Rarely has so much bounty gone so unplundered as at Big Sky — the biggest place you’ve never skied. There’s rarely more than a few seconds’ lift line at this sprawling Montana resort, except when waiting for the marquee 15-person tram ( map) that takes skiers to the top of 11,166-foot Lone Peak. A big reason for Big Sky’s quiet is the perceived remoteness of the resort: it sits about one hour south of the Bozeman airport.

It’s a destination ski resort if there ever was one, which means midweek skiers share the place with almost no one. The other reason is its sheer size: Those who do make the journey soon disperse over three mountains and nearly 4,000 skiable acres, with a correspondingly huge menu of terrain. From the resort’s tip-top, a snowboarder can drop into the black-diamond slopes of Liberty Bowl ( map) and ride all the way down to this winter’s new Dakota triple chair (  map), which opens access to 200-plus acres of expert-level open bowl skiing. Less adventuresome skiers gravitate to Andesite and Flatiron Mountains, where large groomed boulevards like Big Horn ( map) and Madison Avenue ( map) are served by several high-speed quads.

But one of the most intriguing developments at Big Sky has been linked with an adjacent resort, Moonlight Basin (www.moonlightbasin.com), which shares Lone Peak; the joint Lone Peak Pass ($89 a day) creates a 5,512-acre playground that gets 400 inches of snow a year with access to the gun-sight gullies that spill off of Lone Peak — and may leave skiers who’d been happily humming “Don’t Fence Me In” suddenly wishing someone would have.

By CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON

Download a printable full-size trail map (pdf) here

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