Good news of 2016

Whitefish is a community that gets things done and where good things happen.

Volunteers are always pitching in to work on the next project that benefits the community and donors are right there making sure those projects have the needed funding.

Students are often accomplishing amazing things inside and out of the classroom. And some stories are just plain fun.

The year 2016 was no different. Here’s a look back at some of the good things that happened in Whitefish this year.

Year after year, volunteers and donors continue to assist the Whitefish Trail. Almost 300 volunteers contributed 1,818 hours of labor to the trail system this year. According to the Whitefish Legacy Partners, that work has a value of over $27,000. Those volunteer efforts include 14 Adopt-A-Trail crews, nine Adopt-A-Trail sponsors, 32 educational events, and eight school field trips on the trail.

A longterm housing facility for homeless high school students opened in the spring. Sparrow’s Nest Northwest Montana, a nonprofit, opened the house after months of work and fundraising. Volunteers worked diligently and the community made donations to ensure that the home would open to provide a house for up to five students who need a safe place to sleep at night.

A fundraiser in December continued to raise funds for the effort by asking volunteers to obtain pledges for spending the night in the cold.

In February, the Whitefish Chamber of Commerce awarded several community members for their hard work. Dr. Ron Miller was honored with the Great Whitefish lifetime achievement award for his service not only as a physician, but as a long-standing volunteer in the community. Miller practiced medicine in the community for 40 years before retiring from Glacier Medical Associates in 2011.

While the project was much more of a topic in 2015, early February saw the final signing of the conservation easement for Haskill Basin. The five-year effort to keep future development out of Whitefish’s main watershed was finalized when The Trust for Public Land, city of Whitefish, F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber, and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks closed on the 3,000-acre conservation easement in the forestland east of town.

Whitefish students looked to create a better community and world with their ideas. Four Whitefish High School students pitched their vision to the city for a bike share program that would allow residents and tourists to park their cars at the high school and then bike around town. Whitefish Middle School students, as part of a Student Council project, pushed for the creation of an education campaign about the health risks and costs of idling vehicles.

Whitefish firefighters Sarah Peterson, Cole Hadley and Joe Rendahl participated in the Scott Firefighter Stairclimb competition in Seattle. The firefighters were part of a team that included Kalispell firefighters, and earned third at the annual event that raises money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The firefighters had to run as fast they could up 69 flights of stairs in 60 pounds of firefighting gear while wearing a breathing apparatus.

In a fun promprosal, Whitefish High School student Travis Catina in March went over the top when he asked Allie Schultz a question — will you stick with me at prom? He applied roughly 4,000 sticky notes to her car in a promprosal. With some help, Catina spent about four hours sticking the notes to her car. Schultz, of course, said yes.

“Nice Day!” The simple greeting forever connected to hall of fame skier Martin Hale was memorialized in March with a named run at Whitefish Mountain Resort. Slalom Run off of Chair 2 has been renamed Nice Day to honor Hale’s years of support for youth ski racing in the Flathead Valley. Hale was a national junior champion ski racer, and later a coach, mentor and longtime ski school director at Big Mountain. He was inducted into the Flathead Ski Heritage Center hall of fame with the inaugural class of 2014. Hale was known to say “Nice day!” to skiers who came to town and got off the train in horrible weather.

The Whitefish High School senior class of 2016 proved their smarts when a bevy of them were heading to top-flight universities. In May, seniors with the class had plans to head off to some of the most elite institutes of higher education in the country — Harvard, Standford, Princeton, Duke, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Middlebury, NYU, and Pepperdine, just to name a few. According to guidance counselor Barb Mansfield, while it’s not uncommon for Whitefish grads to attend prestigious universities, the sheer number of graduates in the class reaching those levels was totally unprecedented.

Big improvements to Whitefish city parks continued over the summer and fall. It was the second year in a row that the city of Whitefish continued to upgrade its parks and recreation facilities. Major projects were scheduled for Memorial Park, Riverside Park, Armory Park and at the Roy Duff Memorial Armory.

“We’ve never really done this many projects in such a short time that people get to enjoy,” Parks and Recreation Director Maria Butts said. “The parks staff really wants to make sure things are nice and we keep the community beautiful.”

Whitefish was generous again this year, donating almost $1.5 million to the Whitefish Community Foundation’s annual Great Fish Community Challenge. The two-month campaign began in July and raised a total of $1,486,526. The community foundation distributed the money in October to 40 participating nonprofits. The challenge receive 2,420 contributions totaling $1.15 million. The foundation match amounted to 55 percent on the first $15,000 raised by each nonprofit, for a total match of just over $322,523.

Dwayne and Marlene Becker donated a passel of pumpkins from their garden to the North Valley Food Bank. Just in time for Halloween, the Beckers dropped off 45 pumpkins to be given away.