March 16, 2007
Crushing on Montana's Big Mountain
Sandy MacDonald READ TIME: 4 MIN.
Sometimes you fall in love with a mountain. You don't mean to; it just happens. And then you have no choice but to commit to a costly, inconvenient, time-consuming, long-distance commuter relationship.
A couple of years ago, I got seduced by the or
generally requires a stopover and eats up a good part of a day. However, Big Mountain, at 3,000 skiable acres, is aptly named. It just as easily deserves the title of Fun Mountain - or, as I like to call it when transported by tenderness, "My Blue Heaven."
Western mountains can sometimes intimidate, but not my beloved. It's huge, to be sure, with plentiful challenges built in - so many cliffs and chutes and glades, often all intermixed, that an extreme skier wouldn't even need to venture out of bounds to get the adrenaline pumping. However, the big draw, for those of us permanently arrested in the intermediate stage of prowess, is a seemingly endless array of blue runs - and not the vanilla boulevards typical of big resorts, but tilted, meandering trails screwy as a funhouse mirror.
You'd be hard pressed to find a trail here limited to a single fall line, or one so predictable, it had to be designed by committee. Instead, the trails follow the logic of the sprawling peaks, and if that means a trail that wanders off to the back of the beyond, like 3-mile-long Hell Fire, so be it. Ptarmigan Bowl, a perfect funnel shape, is positioned for optimal grandstanding in front of the chairlift. Your best bets on a bright spring day (when welcome sun can unfortunately render the snow the consistency of Elmer's Glue) are the north side runs, ranging from true double-blacks (super-steep, tree-strewn moguls) to the kind of single black - precipitous but brief - that can provide an instant boost to an intermediate's ego. Kodiak, for example, is one of those convex slopes that appear to have no bottom, until you're sailing over the crest. There's even a natural half-pipe, George's Gorge, running alongside the lift: should you freak out, it's easy enough to flip out.
Big Mountain, my winter paramour, will be celebrating its 60th birthday next December, and in celebration some lifts will get shifted, so as to consolidate the base area, which currently is a hodgepodge of all those decades' worth of facilities and lodgings. The traditionalist's choice is the slopeside
Another enticing lodging option, a ten-minute drive to the foot of the mountain road, is the brand-new
A popular destination in "downtown" Whitefish is the Cajun-inflected
Alterna-Mountains
Should you tire of Big Mountain (I can't imagine why),
In Missoula, which is located about 75 miles farther south (a negligible distance by western standards), the
We spoiled adults found ourselves quite smitten with Missoula's
Another 90 miles south of Missoula, in Sula,
Sandy MacDonald (www.sandymacdonald.com) is a travel writer and theatre critic based in New York, Cambridge, and Nantucket.