(Photo: Kevin Watson)

By Kevin Watson

FEATURE PROFILE

Whitefish Mountain Resort keeping things fresh for snow lovers

Feb 23, 2020 | 10:59 AM

Skiers and snowboarders in this part of the world have an avalanche of choices when it comes to finding mountainous terrain to explore. However, if you’re looking to venture south of the border a 6-hour drive will take you to Whitefish Mountain Resort.

Known as Big Mountain when it opened in 1947, the name was changed in 2007 to Whitefish Mountain Resort. Even though it took 60 years to make a name change, the privately-owned ski hill doesn’t just sit around and wait for the snow to fall, they are constantly changing and improving the experience whether that be big improvements or just a minor detail here and there.

Public Relations Manager Riley Polumbus says if you’ve skied Whitefish, but it’s been a few years you will notice some differences.

(Photo: Kevin Watson)

“Sometimes they’re really big things like moving chair five or a few years ago, adding the Flower Point chair, but we also do a lot of little improvements. Because we have seen more people, we’ve been breaking skier visit records every year we added a new sign at the top of our hill that’s electronic and indicates which parking lots are open and which ones are closed, so little things like that, that help the day.”

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People are encouraged to make suggestions on what they would like to see and one of the main issues was more bathrooms at the Summit House, so when it was renovated a couple years ago they added more stalls and put them right by the front doors for convenience.

The Montana mountain allows for night skiing Friday and Saturday and features 3000 skiable acres from beginner to families to seasoned shredders.

“Once you get up to the Summit you spread out and you have 360 degrees of skiing. You can go West and go into Hellroaring Basin, you can go East and go down into the North Bowl East Rim area or you can go North side which has the best snow all the time.

It was my first time skiing the mountain and the snow under my boards felt different than what I was used to. Polumbus says that’s their “special recipe.”

“The ingredients include having the jet stream come in from the Pacific Northwest, which brings us moisture and having the Arctic air flow in from Canada which cools it off. Having that combination is the right recipe to get snow that is nice and dry, but not too dry. That allows it to stick around longer than really dry snow does and also allows for it not to be as heavy as the wet snow is. When you get a couple inches of snow it sticks and then you get another couple inches and even though you only got 4 inches it skis more like 6 to 8 inches because it’s bonding to its previous layers.

The other secret, Polumbus says, is the clouds and depending on the day you could find yourself skiing in a cloud and not just because you stayed too long in the Bierstube.

A stop at The Brierstube is a must after a long day on the hill.

“The clouds help preserve the snow and help give us those awesome “snow ghosts.’”

The snow ghosts are another scary cool weather phenomenon.

“There’s moisture in the air and with the wind and the cold it becomes super cooled droplets of moisture that just bond to the first thing they can bond to. They bond to the top of the lifts, buildings and trees. The cool thing is when they bond to the trees, they tend to build on more to the trees and they start to bend over and form lots of shapes and different branches will do different things so they can make really cool shapes.”

The infamous Snow Ghosts of Whitefish

There’s still a lot of ski season left as closing day isn’t until April 5. The ski village features loads of options for lodging as you can Shred and Bed for as low as $89 U-S per person, per night including lodging, lift ticket and breakfast Monday to Thursday.

You can learn more by visiting www.skiwhitefish.com