding had them worried about their investment. However, despite the financial debacles, the Petersons were able to maintain their investment by renting out their condo.  

The skiers learn to conquer the mountains in the summer 

As educators, the Petersons had summers free, allowing them to spend the last 50 summers in Big Sky. In 1979, Marv and his 12-year-old daughter Julie climbed to the top of Lone Mountain and were amazed by the steep rocky pitches that they thought would never be accessible by lift. They made many friends by meeting at the tennis courts in Meadow Village every Sunday. Some Sundays there would even be a keg of beer. Marv explained how the resort had put a lot of money into the tennis courts and even hired a tennis pro every year.  

He remembers summer markets with vendors setting up tents and accompanying live music. Buck’s T-4 Lodge would host Friday and Saturday night dances and a half-mile line of parked cars would stretch along the highway. 

Marv’s daughters, the eldest being 14, once wanted to walk from the Meadow Village to Ousel Falls with some friends. The children set off in the late afternoon, trekking through sagebrush. Soon, the parents got word that a mother bear and her cubs had been spotted near the falls earlier that afternoon. The parents ran to the falls where the children were found to be safe and the bear was never spotted.  

“We learned how to backpack from a book,” Sarah said, grinning. Being from Michigan, they had no experience in the backcountry but they never let that stop them. They spent two summers on guided horsepacking trips, but saw plenty of backpackers and wanted to try exploring on their own. Through their study of “the backpacking bible,” as they called it, Colin Fletcher’s The Complete Walker, the Petersons learned by doing. Marv admits that they were naive and never carried bear spray, but they took precautions like hanging their food and making noise as they traveled. Their first trip was with their six- and 12-year-olds up Porcupine Creek where they were captivated by the views of Lone Mountain. Marv even wrote about a trip where their tent nearly collapsed under 16 inches of snow on Aug. 16, 1978. After returning home safely a day later than expected, the Petersons were grateful to find that locals had organized a search party.  

For 40 years the family enjoyed the backcountry together. Marv would eventually complete a 40-day trip in Nepal in 1988, and the couple celebrated their 60th birthdays together with a 14-day trip in the Arctic National Wildlife Sanctuary. 

The changing of the guard 

In 2004, the family bought another condo in Hidden Village to accommodate their growing family. Marv and Sarah became grandparents in the 1990s. They held onto their original Stillwater condo until 2008. 

After retiring in 2008, they were able to spend nearly six months out of the year in Big Sky, split evenly between the winter and summer. The couple got involved in the Master the Mountain program at the ski resort, joined cross-country ski and hiking groups, and regularly attended the Sunday services at Soldiers Chapel. Many of the friends that the Petersons made in these groups were fellow retirees, or nearly retired. Unfortunately, time has changed those groups.  

“One by one we’re dropping off,” Marv said. “Either somebody died, or somebody’s had a heart attack, so you know we’re at the point where that group is thinning out.” 

In hopes of connecting EBS with other long time lovers of Big Sky, the couple had some very somber things to say. 

“Well, the problem is that they’re old enough that they’re gone,” Marv said.  

“Gone-gone,” Sarah emphasized. 

Marv believes Big Sky has changed drastically because many of the “core people” of his generation have grown too old to do all of the exciting outdoorsy things that they came here to do.  

“And at the same time there’s the deluge of all the people [moving in] so I think we don’t know as many people now as we did maybe 10 years ago,” Marv said. 

As the area matured, so did the people. Marv described Sarah’s development of a “late-life addiction to golf,” an addiction that deepened many of her relationships. Marv himself has six fused vertebrae and now chooses to walk with a pair of trekking poles out of an abundance of caution. 

When Marv was asked about why he types away, documenting the early days in Big Sky, he explained that many people just don’t know about those times.  

“There’s some people who complain about the developments, there’s other people that say it’s fine and it’s what we need to do—I didn’t wanna get in the middle of that,” Marv said.  

Marv wants people to know what it was like in Big Sky for the first decade. Although he keeps a cheerful demeanor when speaking of all the change, Marv talks about how tightly knit the community was and how much unity could be found in the community events. When the community was smaller, Marv noticed that local workers, visitors, and “bosses” could all be found eating and recreating together. He believes that this is still the case in Big Sky, however it is at a “much grander scale, and less personal.” 

“It was a very different place,” he said. Nevertheless, Marv and Sarah’s love for Big Sky remains. It’s still their favorite place to be. 

This story is a part of an ongoing series. Read the rest of them here.