But, as the New York Times recently profiled, the resort for rich people has charged back during the last two years, selling nearly $1 billion in real estate. It wasn't too long ago that we wrote a piece for Skiing Magazine needling The Yellowstone Club for its disastrous management practices that led it to declare bankruptcy. Build a house here and you can ski with Bill Gates and the rest of the uber rich. It's private, but anybody can join, provided that they buy a piece of real estate and build a house-something that, in the Yellowstone Club-averages about $9 million these days. The Moonlight terrain doesn't bring anything too notable along with it, but it does help to even further spread out people and crowds, so skiers on snow days have even more room to powder hunt.Īlso bumping up against Big Sky is a resort that's now anything but bankrupt: The Yellowstone Club. Unlike some resorts, a long green run at Big Sky doesn't translate to "a cat track that slashes across the mountain with a sheer drop on one side." Big Sky has the cruisers your kids dream about.īig Sky recently folded in all the area that once encompassed the now-defunct Moonlight Basin Ski Resort, giving it 5,750 acres of skiable terrain in-bounds, pushing it past Vail as the largest in North America behind Whistler-Blackcomb. Many Rockies' resorts are short on long, mellow cruisers that give children ample opportunities to explore the woods and shoot across the run in either direction, but Big Sky isn't one of those places. The Lewis & Clark chair, along with the Southern Comfort and Ramcharger chairs, offer some of the best terrain for kids in the West. Big Sky's lower reaches abound with easy blue cruisers that are normally sparsely populated, and which give skiers a chance to show off their GS turning skills. Getting away from the imposing peak puts skiers in wide and plentiful stretch of intermediate terrain. Other steep terrain can be had off of the Challenger and Headwaters lifts, which ply the lower shoulders of Lone Peak. For that kind of steepness, head from the tram to Castro's Shoulder, which averages 50 degrees. It's persistently steep, with an average of 42 degrees but not so steep as to lock knees up with fear. The shot down Lone Peak's gut, The Big Couloir, gives expert skiers a legitimate challenge with sustained narrow and rock-walled path. The tram carries only 15 passengers at a time up the stretch of 1,450 vertical, but because most of terrain from the top is highly technical, crowds and lines don't grow too cumbersome.
It picks skiers up at a point reached by the Lone Peak triple chair that's already well up the mountain.
Unlike the trams at Jackson Hole and Snowbird, the car riding on cables at Big Sky does not scale the entirety of the resort's vertical. Since it opened in 1995, the Lone Peak Tram has been the best known facet of skiing here, with good reason. The skiing at Big Sky runs from steep and harrowing to wide, easy and open. Once skiers make it here, however, they can expect a dearth of lift lines and, if they're lucky enough, a whole day skiing powder (as opposed to just an hour or two) if it happens to dump. Bozeman has developed a nice little airport to support the resort, but Big Sky still takes a demonstrative traveling effort to reach, unless travelers hail from airport hub cities with direct flights (Denver, Chicago, Dallas, a few others). The best thing about skiing at Big Sky is its lack of crowds.
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