Long before a chairlift turned above Lake Pend Oreille, Sandpoint learned to ski on a steep hill on West Pine Street. Known in the 1940s as the Pine Street Hill, it was the destination for local skiers before Schweitzer Mountain Resort opened in 1963. The operation was casual and entirely homegrown, set on privately owned land and run by the skiers themselves, who volunteered to install and maintain a rope tow powered by a portable motor.
The effort took shape in 1946, when Jim Parsons Jr. and his friends formed the Sandpoint Ski Club and set out to get a tow for the hill. Parsons had moved to Sandpoint from San Diego in 1945, and he and other Sandpoint High School students collected money from residents and local businesses, and Parsons raised pigs and put his profits toward the project. The club bought a Swedish ski tow and 1,800 feet of rope, enough for about 900 feet of tow once it was installed, with the motor mounted on a toboggan at the top and anchored to a tree.
For teenagers like Fritz Holz, who started skiing in 1947 on his father's old wooden skis and taught himself on the hill, Pine Street was a complete ski school without instructors. Skiers side-stepped up the slope to groom it for the day, learned to splice the hemp rope when it broke or froze, and rode a tow that could carry three small children or two adults at a time. Gary Pietsch later recalled that they simply skied until they fell down, and during the fierce winter of 1948, when more than six feet of snow fell in Sandpoint, he and Holz skied the hill every day of Christmas break.
That small hill also produced one of the people who would help create something much larger. After college and military service, Parsons returned to Sandpoint as local leaders, looking beyond a waning timber economy, considered tourism and a full-fledged ski mountain. Pine Street, he noted, lacked the altitude and deep snow a resort would need. The group first considered Baldy Mountain and approached Burlington Northern Railroad for financing, but studies found Baldy unsuitable. When the mountain that would become Schweitzer was identified, Parsons walked into it many times with seal skins on his skis to help advance the effort.
When Schweitzer opened in 1963, the Pine Street Hill was laid to rest as the town's local skiing spot, its work done. A year later, Joe and Lois Weisz bought part of the land, and their family shared the hill for decades as a beloved sledding slope. Kaniksu Land Trust opened Pine Street Woods to the public in the fall of 2019 on part of the former Weisz farm. The next time you ride a lift at Schweitzer, remember that the resort's community spirit did not start at 4,700 feet. It started in town, with wooden skis, a rope, and a group of young people determined to climb their own hill.