By Molly Miller
I broke into this winter’s ski season at Whitefish Mountain Resort in Whitefish, Montana, forever known to locals as Big Mountain. This marks my tenth year of skiing at Big Mountain, and I hope my inaugural outing of the season is a portent of more good ski days to come.
Seven inches of fresh powder and two brand-new high-speed quads greeted me and my sister as we reached the mountain around noon. (I’m over my days of “first one on and last one off the lift” attitudes and ski more for pleasure than performance.) As is typical here, there were virtually no lift lines, even though it was Sunday and only the second weekend the resort has been open this year. I demoed some Rossignol 160s that sliced through the soft powder like a knife in warm butter but held their edge soundly through every turn. Though my technique was rusty at first, by the third or fourth run I was able to disengage my mind and just fall into a rhythm of muscle memory. The rest of the day was pure pleasure.
We stuck to the lower slopes initially, which are just steep and long enough to pick up some good speed but are wide enough to let you take it easy if you feel like moseying. After lunch, we headed to the top of the mountain and off to the backside. Here the runs cut though the woods and over varied terrain, taking their time reaching the lift below. It’s so quiet and still back there, it’s like skiing in a dream. As the lift returned us to the mountaintop, the afternoon sun burst out to reveal the massive peaks of Glacier Park to the North and East and the broad Flathead Valley extending southward to Flathead Lake, the largest freshwater lake in the West (even bigger in circumference than Lake Tahoe, but not as deep). As we took Big Ravine downhill—a “thigh burner” of a relentless descent from the crest—we gazed the beauty of Whitefish Lake shimmering below.
For the last run of the day, we circumnavigated the resort on an easy and very fun trail called Home Again, which winds through the woods, crosses two roads on bridges, snakes through tunnels, and finally ends up at the day lodge at the base. As I pulled off my boots, I had that wonderful mixed feeling of exhilaration and exhaustion—telltale signs of a satisfying ski day.
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