Whitefish: Lake, Mountain, Gateway

Whitefish, Montana is a mountain town that has accumulated identities over more than a century and kept all of them. It sits in the Flathead Valley below the wall of Glacier National Park, beside a large natural lake, at the foot of a mountain that turned out to be perfect for skiing. It is small, under ten thousand people, but it has become one of the premier outdoor recreation towns in the American West.

The lake is the town's most immediate geography. Whitefish Lake is about six miles long and less than a mile and a half wide, deep and cold and framed by the Whitefish Range to the north. Its waters drain south through the Whitefish River toward the Flathead River.

The lake was the reason the first non-Indigenous settlers came here in the late eighteen hundreds, for the fish in its water and the timber surrounding its shores. The Kootenai, Pend d'Oreille, and Bitterroot Salish peoples had already been here for thousands of years. The Great Northern Railway rerouted its main line through here in nineteen oh four and shifted everything.

The railroad moved its Flathead Valley division point from Kalispell to Whitefish in nineteen oh four, and the town was incorporated the following year. Loggers came, and the stumps that gave the town its first nickname accumulated across the cleared land. Then in nineteen forty seven, a group of returning veterans and local entrepreneurs opened a ski resort on the mountain above town they called Big Mountain.

Whitefish has been a ski town ever since. The railroad still runs through the center of town. Amtrak's Empire Builder stops here daily on its run between Chicago and Seattle, and on the platform you can watch passengers board who are heading into Glacier National Park to the east.

The lake is still cold and clear. The mountain still fills with skiers from Christmas through April. All three identities, lake town, rail town, ski town, are still operating at once.