Luella Broby Seeholzer,
Ski entrepreneur

By Emily Peterson, Former Better Days Outreach and Research Coordinator

Born in Cache Valley, Utah in 1905, Luella Broby Seeholzer was introduced to skiing by her future husband, Harold Seeholzer, as a teenager. Years before the emergence of ski boots, Luella learned to ski with only a leather toe strap holding her foot to a flat piece of wood! She picked up the sport cross-country style, as ski lifts did not yet exist. 

Seeholzer family in 1961. Courtesy of Beaver Mountain Ski Area.

After marrying Harold in 1921, Luella spent lots of time with him at a small ski club in Beaver Mountain, where she recalled they were always the first to arrive and the last to leave the slopes. Eventually, Luella and her husband decided to buy the land from the Forest Service and try to develop it into a ski resort. They first installed a rope tow, an early predecessor to ski lifts that used a pulley system to help skiers up the mountain.

Starting a mom-and-pop ski resort wasn’t easy. Harold and Luella both worked on the weekdays at other jobs to earn money and worked at the resort on the weekends. They even had to mortgage their home to pay for the first ski cable to be installed. Luella served as a “jack of all trades,” managing ticketing, the cable tow, and making sure everything was running smoothly. 

In its early days, visitors to the ski resort would pack their own snow as they skied down the mountain and eat homemade chili in the ticket office the Seeholzers had built themselves. As the sport continued to grow in popularity in Utah, the Seeholzers moved their resort to its current location at Beaver Mountain and eventually began running the resort full-time with the help of their kids.

Luella and Harold worked together as equal business partners.  Luella recalled in an interview, 

“We both worked, and it was his and mine. It wasn’t just his, it was mine. He would feel the same, he felt that it was mine just the same as his, because I worked just as hard as he did…We were a team, and it was just our life together.” 

Luella and Harold at Beaver Mountain in the late 1950s. Courtesy Cache Valley Family Magazine.

Luella continued to run the company for 20 years after her husband passed away in 1968. Luella passed away in 1998, but her legacy lives on at Beaver Mountain which is still run by her family members. Today, Beaver Mountain remains the oldest family-owned ski area in the United States.

Emily Peterson is a history BA graduate of Brigham Young University assisted as outreach and research coordinator for Better Days. She is currently completing a Master’s in public history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.