Crossing the peak’s summit in a roaring wind, we move cautiously among half-hidden rocks that, like bare knuckles, protrude from a scoured sheet of snow and ice. We try hard not to gouge the bottoms of our skis on them. Below us, fields of sharp rocks cover all exits into Liberty Bowl, so we follow a foot-wide strip of snow that traverses the peak to three steep lines, partially wind-protected and full of snow. The widest, Marx, plummets away from us at a 42-degree angle. “Let’s go,” my companion yells through blasts of wind that send surface snow swirling around us. Amazingly, we drop right in.
ou
Moonl ig
postcards
o c m e B e s t Y h ➔
photo by Ryan Turner
Combine Montana’s Moonlight Basin with Big Sky and you’ve got the largest skiing area in the United States. By Roger Toll
march 2009
Sky 33
postcards
L
skiing between the two resorts, they offer up the largest ski terrain—5,512 acres—in the United States. With only six years of skiing under its belt, Moonlight Basin is the newest ski resort in the country, while Big Sky, at 35, is the veteran resort, brainchild of the late NBC newsman and native Montanan Chet Huntley. For years, it existed as a remote location, loved by its small fan base. But things changed radically when the gut-puckering Lone Peak Tram was laid up its steepest,
one Peak is the spiritual soul of Big Sky and Moonlight Basin, two adjoining resorts in southwestern Montana that share the shark’s tooth of a mountain that soars to 11,166 feet. Thanks to a joint Lone Peak Ticket that provides seamless
near-vertical face in 1995, giving expert skiers, for the first time, a crack at the vertiginous terrain that falls off the mountain’s summit. “There are at least eight separate routes down Lone Peak, each with a personality of its own,” says big-mountain skier Mike Mannelin, a Big Sky resident featured in the 2006 Warren Miller movie Off the Grid. In it, he hikes along the razor’s-edge ridge that separates Big Sky’s extreme terrain from Moonlight’s, at times with a foot on each side, searching for the steepest, narrowest and most lifeendangering chutes to ski down. “It’s awesome, limitless skiing,” he says, “and never crowded.” While fewer people are skiing this year than last, Big Sky and Moonlight are always far less crowded than the nation’s other major ski areas. “We have 3,812 acres—5,512 with Moonlight— and we average around 2,000 to 2,500 skier visits a day,” says Dax Schieffer, Big Sky’s director of public relations. “It works out to about one skier for every two acres,” Big Sky’s general manager, Taylor Middleton, tells me. “Most big resorts in other states would have four or five times that number.” One Saturday last year at Big Sky, with fresh snow on the ground—candy to the good skiers of Montana—the wide-open, groomed runs, usually the most crowded, are virtually empty. “I can’t believe how empty it is, even on a weekend,” an Illinois physician who usually skis in Colorado tells me when we share a table at lunch. “There aren’t even any lift lines out of the base area.” At Moonlight Basin, Mannelin
One Saturday last year at Big Sky, with fresh snow on the ground—candy to the good skiers of Montana—the wide-open, groomed runs, usually the most crowded, are virtually empty.
➔
Photo by ryan turner
Lone Peak Season
xx Sky month 2009
Big Sky One Lone Mountain Trail, Big Sky, Montana; 800-548-4486, 406-995-5000 or www.bigskyresort.com moonlight basin 1020 Hwy 64, Big Sky, Montana; 888-362-1666, 406-993-6000 or www.moonlightbasin.com
march 2009
Sky 35
kindly removes his after-burners and guides me to his favorite snow stashes. “If Big Sky is quiet, Moonlight Basin is doubly so,” he says as we survey the woods that stretch below us all the way to Moonlight Lodge (at right), a spacious, stunning building with log rafters. “You ski mainly through well-gladed trees on winding, narrow runs that follow the natural contours. It’s so much fun, so easygoing and laidback, a good complement to skiing Big Sky’s wide-open slopes.” On one of the groomed runs flowing along a low ridge, we pull up. “There, that’s what it’s all about,” Mannelin says, pointing his ski pole toward the summit of Lone Peak soaring high above us, and a vast field of snow on its northern face. “That’s the reason a lot of us live here.” Below the snowfield, a few narrow snow lines plummet through steep rock faces and cliffs to wide-open For information on Delta Air bowls that, in turn, fall into the Lines’ service to Bozeman, Monfir forests through which we tana—the closest Delta gateway are skiing. to both Big Sky and Moonlight “That’s the North Summit Basin—visit delta.com.
36 Sky march 2009
Field. It’s big-route skiing. To be able to take a lift and then ski that—well, it’s just such a big thing,” he says with a depth of feeling that almost has him choked up. “From that peak, it’s a 4,350-foot descent through extreme, exposed, consequential terrain. One wrong move, and you may start an avalanche, or you may fall onto the rocks or over a cliff. It’s just that serious.” If Lone Peak is the soul of the two-resort area, the North Summit Field is the symbol of symbiotic success: You’re skiing on land that belongs to Moonlight Basin, but you can’t reach it without Big Sky’s Lone Peak Tram. “We opened terrain that would have been impossible without the two resorts working closely together,” says Big Sky’s Middleton. “And because of that, we can offer skiers the most gnarly lift-accessed extreme skiing in the United States.” Even when he’s not on assignment for Sky, Contributing Editor Roger Toll can often be found schussing about the powder-rich mountains of the western United States this time of year.
Photos by Scott Spiker (lodge and pool) and ryan turner; opposite page by ryan turner
postcards
“You ski mainly through well-gladed trees on winding, narrow runs that follow the natural contours,” says Moonlight Basin devotee and Big Sky resident Mike Mannelin.
month 2009
Sky xx