Vertical Feat: How A Retired School Teacher Smashed Big Mountain’s Boldest Skiing Record

It wasn’t until Michael Donnay encountered the most disagreeable skiing conditions he’d ever experienced at Whitefish Mountain Resort — bone-blasting windchill, rime ice, impenetrable fog, holiday crowds — that he finally found the confidence to declare his ambition to rip more laps down Big Mountain than anyone in the ski area’s history, or any other ski area’s for that matter.

By Donnay’s standards, “disagreeable” means slow, and while it’s counterintuitive to wring motivation out of discomfort, especially when pursuing a hobby that elicits such pure, unadulterated joy as skiing, his ability to shred dozens of laps despite the harsh conditions was just the boost of confidence he needed to chase Big Mountain’s boldest vertical record.

On April 6, when the chairlifts stopped spinning for the season and Donnay officially minted a new record of 10,347,920 feet of vertical descent — shattering the previous high mark of 8 million feet — he was satisfied that he’d given the project his all, and he couldn’t have been happier with the result.

“All ski days are fun days,” Donnay, 53, said. “But there were some tough days, like when the rime ice is forcing you to stop mid-lap to chip away the ice from your goggles just to get down safely. And then there was the fog. But generally I kind of thrive off the adversity. I enjoy the challenge. It’s what makes it memorable and it makes the outcome more rewarding.”

To put the outcome of Donnay’s recent ski season into perspective, his record-breaking descent of 10,347,920 feet amounts to skiing from the summit of Mount Everest to sea level 356 times. It equates to 4,653 chairlift rides, or spending 543 hours (22.6 days) suspended from a lift cable.

Attaining the lofty goal required Donnay to ski a near-perfect season — 123 days of bell-to-bell, chairlift-assisted skiing, extending from the season’s opener to closing day while logging a daily average of more than 84,100 vertical feet. The chairlifts needed to run close to flawlessly; any sustained mechanical malfunctions would have derailed his chances. He also couldn’t afford any glitches in the resort’s IT infrastructure that powers Big Mountain’s vertical program, which records a season-pass holder’s scanned chairlift rides and assigns each lap a fixed amount of vertical ascent. Each day, the summaries are posted to the resort’s website.

Most importantly, the early-season snowpack needed to be substantial enough to fast-track the opening of Big Mountain’s vaunted front-side terrain, the south-facing aspect featuring the most vertical drop, as well as the fastest fall lines between the top of the lift to its terminal.

With that in mind, it makes logical sense that Donnay set his sights on what many people thought was an unattainable goal after a miserable day of skiing (it’s also a revealing character trait). But at the end of that no good, very bad, rime-encrusted day — during which Donnay encountered every obstacle imaginable, including deep powder, which by noon skiers and riders had carved into even deeper trenches that decelerated his 4-minute descents — Donnay still managed to stack up more than 80,000 feet of vertical feet, amounting to 36 laps on Chair 4, the six-pack Snow Ghost Express that would serve as the 6-foot-6-inch-tall retired teacher’s primary mode of conveyance, both because of its ergonomics as well as its efficiency.

“That day included all the obstacles, and I still went over 80,000 feet,” Donnay said on a recent mid-April morning at a Whitefish coffee shop, reflecting on the harsh conditions that prompted him to chase the record. “And once I built a spreadsheet and crunched the numbers, I realized that not only could I very reasonably expect to beat the record, but 9 million or 10 million feet is attainable.”

Or, as a ski buddy told Donnay: “Don’t just beat the record; smash it.”

But first, about that previous record.

A decade ago, during the 2015-2016 winter, a 52-year-old Nebraska transplant arrived in Whitefish and, for the first time in 24 years, clicked into a pair of skis — some used Dynastars he bought at a local gear swap. It wasn’t until Christmas that Ken Jones even learned about the resort’s vertical program, and he proceeded to mount a Herculean vertical assault on Big Mountain. By the time the season ended, he’d tallied 8,058,144 vertical feet, or 1,526.16 miles, crushing the previous record of 5.61 million feet set by Tony Cooper in 2013.

To accomplish the feat, Jones skied 122 of that season’s 128 days, averaging 30 runs per day from first to last chair. On good days, he averaged 70,000 vertical feet, and on days when night skiing was an option, he typically hit 115,000 feet, skiing from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. while stopping only for bathroom breaks.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Fred Frost, 82, a dedicated Big Mountain skier who, with a total of 81,916,893 feet (15,614 miles), holds the overall record for most distance accumulated in the vertical program’s 21-year history.

Jones entered the next ski season determined to break his own record. Following a grueling off-season cross-training and conditioning regimen, Jones was on early-season pace to surpass the mark he’d set when a microburst storm converged on Big Mountain, creating whiteout conditions just as Jones descended Big Ravine at speed. He caught an edge, crashed and dislocated his shoulder, necessitating a trip to the hospital and a few days of rest. But then Jones resumed skiing for an additional eight days until, after amassing more than 1.3 million feet before the end of December, he dislocated his shoulder again while taking off his jacket, ending his season and requiring surgery.

Jones had flown too close to the sun, the old-timers reasoned.

They were wrong.

“When Ken Jones set his record, we thought no one would ever break it,” Frost said. “And then Michael came along and just destroyed it. His dedication was unbelievable.”

To hit his final tally of 10,347,920 vertical feet on Big Mountain, Donnay depended heavily on the Snow Ghost Express, which Whitefish Mountain Resort installed in advance of its 2022-2023 season. As Big Mountain’s only six-pack,  the high-speed chairlift ferries skiers from the Base Lodge to the top of Inspiration Ridge, a 2,224-foot ride that lasts seven minutes.

That’s if everything runs perfectly. And in a northwest Montana winter, there’s always the potential for something to go wrong.

That basic law of averages wasn’t lost on local skiers who rode the Snow Ghost Express during its inaugural year, when it earned the nickname “The Gambler” due to its frequent delays. The mechanical problems persisted into the following season, creating less-than-ideal conditions for vertical-seekers, a challenge that was further exacerbated by a bleak early-season snowpack that limited front-side terrain for much of December.

For Donnay, the Snow Ghost Express — which hadn’t yet been installed during Jones’ banner year — was a secret weapon that would give him the edge he needed to torpedo the vertical record and set a proud new standard.

But only if it was reliably functioning. By mid-January of 2024, the resort had ironed out the mechanical kinks on Chair 4, prompting Donnay, then in his fourth season as a Big Mountain season-pass holder with several first-place finishes in the vertical program’s rankings, to commit to riding the Snow Ghost Express exclusively.

“I wanted to see what I could do if I skied every day on Chair 4,” Donnay said. “By the end of that season I ended up with 7.7 million. I realized that even with such a rough start to the season, that despite the mechanical failures and the poor snowpack, that was still pretty close to Ken Jones’ 8 million, which we had always seen as unattainable. In our eyes, Ken was just on a whole other level.”

Based on Donnay’s calculations, which he based on his average daily vertical during the 2023-2024 ski season and meticulously ran the figures through a spreadsheet to make projections, it was a level that no longer seemed out of reach.

“At the end of last season when I made that spreadsheet, I decided I would only go for it if Chair 4 had no more issues, if the scanning guns had no more glitches — which was a problem that drove Fred Frost insane — and if I could stay healthy,” he said. “Under those circumstances I thought beating the record was really attainable.”

The final challenge was to convince his wife, Kerith. The couple had spent most of their adult lives working as international teachers, first in Prague, in the Czech Republic, and then in Taipei, Taiwan. They were accustomed to working during the school year and embarking on long-distance backpacking trips every summer. But, having bought property in Whitefish in 2012 and retired from the international school in 2019, it was time for the Donnays to embark on a new adventure — building their dream home. With Donnay’s spreadsheet requiring him to ski seven days a week for up to 11.5 hours per day, he wouldn’t have time to walk the dog or shovel snow off the roof of their mobile home, let alone begin work on a new house. He did attend Friday morning meetings with their home builder, which forced him to sacrifice between 25,000 and 35,000 feet per week.

It was a sacrifice Donnay said he was willing to make, and which was easier to stomach knowing he’d built up a buffer in December when the front-side terrain opened ahead of schedule.

“I’m going to do it one more time,” Donnay recalled telling his wife.

According to Kerith, who’d already watched her husband snatch first-place vertical finishes in 2023-2024 (7.7 million feet), 2022-2023 (5.7 million feet) and 2021-2022 (6.8 million feet), it was a concession she was willing to make, so long as it was a one-and-done affair.

“The other skiers called me the best ski wife ever, but I can’t imagine being the kind of wife that says you can’t chase something you love, and we have always had a mutual understanding when it comes to ski season,” Kerith said. “But this year was a little different because I knew that it was going to be every day, bell to bell. I knew I would have to go home early and exercise the dog. I couldn’t go meet my sister on a whim. And if Michael is chasing vert, we don’t ski together. So that was our agreement. He had to get it done, and get it out of his system.”

With that in mind, on the morning of April 2, when Donnay hit 10 million vertical feet, he confidently told Kerith: “I’m done.”

 He then proceeded to heap a few hundred thousand vertical feet on top of his record, just for good measure.

“It was kind of a relief,” Donnay said. “It’s wear-and-tear on the body. It’s a helluva lot of fun but you can’t ski like this forever. I’m inspired by guys like Fred [Frost] and Jim [Petersen] who ski every day. I just can’t ski like I’ve been skiing and hope to still be going in my 70s and 80s.”

“It will be nice to ski together and try some new runs with Kerith,” Donnay added. “I was rinsing and repeating and she likes a little more variety.”

Not only did Donnay’s path to 10 million feet require riding the same chairlift every day, but he also skied the same line, which he’d select early in the day depending on which runs had the fewest grooming irregularities, lowest crowd densities and most ideal conditions.

“In all my other years chasing vert, I’d ski the whole front side,” Donnay said. “But I found it was safer and more efficient to ski a sampling of runs — Big Ravine, Toni Matt, Corkscrew, Bench Run — and I would find the smoothest, safest, most efficient, least-crowded line. And then I would just rinse and repeat.”

Rinsing and repeating did not include bathroom breaks, while Donnay consumed all of his nutrition on the go, with a lunch sandwich, a dinner sandwich and his snacks tucked away in the pocket of his signature red jacket, which is now so worn and torn that he must retire it. He also didn’t drink any fluids during the day, reasoning that he wasn’t sweating to the extent he would on a long-distance backpacking trip, and the chairlift rides, which account for nearly two-thirds of his ski day, afforded him plenty of rest.

He alternated two pairs of Völkl skis, de-burring their edges each night with a diamond stone. But even with that maintenance, the tips and tails of his skis look as though they’ve been run through a planer machine.

It’s a strategy that Frost characterized as “insane.”

“He’s crazy,” Frost said of Donnay, with whom he’s developed a friendship, and even gifted Donnay his Skigee goggle wiper to combat the infamous Big Mountain fog and rime ice.

“I watched him all year and he was hitting his exact numbers just as he’d projected,” Frost, who finished the winter in 10^th place with 2,800,805 feet, said. “He had it all planned out. He’s worse than me. But he’s a really nice guy and we’re all proud of him.”

The new local record surpasses the Guinness World Record for the most vertical feet skied downhill in a single year by about 1.8 million feet. That record of 8,513,340 feet is held by Thomas Hart, of Utah. However, because Donnay didn’t independently track his vertical endeavor with a GPS device or smart phone app, such as Trace Snow, which allows skiers to track their vertical and ranks them against other users, he isn’t eligible. His reluctance to track his record-setting season is due in part to the fact that he’s never owned a smart phone. Although Donnay briefly owned a flip phone, he only had it for a week before he inadvertently ran it through the washing machine.

“I just don’t have the need to carry a small computer in my pocket,” Donnay said. “I have a laptop at home.”

The mechanical rhythm of Donnay’s ski season might strike the uninitiated skier as an attenuation of the sport’s simple pleasures. But neither the numbers nor the strategy that Donnay employed convey the intangible rewards he’s reaped during his five seasons at Big Mountain.

They don’t capture his burgeoning bond with Frost or Jim Petersen, the vertical program’s de facto gatekeeper who during Donnay’s inaugural season vetted him during a chairlift ride before “officially” inducting him into the program’s elite ranks.

“I knew I’d made it when I passed the ‘Jim Interview,’” Donnay said of Petersen’s assessment.

The mountain math also doesn’t include his friendship with Jason Robertson, whose obsession with the mountains drove him to summit all 234 listed summits in Glacier National Park, a project he pursued for 25 years before ticking off the final summit in 2021.

“Jason’s crazier than Michael,” Frost said. “One day Jason and his girlfriend got up at 2 a.m., went off ice climbing in the dark, climbed up Calf Robe Mountain to watch the sun rise, came down, and they were on Big Mountain skiing by noon. That’s not human.”

Yet there was Robertson, delivering a Thermos of hot cocoa to help fuel Donnay through the sub-zero windchills that buffeted Big Mountain’s night skiing. And it was Robertson, who has ranked second in the resort’s vertical program the past two ski seasons, who surprised Donnay with an oversized banner that read: “CONGRATULATIONS MICHAEL! 10 MILLION VERTICAL AND THE BEST SKI WIFE EVER!”

To Donnay, the quest to 10 million vertical feet wouldn’t mean as much without the cast of characters he’s met along the way. And while he’s been experiencing the kind of withdrawal that follows most sustained feats of endurance, he’s not questioning his decision to retire from the vertical program.

“Last year I felt was this prelude to something bigger. It was an R-and-D reconnaissance winter,” Donnay said of the 2023-2024 season when he set his goal. “I was refining and optimizing strategies. This year, I was executing those strategies. Now, it’s time to simply ski. And generally, skiing and sliding and gliding on snow does not get old.”

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