Moonlight Basin faces foreclosure

[Admin]

http://www.newwest.net/city/article/moo ... der/C8/L8/

Could this be #2 after Tamarack? Unlike Tamarack, however, I can envision buyers for Moonlight, not the least of which would be Boyne as their Big Sky Resort is connected.

 

[Tony Crocker]

Merging with Big Sky seems obvious, assuming the price is right. Under foreclosure it probably will be.

 

[rfarren]

Merging with Big Sky seems obvious, assuming the price is right. Under foreclosure it probably will be.

I would think that's going to happen. It would make Big Sky one of the largest resorts in North America. Now only if there were direct flights to bozeman.

 

[Tony Crocker]

5,500(?) acreage far overstates Big Sky/Moonlight's ski variety IMHO due to flats on the lower slopes and a lot of unskiable cliffs above. Nonetheless it should still be on every skiers "must do sometime" list.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

I never understood how they expected two different operations on the same mountain (and without a big urban base nearby)to survive. Before they started offering combined tickets, wasn't there a Hatfields & McCoys feud going on? I see why neighboring ski areas like Alta and Snowbird (with, as they say, "cultural differences") would want to stay separate, but what was the advantage of the BS/MB set-up?

 

[Tony Crocker]

what was the advantage of the BS/MB set-up?

None whatsoever IMHO from a skiing standpoint. This was the point of my FTO feature in 2006, that the whole was greater than the sum of the parts:
1) Moonlight faces north while most of Big Sky is in the sun, so timing where one skis by time of day can keep you in good snow more often than if you're in just one area.
2) For experts the Challenger and Headwaters are adjacent at the top so you can stay on that terrain more without as many long runouts to the bottom.
3) The North Snowfields are within Moonlight's terrain but require Big Sky's tram to access.

Topographically the 2 areas are similar, so presumably the much smaller Moonlight got very little of the destination traffic. Moonlight's snow surface advantage probably isn't often important until March. Hamdog would argue that Moonlight is a powder stash with so little traffic, but Big Sky is quite low density anyway, and for the hotshots Big Sky has most of the tram terrain.

 

[Patrick]

what was the advantage of the BS/MB set-up?

None whatsoever IMHO from a skiing standpoint.

I pretty much agree with what Tony said in his posts about BS/MB. Although the negatives at Big Sky are pretty high for me, I still think that it's in the second tier of great North America ski areas, uniquely based on that expert terrain. Remove that tram and challenger, Headwaters lifts with keep the acreage as now and I wouldn't even on the "radar".

 

[salida]

I can envision epic car drops on a closed moonlight basin. Keep it closed!

The headwaters might even keep some pow if folks didn't ski it so much.

 

[Tony Crocker]

I don't know whether salida has skied these areas, but I'm not so sure Moonlight would make great sidecountry. As at Big Sky the lower sections are flat, so you might bog down if it's ungroomed. And unless there's a plowed road to the base of Six-Shooter the gravity accessible area would be no more than before Moonlight was built.

Moonlight had super low skier density in January 2006, almost on the order of Powder Mt., so it was a potential powder stash anyway. Combined into Big Sky it would see more traffic, but the combined area would clearly have the lowest skier density of anyplace that big in North America. Many would be happy with that as the tradeoff for the topography flaws that Patrick and I have described.