Remember This? Big Mountain Before It Was Whitefish Mountain Resort

If you still call it Big Mountain, you’re in good company. So does the map.

Winter Sports, Inc. formed in 1947 as a public company owned by community shareholders, and it opened Big Mountain that December 14. In early March 1949 the hill hosted the U.S. Alpine Championships, and 16-year-old Andrea Mead of Vermont, a future Olympic champion, won all three women’s titles. At sixteen. Most of us were just trying to get through driver’s ed.

It started with a single T-bar. Chairlifts came in 1960 and 1968. Tommy Moe learned to ski and race there, with his father on the ski patrol, and won Olympic downhill gold in 1994. If you were in Whitefish that winter, you remember.

For decades the company belonged to a lot of small shareholders, so plenty of people in town could look up at the hill and say they owned a little of it. In 2004, when Winter Sports proposed a reverse stock split, about 664 shareholders of record, roughly 72 percent of them, held fewer than 150 shares each. Another split in late 2006 was expected to shrink that to 40 to 50 shareholders, and it cashed out many small local holders. Then in June 2007, after Bill Foley became the majority shareholder of Winter Sports, Inc., the resort got a new name: Whitefish Mountain Resort.

The mountain itself still says Big Mountain on the map, which makes the old name easy to keep. Nobody on the chair is going to correct you.

Still got a share certificate in a drawer somewhere? Tell us what you remember. The T-bar, the winter of ‘94, or the first time you heard the new name.