Plenty of Snow For Everyone

We had enormous fun snowboarding through the trees on runs like the aforementioned Tango and Bacon Rind at Big Sky, and Ulery's Trace and Ram's Glade at Moonlight. To me, zipping through a white-blanketed forest, with a bright winter sun casting dappled shadows through the branches and big pillows of snow dropping from the boughs, is the distilled essence of what skiing ought to be.

You're on Your Own

It's a good thing that there's so much skiing to do at the Big Sky/Moonlight Basin complex, because the two areas don't have a lot to offer other than their massive ski hill.

Big Sky has shopping, restaurants and nightlife options at the base, but it's a shadow of what you would find at Vail or Park City or the major resorts at Lake Tahoe.

At the base of Big Sky, you owe it to yourself to stop at Chet's Bar to get a feel for the resort's beginnings (or to play a few hands of poker). There's a Montana beef restaurant, the Peaks, and an Asian bistro if you crave after-ski Chinese, plus a few smaller bars and cafes. Big Sky also has free movie nights and fireworks shows to keep the kids entertained.

The base area of Moonlight Basin is essentially one big lodge surrounded by a series of attractive log homes you can rent for a night or a week. With the possible exception of a couple of super-deluxe resorts in Japan, Moonlight Lodge is the most attractive ski-area base lodge I've ever seen. It looks like the lobby of a five-star resort hotel, with a huge stone fireplace rising to a tall, wood-beamed ceiling. Big, sun-filled windows overlook the slopes. And yet it's open to everybody, and makes a lovely place to hang out before, during and after the ski day.

The Moonlight Lodge has a terrific upscale restaurant, the Timbers, a deli for lunch or breakfast, and a rustic bar featuring an excellent selection of Montana microbrews. It has a spa facility with an indoor-outdoor heated pool.

And that's about it. Unless you're up for the 70-minute drive to Bozeman and its collection of cowboy bars, there's simply not much to do after a day on the slopes.

If you're going to Lone Mountain for the week, it would make sense to take a day off skiing and head an hour south to the west gate of Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone in winter -- with elk, bison and eagle abundant and those furious geysers gushing white steam into the winter air -- is even more fantastic than Yellowstone in summer. My personal advice would be to avoid the snowmobile tour, which is without doubt the noisiest, coldest and smelliest way to see the park. Cross-country skiing or snowshoeing is vastly better. Or you can take one of the "snowcoaches" -- basically, a bus mounted on tank treads -- that glide slowly and silently across the rolling dunes of snow.

If you spend a week skiing the two-peak Lone Mountain pass, you're probably going to need that day off on the snowcoach. When you get back to the resorts, there will still be countless runs left to explore on the biggest single-ticket expanse of ski terrain this country has to offer.

T.R. Reid, The Post's Rocky Mountain bureau chief and author of "Ski Japan," has ridden his skis and snowboard at the biggest resorts on three continents.