Reward to stop graffiti

The staff of Whitefish Mountain Resort

To our fellow citizens of Whitefish and the Flathead Valley:

Recently, we noticed some rudimentary graffiti appearing on and around one of our chair lifts, in the skier tunnel on Home Again, and on one of the privately-owned condos along that same trail, along with some other vandalism of various sorts.

We took some photos, and it became obvious to us upon examination that it shared common elements with some of the graffiti that has appeared around downtown Whitefish lately.

Over the years, the resort has been the target of occasional vandalism, but it always seemed to be related directly to how the vandals felt about management changes, a new name, and so forth.

While it is always hard to deal with such displays of dissatisfaction, we are much more bothered by this most recent vandalism, for two reasons: First, because it does not seem to be motivated by any action by the resort or the city of Whitefish, and second, because what is being written is not related to the resort but to the person or people writing it.

In other words, it appears that whoever is doing this is taking personal pride in having done it. They’re showing off.

Graffiti and other vandalism such as this reflect badly on a town whose citizens care. Whitefish is a beautiful place to live. We take pride in our community, and we would like to keep it that way.

Therefore, we are offering a 2009-2010 winter season pass as a reward for substantive information that leads the Whitefish Police Department or the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office to an arrest in conjunction with this graffiti. If you have any information or even a hunch, please contact the proper authorities.

Of course, if you’d rather not but you can manage to convince whoever is responsible to stop, we’d appreciate that as well.

Places like Whitefish are rare, even if it is hard to realize that if it is all you know. Thank you for your help in keeping it beautiful.