Trust Fall
IT WAS SNOWING IN WHITEFISH. Again. For eight days straight, a relentless February storm had been blanketing Montana in white, adding 45 inches to the snowbanks of what would be Whitefish Mountain Resort’s second best winter in the last two decades.
Just as the lifts started to spin, the cloak of gray fog gave way to a rarely seen cobalt blue sky over 6,817-foot Big Mountain. The shaken snow globe had finally settled. Temperatures hovered near 20 degrees at the summit, preserving deep pockets of powder among the gladed larch trees bending beneath the weight of thick rime.
It was the kind of day that made Eliana Langer want to move to a ski town. That morning, she was on the mountain by 8 a.m. She zipped into her green jacket and waited to meet her party at the bottom of the lift. With 9 more inches overnight, upper-mountain conditions looked perfect, but Langer wouldn’t be going more than 150 yards from the base area. Instead, she’d be spending the day wrangling three 4-year-old girls through their half-day ski lesson. Making her own turns would have to wait.
A 23-year-old recent college graduate who grew up in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Langer is one of Whitefish Mountain’s 125 ski instructors hired each winter to teach more than 8,000 lessons to children and adults. A petite brunette with a warm smile, she is friendly and smart and unshakably patient. For the first winter of her post-college life, instead of pounding the pavement at a
