RV7 Flight: Whitefish, Montana



A couple of weekends ago, we flew the RV-7 to Whitefish, Montana. In the top picture, the nose of our airplane is looking straight down the grass runway.


Whitefish Lake is on the outskirts of town, and probably 3-4 miles from the airport. If you look closely at the mountain, you will see a bunch of ski runs coming down it. That is Big Mountain Ski Resort. In the summer, you can hike on several hundred miles' worth of trails around the mountain.


In order to get to town from the airport, we pulled our mini-bikes out of the back of the airplane. But there is also a shed at the edge of the airport that is filled with bikes, free for use by pilots. It was a lot of fun to ride our bikes through the quiet little town where the limbs of apple trees, laden with ripe yellow apples, and one of the most wonderful scents known to man, spilled over the sidewalks.

Whitefish is a very small town with a definite Montana, frontier-like quality to it. It reminded me of Bend, Oregon and Sandpoint, Idaho, also resort towns--skiing in the winter, boating in the summer. All three are resplendent with restaurants and boutiques. At least two are the home of local micro-brews. I think the Deschutes Brewery in Bend probably has national distribution by now, making it less local than most micro-brewerys. 

I found this purse in one of the boutiques. It's a Mary Frances. No, I didn't buy the eye candy with the $275.00 price tag, but it was sure fun looking at all the Mary Frances purses and scarves. Wow.  


For lunch, we ate at the Piggyback Barbeque, home of Pig's Ass Porter. And no, neither my husband nor I had a brew, although we are huge fans of micro-brews. He will absolutely not break the 8-hour rule about drinking and flying.

It was a delightful Saturday. The day's only imperfection was that working so hard to ride my bike up over a steep overpass, and than sailing down afterwards, I fell off as I was crossing an intersection (embarrassing) and scraped my knee. I wasn't able to wash the blood off until a couple of hours later, after we'd flown home. Just to play it safe, I got a tetanus shot--and boy, do those babies hurt.

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