On any winter day at Whitefish Mountain Resort, it’s common to see a handful of people making the trek up the mountain. While a community of locals enjoy uphill travel, particularly its suffer for fun aspect, most people find it unfathomable. 

Some uphill enthusiasts enter ski mountaineering, or skimo, races that require skinning uphill, boot packing and skiing downhill. The term skinning comes from the nylon material on the bottom of the skis that grip the snow, allowing the skier to travel uphill without sliding. 

When high school art teacher, Claire Kniveton, and her husband, Burket, arrived in Whitefish in 2011 and began skinning the Big Mountain, they found it was a great way to meet people.  

One of the first people they met was Ben Parsons, an elite ski mountaineering and mountain biking athlete, who was instrumental in bringing the sport of skimo to Whitefish Mountain Resort and for keeping it there. Parsons died in an avalanche in 2017 while backcountry skiing in Glacier National Park. 

“Ben created this really amazing community of skimo racing here,” Kniveton said, adding that people skinning up his namesake route, the Benny Up, feel his energy, camaraderie and pure love for the activity. 

“Sometimes when I'm skinning ... I'll feel this little weird push on the back of my ski, almost like someone's coming up behind you and like tapping your ski with the front of their ski,” she said. “It just reminds me of Ben out there [saying], ‘You're doing this! This is awesome!’ and he would've been so excited.” 

Most folks skinning up the Big Mountain are less concerned with speed than with the experience. 

“We're all doing the same thing, fast, slow,” said Tara Brown, teacher at Fairmont Egan School. “You're all suffering together and people are typically pretty friendly and chat a little bit as you're going by somebody or getting passed. So that's a nice feeling.” 

Brown and Kniveton belong to a group of women who lightheartedly call themselves the Slaydies. While they are more advanced and more proficient than most, they still embody the friendly nature of the sport.  

Kniveton said the Slaydies began when a couple teachers decided to skin once a week after work. 

"Then other people that we know kind of joined in and so there's usually about five or six of us every Wednesday that skin the mountain,” Kniveton said of the group that also competes in the resort’s skimo race series. “It's our social life. It's just become a great community of people that are really close and you know we support each other and have a lot of fun.” 

The social aspect of the activity is a big draw for the women. Kniveton said while some people like to go to a bar or get their nails done, the Slaydies meet on the mountain to skin. In the summer, they mountain bike up the Summit Trail or go for a run. 

Another factor that makes skimo attractive to this group is that it gets them outdoors during the long, dark winters of Northwest Montana. 

“Winters are hard here. The majority of our winter is fog and 20 degrees and it’s dark,” Kniveton said. “The first couple months of our Wednesday nights we were bringing our head lamps out for the ski down.” 

Brown said she hopes others will give skimo a try because it can help with dark moods that can come with the dark days. 

“It's just something to do in the winter that can maybe lift your spirits,” she said. 

Fellow Slaydie and endurance gravel cyclist Rachel Desimone added that skimo is a great way to cross train for other activities like biking and running. 

“It provides this amazing opportunity to get in lots of hours going uphill at an endurance pace to suffer through and get that kind of fitness for the summer activities,” she said. 

Desimone appreciates the suffering of the sport along with the unpredictable environmental factors she may encounter in a race, like extreme cold, wind and zero visibility. 

“During the Whiteout this year, I went through three different sets of skins,” she said of the annual skimo race at Whitefish Mountain Resort. “For some reason, none of my skins would really stick and I was sticking them in my shirt in order to try to melt off the snow and ice between laps. 

“But it's more than just the suffering, it's like it's the environment, the unknown,” she added. 

Brown calls her love of going uphill an addiction. 

"It’s something that I really crave and I really want to go do and sometimes when I'm doing it, I'm like, ‘Oh, this kind of sucks. Why do I keep coming back for more?’” Brown admitted. “But when you’re done ... you feel great again and want more.” 

Brown skins up Big Mountain several times a week, often completing multiple laps. She and her husband, Jeff, plan to participate in DREAM’s Shred Fest fundraiser in March. Last year, she skied seven laps for the event and will go for eight this time around. 

“I'll say it's a long day of suffering and fun,” Brown said. “The second lap is just as hard as the fifth lap. They never get easier.” 

Jeff joined Chance Cooke and Janelle Smiley for the DREAM fundraiser last year and completed 11 laps on the Benny Up trail in 10 hours, a feat that leaves elite athletes and weekend warriors alike gobsmacked. 

Kniveton said she finds her rhythm and settles in during races.  

“It's hard but it's fun and my lungs feel like they're going to explode at the end of the race,” Kniveton said. “If I went any faster, I'd be redlining it, so I'm going as fast as I can to make it comfortable and to make it so I'm not collapsing." 

Many uphillers grow to enjoy the feeling that comes with suffering for fun, finding that enduring the pain is a case of mind over matter. Kniveton and Brown said part of the appeal may be due to the endorphins that come from kicking it into high gear. Desimone suggested the sport has a meditative quality. 

“You feel alive,” Kniveton said. “You feel like you're really breathing in the air you need to keep moving.” 

Many ski resorts don’t allow uphill traffic. Kniveton said Parsons remains a key reason Whitefish Mountain Resort keeps its uphill policies. 

“They know how much of a legacy he left and how much of a community that relies on that,” she said.  

The Benny Up route is 1.4 miles long with 2,052 feet of elevation gain. 

The quickest ascent of the Benny Up at this year’s Whiteout race was a blistering 26:03 by the long-course winner, Jeff Mogavero. 

Even if it takes longer to summit the Big Mountain, the benefits of the misunderstood sport of skimo are the same. 

“Sometimes, I do think I'm a little crazy for loving the uphill,” Kniveton said. “I just feel so much better. It makes me a better person, a better mom, a better teacher.”