Pescado Blanco

57. Ski at least 8 resorts I’ve never been to before.

The ski season is quickly coming to an end here in Red Lodge.  This coming sunday April 11th will be our closing day for this season.  So before the season ended I wanted to visit at least one more resort off the goal of eight new places to ski.  My good friend Dawn and I decided to take a few days and visit our friends Katie and Cory up in Whitefish, MT for a long “weekend.”  (Like many people who work in tourism based industries, our weekends don’t actually fall on Saturday and Sunday.  I always have found it interesting to hear people in Red Lodge say things like “Its my Tuesday” on a Friday night.)

For those of you who don’t know, Whitefish, MT is part of the Flathead region near Flathead lake and Glacier National Park in the Northwest corner of Montana.  It really is another  beautiful region of this state that I have come to love.  It is also the home of Whitefish Mountain Resort.  So Dawn and I packed up our things on Sunday afternoon and made the 8-10 hour drive to northwestern Montana.  We made a few interesting stops along the way including the New Atlas Bar in Columbus, MT which apparently has the oldest continually operating liquor licence in the state as well as just about every animal you can imagine stuffed and mounted on the walls.  We also stopped for dinner near Flathead lake at a little bar called the Spinnaker.  The burgers were good but I found out after dinner  that this is one of those places where they like to be cute about labeling the bathrooms.  They were labeled inboard and outboard.  I correctly assumed that I am an outboard.

We finally got into Whitefish and caught up with Katie and Cory sometime around 11 Sunday night.  Monday morning we all slept in a bit and looked out the window to find it raining and the Mountain completely fogged in.  So we decided to visit the brewery in town instead.  We had a great leisurely lunch, tried the beer sampler, and relaxed.  Around 1pm we looked out the window and saw that the fog and lifted quite a bit so we decided to get in a few runs.  Of course by the time we got up to the mountain it was sort of raining again and the fog was pretty thick at the top of the mountain.  Even worse the wind was just howling.  So we skied a few runs and called it a day.

That night we had a fantastic dinner at a local mexican restaurant called Pescado Blanco which is spanish for Whitefish.  The food was great.  Dawn had Elk Chorizo tacos.  I’ve always like Elk meat and in a chorizo sausage was no exception.  I had the Pheasant enchiladas.  I’d never had pheasant before, not that I can remember anyway.  I was very pleasantly surprised and will gladly try it again sometime.  Katie had fish tacos and Cory had the pork tenderloin.  We all shared and all of the food was excellent.  We finished off the night by going to see the new Alice in Wonderland movie.  All told a very entertaining evening.

The next morning Katie, Dawn, and I went out a bit earlier and hit the slopes again.  There had been some new snow overnight and while the front side of the mountain was a sheer sheet of ice the back side had some absolutely excellent skiing.  We skied most of the day and really enjoyed the terrain.  I really look forward to getting back to Whitefish mountain in the next few years.

On the drive home, we again passed through Butte, Montana.  For those who aren’t familiar with it, Butte has a strong mining history and is now home to a major Superfund site.  (If you’re not familiar with the government’s Superfund program , it basically was intended to help deal with  environmental messes but provides all of the wrong incentives and usually ends up creating sites that are unusable and will never be cleaned up.)  A little bit west of Butte you will see this tower off of the interstate.

Every time I drive by it I half expect to see the Eye of Sauron open on top of it.  It hasn’t happened yet though.

14. Get a massage at least once each year.

I keep forgetting to mention the massage I got during my Bozeman trip in the middle of March.  I don’t know why I keep forgetting, it was wonderful.  Anytime I get a chance, which is not nearly enough, I try to get a message from my friend Jenny LePage.  Jenny is a former Outward Bound instructor and an all-around great person.  I tend to hold a lot of my stress in steel-like knots in my back, neck and shoulders.  Jenny recently moved into a new space for her business, Bozeman Massage Therapy.  The space is great. Jenny does great work, and I recommend it to anyone who is in or near Bozeman and wants a massage.

 

62. Watch or re-watch every movie that has won the best picture oscar since the year I was born (1975)

Gandhi (1982)- I saw this movie or at least parts of it when I was much younger, in middle school I think.  And I have to admit, that while I didn’t really remember much about the movie, Ben Kingsley in this movie is really the image I’ve always had of Mohandas Gandhi.  Looking at pictures of the actual man, the likeness between the two is actually quite striking.  More striking of course is the story of Gandhi.  It’s hard to imagine a leader like him in today’s world.  It’s hard to imagine anyone who could get Muslims and Hindus in Pakistan and India to set aside their hatred for each other as effectively, if only for a short time, as Gandhi did. 

I try to imagine one of today’s leaders using some of Gandhi’s methods and just can’t envision it.  I’m pretty sure that if George W. Bush or Barack Obama tried to effect change through a hunger strike, I think it would be dismissed as juvenile and inappropriate.  However, with Gandhi it was different.  I don’t know if it’s because he was a different sort of man or if it is becuase the world is a very different place.  I suspect it’s a bit of each.

The movie was moving and its 3 hours zipped right by.  I enjoyed both the story of the man and the the underlying messages of his philosophy and his impacts on the world.

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