Furniture races will be missed

I was sad to see that Big Mountain will no longer have the furniture race. Every long-term resident I spoke with simply said that it was a shame that the race is now gone.

Big Mountain's logic seems quite off if they are trying to have a more family-friendly event. If anyone was up there this Sunday, there were plenty of snowballs and a lot of full-frontal nudity for their new "family-friendly" event.

I watched as security gazed past one man with his pants at his knees. Fun is fun, but when kids are present, those kinds of actions are perverse. Changing the event did nothing.

The furniture race was uniquely different and had a history with the area. Big Mountain got national recognition for this event. And why would, as Mr. Cooke put it, we copy resorts back East?

And to top off the article, they announce that season passes have now increased $50. It seems Bill Foley and his underlings are trying to turn Big Mountain into just another ski area that cares about revenue and not the locals. This comes well predicted in the book A Downhill Slide, which references ski areas that are grabbed by people and corporations only concerned with the dollar signs and not the people nor the environment.

I think Big Mountain has done many things to encourage local families to get involved, but I see that trend changing quickly. My family loves this place partly because of the events that the mountain offers. Please don't go the way of Vail, Breckenridge or Jackson Hole.

Jonathan Trom

Whitefish