MOONLIGHTING: Put Moonlight Basin on your hit list

Don’t be fooled by the Jack Nicklaus signature golf course, the multi-mullion dollar second homes or the plush lodge, Moonlight Basin isn’t just another resort real-estate venture, its terrain is 100% legit and its attitude is more put your feet up than stuck up.

From the Headwaters to the North Summit to the gullies off the Lone Tree lift, Moonlight offers steep, exposed chutes, a high-alpine snowfield, sheltered gullies, gladed knolls and tons of terrain features—all for a ticket under $50.

Big Sky and Moonlight share 11,166-foot Lone Peak, whose North face makes up Moonlight’s North Summit Snowfield, a glacier skiing experience you’d have to climb anywhere else for. The Field narrows into a handful of chutes, which empty out into the Deepwater Bowl. On your way down, hit Lookout Ridge, where a dozen entry points award steep tree skiing that stays soft days after the storm. Six Shooter, the resort’s high speed six-passenger chair, whips you up to the Headwaters Chair, a double that accesses the burly Headwaters terrain.

Moonlight has a serious amount of terrain to offer, but it’s really the Headwaters that put the place on the map. This scree-strewn massif is intimidating as hell, but it’s almost always better than it looks. At first glance, a lot of it barely looks skiable, but the chutes harbor a surprising amount of snow and when you start piecing together your line from the chair, possibilities tend to present themselves. In a good snow year you can traverse in to the first three chutes, but to get to the gnarly stuff, like Hell’s Half Acre, Classes 4-6 and Three Forks, you gotta hike. Hoof it to the highest point and you’ll earn yourself 4,150 feet of vertical.