Page 70 - Flathead Living Fall 2013

68 FLATHEAD LIVING | FALL 2013
FOOD&DRINK AN EVENING OUT | STORY & PHOTOS BY JUSTIN FRANZ
Whitefish
Getting reacquainted with a familiar place
A fter two years of living in Whitefish, I thought I had experienced everything there
is in this mountain town perched at the top of the Flathead Valley. But when you think you’ve seen it all, take another look; what you’ll find might surprise you.
That’s exactly what happened when I hit the town on a Friday evening.
Whitefish is arguably the center of the Flathead’s culinary scene, with award-winning restaurants and more watering holes than you can hit in one night. But it wasn’t always like this. Whitefish began as a railroad town in 1904, when the Great Northern Railway moved its main rail line to the West Coast from Kalispell to the foot of Big Mountain. The reason? Trains had fewer grades to climb on their way
west.
But Whitefish didn’t remain a
rough-and-tumble railroad town for long. In the 1930s and 1940s people started coming to ski Big Mountain and enjoy Whitefish Lake and, since then, tourism has been a primary economic driver. Ironically, tourism is what often keeps locals away from some of Whitefish’s more popular restaurants and bars during the sum- mer – why wait in line when you can barbecue at home? But when the air chills, most of us reemerge and redis- cover the town we call home, which is exactly what my girlfriend Ashley and I did a few weeks ago.
Knowing we would be indulging in all of the food and drink Whitefish has to offer, we figured we should at the very least do something active before