Resort sets new mark for New Year's Day skier visits
A trio of skiers follow Maggie Voisin down Hellroaring off Chair 2 during Whitefish Mountain Resort's annual Ski With Maggie day. (Daniel McKay/Whitefish Pilot)
Whitefish Mountain Resort kicked off the new year with a new daily record. An estimated 7,400 skiers hit the slopes on Wednesday, Jan. 1, making it the busiest New Year’s Day ever at the ski resort.
The week between Christmas and News Year’s is typically one of the busiest stretches for the resort. The top day last week was Saturday, Dec. 28, with 7,643 skier visits.
Resort spokeswoman Riley Polumbus said that overall the traffic between Dec. 25 and Jan. 1 was down slightly from last year. Christmas week for the 2018-19 season had three days top the 8,300 skier-visits mark. The busiest day ever at the resort was recorded Dec. 28, 2016 with 8,601 visits.
On Thursday the resort touted a settled base of 66 inches at the summit of Big Mountain, with 95 named runs open for skiing. The ski area had received 17 inches of powder snow over the past week.
The resort tallied a record 384,000 skier visits in the 2018-19 ski season. This year, a record 11,500 season passes were sold.
Whitefish Mountain Resort was named the No. 3 overall ski resort in SKI Magazine’s 2019-20 reader poll.