The Ghosts of Big Mountain: Tree Skiing in the Snow

Whitefish Mountain Resort now offers more than three thousand acres of skiable terrain, about ninety named runs, and an average annual snowfall of around three hundred inches. But the feature that has defined the mountain's reputation is not its size or its vertical. It is the trees.

Whitefish Mountain is known throughout the skiing world for tree skiing through stands of snow-loaded Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir. When heavy snowfall coats the trees, the boughs bend under the weight and each tree becomes a distinctive white shape. In the fog and flat light that often settles on the mountain during heavy snow, the coated trees take on human proportions, vaguely figure-shaped, standing in the forest like a crowd of silent watchers.

Skiers call them the snow ghosts, and skiing through them has become the mountain's signature experience. The mountain receives enough snow, and cold enough temperatures, that the ghost effect lasts much of the winter season. The resort that started in nineteen forty seven with a single T-bar lift has gone through ownership changes over the decades as Winter Sports Inc.

eventually shrank its shareholder base and a private investor became the majority owner. But the culture of the place, a ski mountain with a small-town character, built by and for the Flathead Valley rather than by an outside developer, has persisted in the way people talk about skiing here. The ghost trees are still there every winter, the same trees they were skiing through in the days of the Hell-Roaring Ski Club.