
When the owner of Snowbowl, Brad Morris, received criticism about the quality of his ski hill in 2012, he took the vindictive step of banning the skier from future ticket sales. This reaction should help the public determine how to navigate the current issue with Brad Morris and his Snowbowl parking lot problem.
The owners of Montana Snowbowl near Missoula really, really don’t like criticism. So after a skier complained, they refused to sell him a season ski pass, or even daily tickets at a reduced rate during the pre-season. Jim Sylvester says that he put a comment in a handy suggestion box at the ski area, noting that a concluding run that funnels skiers seemed too congested and rough. When nothing happened, Sylvester, who is a former president of the Missoula Ski Education Foundation, called the Lolo National Forest office to find out the name of Snowbowl’s insurance carrier so he could warn it about what he considered the “unsafe skiing conditions,” reports the Missoulian. Nobody got back to him, but the run was groomed, and Sylvester thought no more about the matter for some months, until he sought to buy a season ski pass. He was refused twice — Snowbowl owners called him “disruptive” — and was also told that he should apologize. A season pass holder at Snowbowl for 31 years, Sylvester refused to make nice: “Do I have to apologize for complaining?” Accusing Snowbowl owner Brad Morris of discrimination, Sylvester now wants the Forest Service to rule that the ski resort, which is almost all on public land, violated the terms of its special use permit. Uncomfortably caught in the middle, the Forest Service allows that it is in “fact-gathering mode right now.”
More recently the safety issues at Snowbowl have been an idiot in 2023 who got drunk and accidentally killed his friend in the parking lot with his car, and a toddler who fell from a chairlift the following year. Regarding the latter, the Morris family reminded the public that they are inspected by the Forrest Service and insured:
The following is part of the statement released by Montana Snowbowl management and the Morris family Thursday:
“In addition to conveying our commitment to investigating this incident we want to reassure Snowbowl customers that the Snowpark chair, like all of our lifts, is regularly inspected by the Forest Service and our insurance provider, in addition to the regular maintenance conducted by Snowbowl. The installation of chairlifts, including the Snowpark chair, involve intensive engineering and oversight as well as inspection and approval by our partners at the Forest Service and our insurance provider. Prior to any public use, there are several tests conducted on the lifts to insure safe and adequate operations.
Snowbowl is committed to continue to provide a safe and affordable experience for our community.
If the Morris’ were serious about providing a “safe” experience for the Missoula community they wouldn’t be ignoring the extent of the problem the parking lot by Interstate-90 is posing, but that seems to be the current plan for the 4 acres Brad Morris owns.
On Facebook the group that provides FREE volunteer cleanup efforts for Brad Morris discussed this issue recently in the usual manner of mostly uninformed people saying uninformed stuff about how the world is supposed to work. For these people it’s as simple as posting a sign about the law, then expecting law enforcement to enforce the law.
I mean, it’s just that simple, right?

First off, Marc is wrong, and that’s because this “private property” uses a special use permit issued by the Forrest Service, giving the Forrest Service some degree of authority over this parcel of land. Maybe going to the Forrest Service is the next step for the members of the public tired of mitigating the risk Brad Morris refuses to address himself.

In a conversation with The Pulp after the falling toddler problem, Sarah Duncan was sent out by the Morris’ to take the heat. Here’s one question/answer worth considering:

Back in 2004 the expansion efforts for Snowbowl featured an acknowledgment that the risky Forrest Service road and parking lot limitations on the mountain were some of the biggest barriers.

For the past few years Morris has been on an expansion jag to address the resort’s biggest albatross: a death-beckoning, bile-boiling Forest Service access road married to notoriously limited parking up top. “Bull trout slowed us down on the road,” Morris admits, smiling beneath his mustache as though to acknowledge the truly unknowable exigencies of something so seemingly benign as running an honest little ski slope.
The threatened fish, which might be known to run in the stream far beneath Snowbowl road, were placed on the endangered species list right about the time he applied to upgrade the road, leading to several years of environmental-impact assessment before the necessary permits were issued last summer. Work has begun now, and Morris hopes to achieve a much friendlier drive to the slopes in a season or two.
The other barrier to expansion referenced above–the Bull trout and its inconvenient “threatened” status–means a community stakeholder like Missoula’s Clark Fork Coalition should also be interested in finding a solution. While I know they do some work in this geographical area of the valley, so far they have been pretty mum on this politically thorny “car camping” issue.
To better understand this issue I went directly to the expansion proposal (PDF) put together by Brad Morris, Beat von Allmen, and Robert Brandenberger to see how natural habitat, recreational land use, and infrastructure meshed together in making the proposal to grow. Here’s some excerpts relevant to today’s post, starting with the fishies:


And here’s some perspective for context on the parking lot’s function to Snowbowl’s broader ski business operation:



While this context is helpful, it might not move the dial on the kind of the uninformed people who can’t even process the distinction between PUBLIC land and PRIVATE property. For those people I’m not sure what can be done.

Brad Morris is lucky to have volunteers willing to risk exposure to drugs, like Fentanyl, and paraphernalia, like needles, to do nasty cleanup work for free. That’s pretty cool.
West of Missoula, in Seattle, where one of the most alarmingly unqualified Mayors to ever exist now controls a $9 billion dollar budget, just jumping into water is a high-risk action to take.

For those who watched Seattle Is Dying seven years ago and said JUST YOU WAIT, MISSOULA, we have long been proven correct. If the same “experts” who oversaw this slow-motion disaster are allowed to keep their positions of influence, the same insanity this LA women recently described WILL ECHO in this town.

Thanks for reading! And stay tuned for updates on SOLUTIONS!!!



































