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Big Sky 2/19 & 2/20

Whitey

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Dec 10, 2008
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Took the family out to Big Sky for school vacation week. Splurged and got on-mtn ski-in/out place. I've got 10 days out here so I'll probably be posting a lot of pics.

Big Sky has been on my bucket list for a long time. All my skiing friends who have gone there have raved about it. They were right. What an amazing mountain. All of them had prepped me for how big it is. Nope - still exceeded my expectations, it's huge. My big thing for skiing is I want "interesting" mountains. I want changing terrain, slopes, areas that feel completely different even though they are in the same ski area. Big Sky has that in spades, and I've only sampled about 10% of what they've got. And as many have said - so big that no matter what there are no lines and wide open trails that you can ski by yourself. We skied President's Day as our 1st day, I never waited on line.

Day 1: Our flights were delayed so we got into BS later Sunday night than expected. Because of that we did our shopping and getting sorted out in the AM on Monday. So we had a late start, probably 10:30. Didn't matter, my legs were cooked by 3:30. We stayed mostly to the Madison Base area as it was crazy cold (-5) and Madison had the sun on it all day. There were areas of untracked and lightly tracked powder all over and my boys loved that there was a long terrain park that they could ski right out the back door of our place. In the afternoon I took the Lone Tree Quad and skied off of that. Imagine having an area the size of Waterville with stashes all over and NO ONE skiing there - that's what skiing just that one area was like in the afternoon.

Top of Six Shooter six pack chair (oh yah - forgot to mention, the views are unbelievable too):
DSC01695.jpg

This is somewhere in the trees off of Iron Maiden:
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View of the Stillwater Bowl area from about 1/2 way down off of Lone Tree Quad:
DSC01689.jpg

Good view looking back at Lone Peak (you can see the top tram station at the top) I think this trail is Marshall:
DSC01691.jpg
 

Whitey

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Dec 10, 2008
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Day 2:

We've got some non-skiers in our group so on day 2 we did a winter tour of Yellowstone Park. I've never been to Yellowstone so as much as I wanted to ski - I was cool with going to Yellowstone. We did a tour in a 1968 Bombardier snow car (? - not sure what the heck they call it). Very cool trip. Saw tons of Bison and some elk, coyotes, and bald eagles. The views, of course, were spectacular. We even got to got to see Old Faithful. Fascinating stuff with all the geothermal pools and geysers and such. I would do it again.

Like I said, they have a lot of Bison, this is the view out of the windshield of our snow car/thing:
Bison in windshield.jpg

Elk:
Elk.jpg

Hot spring (that water is 190 degrees):
Hot spring.jpg

My boys (& 1 very smart friend who came with us) in the snow car/thing:
DSC01723.jpg

Mix 200 degree water/geysers with -5 degree air temps and you get something that looks like this:
DSC01707.jpg
 

thetrailboss

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You hit it right. We were up in Grand Targhee last weekend and the snow was amazing. Now we are finally getting some in the Wasatch.
 

speden

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Nov 18, 2008
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I was up a Big Sky earlier in the season. They seem to be having a fairly good snow year. I wish I'd had more time to ski there.

We also took a day off to visit Yellowstone. We went with a snowmobile tour. The bison are cool. We saw a few wolves roaming around since there was a dead bison carcass they were periodically feeding on. The tour was fun, but felt kind of tame after skiing, since they only let us snowmobile on the roads in an orderly line. Glad I went, but seems like a one and done kind of thing where I wouldn't need to go again.

Are you going to drive down and hit Jackson Hole too?
 
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