January 2007

Now that Montana's Big Sky and Moonlight Basin Have Buried the Hatchet, Their Combined 5,512 Acres on Lone Peak Offer the Most Lift-Accessed Ski Terrain in the U.S. Will Anyone Notice?

I'm hiking along Challenger Ridge, and I'm walking very carefully. It's rocky and slick, and in spots, some skiers might be moved to call it a knife-edge. To my left, I can peer down Big Sky Resort's A to Z chutes, which drop sharply to the south. To my right, the north-facing Headwaters Chutes -- 16 fluted avalanche alleys -- plunge plumb-line straight for more than a thousand feet into Moonlight Basin. Above me looms Lone Peak, the towering, conical massif that both ski areas share.

There are four of us, and I'm happy that I heeded my companions' counsel and brought a backpack to carry my skis. Hands are useful up here, I realize, as I shimmy past an andesite outcropping, skitter down an icy ramp, kick steps up a near-vertical wall and scramble across a blustery saddle overlooking one of the A-Z chutes. I don't know which chute it is -- I've been too focused to keep track -- but I do know that the entrance to the couloir features a small black diamond marker that may be the single most unnecessary sign in the history of skiing.

The next hurdle, when we arrive above Three Forks, our chosen route, is putting on our skis. There's one precarious shelf, so we must wait patiently. When it's my turn, I step gingerly into my bindings, hoping I don't lose a ski. Skiing the chute itself, which drops somewhere around 45 degrees for 1500 exhilarating, thigh-burning feet, is effortless in comparison to getting there --so much so that when we finally emerge into Stillwater Bowl, the first thing we do is consult our watches.

Forty minutes until we are due for lunch. Time for another lap? Not quite. But we head back up anyway.

If anything embodies Big Sky and Moonlight Basin's troubled history and promising future, it's this razor-sharp ridge that marks the boundary between the two once-battling but recently reconciled ski areas. When Big Sky and Moonlight linked terrain last season after four years of bitter rivalry, their combined lift-accessed skiing soared to an astounding 5,300 acres (11 more than Vail), making the two resorts America's biggest ski exerience. But it didn't stop there. This season, Big Sky added another 221 acres on the southwest flank of Lone Peak, boosting total combined acres to 5,512. And Moonlight has plans for another thousand acres of mostly beginner and intermediate terrain in the coming years.

And there's sizzle to go with the size: Big Sky's 4,350-foot vertical drop is the second longest in the U.S., and just a few feet more than Moonlight's formidable 4,150-vertical-foot descent.

It's not just the stupendous scope of the terrain that makes the interconnect so extraordinary -- it's also the sheer audacity of the skiing. From the top of Lone Peak Tram, join ticket holders can ski descend 300 degrees off the mountain's summit.

When Boyne USA, which owns Big Sky, built its iconic tram in 1995, it transformed the resort from a laid-back intermediate area to a world-class expert destination, with big, steep alpine shots dropping every which way but west from the peak's summit (the Forest Service owns the western third of the mountain). While other mountains may provide access to big lines through boundary gates and hike-to terrain, precious few offer that amount of extreme exposure right off the main lift. "To get that much challenging terrain inside the resort is truly unbeaten in the rest of the country," says professional freeskier Lynsey Dyer, a former local who now lives in Jackson Hole, Wyo. "I've got a lot of respect for that mountain."

In an ironic turn of events, an intimidating peak whose expert terrain went unnoticed and underappreciated for years now finds its mellower side eclipsed by its bold new image. Rest assured: Big Sky and Moonlight still offer plenty of gentler terrain, from broad south-facing boulevards off the Southern Comfort lift to the screaming groomers and open treeskiing on Andesite Mountain to Moonlight's rolling glades and gentle beginner thoroughfares.

Yet, understandably, it's the advanced terrain that now gets all the publicity. In fact, Lone Peak is becoming a pilgrimage for a new wave of hardcore skiers, many as attracted to Montana's final-frontier charm as to the peak's rugged descents.

Tumbling off the peak's south side is the continuously steep (up to 50 degrees), long lines of Big Sky's Dictator Chutes, Marx, Lenin and Castro's -- as well as the gentler Liberty Bowl, the only single-diamond way down the summit. On the east side, Big Couloir, the resort's marquee run, slashes steeply down the mountain's sheer east face. Those who wish to ski it must bring their own avalanche gear and sign in with the patrol, which allows two skiers in the chute every 10 minutes.

To the north, skiers who purchase the joint Lone Peak ticket can now, for the first time, access Moonlight's new North Summit Snowfields, a rollicking run that drops 2500 feet to Moonlight Basin below. The descent comes as close to the unfettered European high-alpine experience as anything you'll ski in America. "You ski from the top of that mountain all the way to the bottom of the valley and look up and go, 'Whoa! That's a 4000-foot run!'" says longtime local skier and powder guide Lonnie Ball.

In many ways, the terrain offered by the two resorts is perfectly complementary and in its entirety constitues a near-ideal ski mountain. Big Sky offers lift-serviced steeps off the peak, plus wide cruisers and steep tree runs below and on adjacent Andesite Mountain. Moonlight fills the gap with hike-to chutes, low-angle trees and north-facing terrain.

Both resorts see lots in the way of snowfall (more than 400 inches a year) and little in the way of crowds. While a powder Saturday in Colorado might see 18,000 visitors at a major resort, Big Sky and Moonlight's biggest combined day to date has only been 6700 skiers. Twice, after skiing the North Summit Snowfields, we cruise the length and breadth of Moonlight Basin without seeing another soul -- and at 3:30 in the afternoon, we're still carving fresh corduroy. "There's still so much terrain and so few people that it feels like a private resort," says Dyer. "I hate to give away the secret."

Big Sky was, for a long time, an all-too-well-kept secret. The resort was the brainchild of former NBC newsman Chet Huntley, a Montana native looking to help the state's economy move away from resource extraction to tourism. But when Huntley died three days before the resort's official opening in 1973 and the economy tanked in the wake of the Arab oil embargo, the operation foundered.

In 1976, Everett Kircher, owner of Michigan's Boyne Mountain, purchased the resort for $1 million and assumed the remainder of the investors' debts. Kircher, who died in 2002, had been on the hunt for a western mountain, and Big Sky appealed to him, he said in his autobiography, because of its voluminous "cold-smoke" powder. But "most importantly," he wrote, "the area was privately owned" -- and not under the "bureaucratic thumb" of the U.S. Forest Service. "You wouldn't have to go through years of negotiation to cut a tree or add a chairlift."

In fact, the resort's location on and next to large swaths of private property is in many ways the engine that created this big-mountain behemoth. While the resort has invested in its own improvements, it has also profited from the kindness of self-interested neighbors. The Yellowstone Club, a 2,200-acre private ski area adjacent to Big Sky recently traded property with the resort to allow skiers onto Dakota Territory, the new, gentle (relatively speaking) terrain on Lone Peak that has bumped the combined resorts' total acreage up to 5512. And when Big Sky sold a large piece of property on the south side of Andesite Mountain to the developers of the private-home community Spanish Peaks in 2000, the sale price included construction of a high speed detachable quad to replace an excruciatingly slow fixed-grip triple. The new lift, which connects Spanish Peaks to Big Sky, began spinning two seasons ago.

It was the development of Moonlight Basin, though, that put Big Sky over the top. Moonlight got its start in 1992, when three partners purchased 40 square miles on the north flank of Lone Peak. In 1994, they forged an agreement to have Big Sky build and operate the Iron Horse and Pony Express lifts on Moonlight property and manage the terrain. That put the "slope" in Moonlight's premium "slopeside" real estate pitch.

In 2002, however, the two resorts found themselves at loggerheads over Moonlight's decision to add a detachable six-pack lift to service expanded terrain on the north side of Lone Peak, and in early 2003, after negotiations stalemated, Moonlight announced it would operate as a separate resort.

Relations further soured in 2004, when Boyne sued to terminate the 1994 agreement, accusing Moonlight of everything from improper sign placement to improper avalanche control. Former Moonlight General Manager Burt Mills, who was hired to run the resort after the split and left late last fall, says the dispute was probably a natural clash between businesses with very different operating models -- one focused on running a ski area, the other on selling ski-in/ski-out real estate. "Even in a marriage it's difficult for two people to agree on how things should be done," says Mills. "Now you take two businesses who are competing for the same market share and put them side by side, and it's doubly difficult."

So it remained until last June, when the two parties, consigned to mediation by their original 1994 agreement, met in a hotel in nearby Bozeman, and, in the course of a single day, surprised everyone, including themselves, and emerged from the mediation with a new accord: The two resorts would offer a joint pass that would allow skiers to access every corner of their bountiful shared terrain.

It happened, literally, in a day -- no public comment periods, no "bureaucratic thumbs," just more than 5000 acres of private property and two ski resorts willing to share a tremendous alpine bounty. Montana skiing was on the the national ski map -- in a big way.

Both Mills and Big Sky General Manager Taylor Middleton agree that the schism was in many ways the best thing that could have transpired. Because Moonlight had to operate on its own, says Mills, "we developed our own infrastructure," and both resorts have benefited from the terrain expansion Moonlight made available when it briefly broke away.

Besides the new terrain, Moonlight has provided Big Sky with a necessary inroad into the new century. In some ways, Big Sky's architectural character has been frozen in the era of shag rugs and conversation pits. The first 20 years after the resort's construction in the early '70s were devoted to paying off debts rather than providing amenities. While more recent construction, such as the Yellowstone Conference Center, the Snowcrest Lodge and the luxury Summit at Big Sky Hotel, are better geared to contemporary tastes, the base area still feels dated. Next season, however, the construction of Village Center One is expected to transform the base area into a Whistler-style, pedestrian-friendly village and provide a needed social hub for the resort.

Moonlight, on the other hand, has not suffered from the burden of history. The Moonlight Lodge, an airy, timber-and-stone structure with a lively bar, excellent restaurant and cozy seating throughout, is currently the heart of the resort. But a new base village is planned on the site of the Madison Lodge, which is now a pleasant temporary tentlike structure, with cafeteria-style eating in the daytime and fine dining and entertainment into the evenings.

Like all of the construction at Moonlight, the Moonlight Lodge is casually upscale, not pretentious. "What Moonlight has brought to the table is class," says Ball, who, despite living on the slopes of Bridger Bowl for the last 30 years, now skis more than 100 days a season at Big Sky and Moonlight. "The combo is a big win for skiers."

It's also been a big win for the resorts. Big Sky experienced its biggest season in the resort's history last year, with 325,000 skier days, and Moonlight's numbers doubled to 80,000. (For comparison, Steamboat, Colo., significantly smaller at about 3,000 acres, routinely does more than a million skier days in a season.) For both resorts, the interconnected whole has been more than the sum of its parts.

That became clear to me last spring, when, after three days of brilliant Montana sunshine, a blustery storm blew in and dropped 10 inches of new snow. With our Lone Peak tickets, we traversed from Moonlight Lodge to Big Sky, where a sun crust on the resort's south- and east-facing trails drove us back to the winterlike slopes of Moonlight, There, north-facing trees and the Headwaters lift delivered dry, knee-deep powder all afternoon.

The next day the sun came out strong, and we reversed our strategy. We headed up the tram to explore Dakota Territory, the new terrain that Big Sky leases from the Yellowstone Club. We traversed onto the south-facing run just as the new snow began to bond to the crust below. We stopped above a spruce-dotted snowfield under an imposing set of slanted bookcliffs. Then we dropped in, our tracks side by side, picking up speed as we gained confidence in the creamy, spring powder beneath us.

It occurred to me that at that moment, nobody could possibly be skiing better snow. But at Moonlight, they were still plowing through cold-smoke powder. They were ripping up the far north side of Lone Peak, on the distant frontier of this vast alpine playground, where winter still reigned.

END