In December 1947, Winter Sports, Inc. — a public company built on community shares — opened Big Mountain, a ski resort cleared and constructed in part by locals who donated their own labor to make it happen. That fact sits at the center of what Whitefish is. The Whitefish Lake Ski Club had started laying groundwork a decade earlier, in 1937, with cabins and trails. After the war, local people pushed through an all-weather mountain road and raised a T-Bar lift. The mountain hosted the U.S. Alpine Championships in 1949. Olympic champion Tommy Moe learned to ski here. Renamed Whitefish Mountain Resort in 2007, it runs today inside the Flathead National Forest with Glacier National Park to the east. The town didn't wait for outside capital to build something worth having. It built the thing itself.
