Record snow 'lifts' ski resorts
Inter Lake editorial
For our local ski areas, this has been a big year for snow.
It has been record-breaking, in fact, at both Blacktail Mountain Ski Area and Whitefish Mountain Resort.
Over the weekend, both ski areas passed their record levels for snow.
Big Mountain surpassed the previous season snowfall mark of 406 inches set in 1996-97; Blacktail reached 120 inches of settled snow at midmountain, the deepest snow the Lakeside ski area has measured since it opened in 1998.
And the snow keeps on falling. As of Tuesday, the season snowfall atop Big Mountain is now at 423 inches (there's a settled base at the summit of 140 inches) and Blacktail's snow depth is 122 inches.
Those numbers add up to a lot of powder days on the ski hills and a lot of happy skiers.
That means that there is, obviously, more than enough snow to get the two ski areas through the end of their ski seasons - April 6 for Whitefish Mountain Resort and April 13 for Blacktail Mountain.
A unique piece of the past came back home on Friday.
A 1920s S-2 train engine was taken from the Flathead County Museum site to Somers, where it used to work in the Somers railroad-tie plant.
Its new place in its old home is a short section of tracks across the street from Del's Bar.
Thanks to county Commissioner Dale Lauman for arranging the return of the vintage locomotive to the place it belongs.
Another piece of the Flathead Valley past is about to be closed down for good.
The last days of the venerable Old Steel Bridge are at hand. The bridge that has spanned the Flathead River near Kalispell for 114 years is to be replaced by a modern span in an $8.7 million project that should be finished by summer 2009.
As preconstruction work (including a temporary stoplight at Fairmont Road and Montana 35) is implemented, the Old Steel Bridge will close down forever. The earliest expected date for the bridge closure is April 8.
After that there's only one way across the river - the Montana 35 bridge - while the new bridge is being built.