The following excerpt was taken from the book Crystal Mountain: Built by Skiers published in 2012 by the Crystal Mountain Founders Club and tells a little of the history of how ski clubs and Tacoma Teachers came about.
Ski clubs were also a part of the housing picture at Crystal — another Forest Service experiment that the agency would not replicate elsewhere. Thirteen ski clubs requested permits from the Forest Service in 1962: Rokka Ski Club, Forelaufer Ski Club, Boeing Employees Ski Club, Enumclaw Ski Club, Seattle Ski Club, Tacoma Sports Coop, Illahee Ski Club, Mountaineers Inc., Olympic Ski Club, Collins Ski Club, and Penguin Ski Club. Later, other organizations requested permits. In the end, ten clubs were built, not all of them from the original list: Rokka, Forelaufer, SkiBacs (formerly Boeing Employees), Enumclaw, Capitol, Billiken, Edelweiss, Tacoma Teachers, Sitzmark, and Skiers, Inc.
All were built on the dorm-room model, except for Capitol Skiers, which has units more like condos. Tacoma Teachers was the last club to be permitted, in 1968 or 1969, at the instigation of Harry Beggs, later a Crystal Mountain Founders Club board member. Beggs started skiing in his last year at college, at Pacific Lutheran University, remembering that on his very first run at Crystal he went all the way to the top — and it took him all day to get down because he didn’t know how to ski. After he got married, he and his wife planned to ski a lot, but they could never get up to Crystal regularly. After touring the Sitzmark club, Beggs realized that was the solution: they needed a place to stay in order to ski as often as they wanted.
Beggs, who described himself as being a “pushy and forward” kind of person, just picked up the phone, called the Forest Service, and asked for a permit to build a ski club. He got laughed at. There were no more permits available. But within the week, by sheer stroke of luck, or act of God, the Seventh-Day Adventists decided not to develop their permit, and Beggs got a call — the permit was his if he wanted it. Beggs paid the $25 annual permit fee and did some paperwork to form Tacoma Teachers; the ski club took several years to build and opened in 1972.
Source
Van Pelt, J., Crystal Mountain Founders Club, Crystal Mountain - Built by Skiers (1st Ed.), Citing excerpts from Chapter 6: Operations: Building and Managing at the Same Time, The Donning Company Publishers, Virginia (2012), (pp. 99-101)