Whitefish Mountain Resort president starts day on the slopes

On a powder day on Big Mountain, skiers can find Whitefish Mountain Resort president Nick Polumbus enjoying runs such as Connie’s Coulee and Picture Chutes in the Hellroaring Basin, perhaps humming a Willie Nelson or Ray Charles song that he has stuck in his head from his drive up the mountain.

He also enjoys skiing the gladed runs on the mountain’s north side.

“First five years I worked here, every day that I went skiing the very first run I took was to the left or right of Black Bear in the trees,” said Polumbus in a recent interview. “Always.”

It was while skiing in his youth in Loveland, Colorado, where Polumbus grew up, that he had the realization that he wanted to work in the ski industry.

When he went to college to study communications, he made sure to schedule his classes so that he could always have a few weekdays off with friends to hit the slopes.

After undergrad, he went to work at Killington Resort, a popular ski area in Vermont, where Polumbus says he learned about the kind of people that work in the ski industry, the people he has chosen to surround himself with for over 25 years.

“You get a lot of like-minded folks,” said Polumbus. “People who [seek] the outdoors and winter activity. It takes a certain type of person to embrace the cold and snow — to hunker down and enjoy that and thrive. You end up with a bunch of people with strong character.”

That wasn’t all that Polumbus picked up in his time on the East Coast. As a big sports fan, it was at Killington, where Polumbus worked getting his master’s degree that Polumbus started his love for the Boston Red Sox.

“When I started working at Killington, I quickly realized that in the summertime, if you didn’t have an opinion on the Red Sox or Yankees then you had nothing to talk about,” Polumbus said.

These days he spends his free time watching baseball and hockey, and has caught a few World Cup matches with his sons, all of whom are high school aged and accomplished athletes.

Writing on his personal blog, Polumbus described sports as his “popular culture filter of choice.”

He cares very much about education, too. Polumbus previously served 12 years, including time as chairperson, on the Whitefish School Board. Serving on the board changed Polumbus’ view of what matters most in education, and what he values as a parent.

Now, he places more importance on students “learning how to learn,” which he thinks will set students up for success in a broad variety of pursuits, and less on traditional benchmarks of academic achievement.

“I don’t care about [grades] as much as I’d maybe would have otherwise,” said Polumbus. “I’m way more concerned about their character and their growth mindset.”

POLUMBUS MOVED to Whitefish from Vermont in 2007, and started as the resort’s director of communications and marketing. He was drawn to the same spirit he had found with his coworkers in Vermont, as well as the affordability of raising a family in town, especially when compared with the ski towns he was familiar with in Colorado.

“I didn’t think I’d ever be able to afford it,” Polumbus said, referring to settling down in a Colorado ski town. “I thought it would be a grind. And so that’s why this [town] was so appealing to me.”

In 15 years in that role, Polumbus picked up a few leadership lessons from his predecessor Dan Graves, including delivering tough news in a timely and professional manner.

“He had a saying about ‘not leaving old fish in the refrigerator,’ because the longer you leave it there it just smells worse and worse,” Polumbus said of Graves. “Just deal with tough news as quickly as you would with good news. That’s helped me.”

Going into his second winter at the helm, Polumbus has overseen the installation of the resort’s newest chairlift, The Snow Ghost Express. The lift will be the mountain’s largest by capacity, holding up to six people at a time.

He expects the new “six pack” chair to clear up some of the congestion that can build up at Chair One and Chair Six, and is scheduled to begin operations in December.*

As well as the redistribution of skiers on the terrain, Polumbus is also excited that the new lift will make more terrain accessible for beginner skiers.

Polumbus wants to be clear that the resort is not investing just to catch up with the mega resorts in Colorado, California and elsewhere, and that while the new lift will be state of the art, the resort has chosen to forgo some of the bells and whistles.

“We did a ‘six-pack’ because it was right from a skiers per hour perspective,” he said. “A lot of places might put in an ‘eight-pack’ and put a heated bubble and wifi on it just to say they did it.”

“Here in Whitefish, we like our six-packs cold,” he added.

Polumbus is concerned that other resorts have lost track of what’s important in the industry, at the risk of alienating a growing segment of skiers.

“It’s really easy for resorts of our size, middle of the road, to play the ‘Vail game,’” said Polumbus. “A lot of places get sucked into jacking up the prices and then discounting them, or jack up [day ticket] prices and drive people to the [multi-resort] pass. We’ve decided not to play that game.”

When thinking about his legacy as president, Polumbus thinks less about lifts and lodges, but wants to be remembered for creating a positive workplace culture, something he believes will end up benefiting the guest experience.

“I want people to look back at their time working here and say ‘Yeah, that was fun. I felt cared for and taken care of, I felt rewarded,’” Polumbus said.

“We have good smart people around, we just want to make sure they feel like they’re enabled to do their job effectively. I think if we can get that right, the rest of everything takes care of itself.”

*This paragraph has been updated.

Reporter Adrian Knowler can be reached at aknowler@dailyinterlake.com or 758-4407.