Best ski resorts in the United States

Alta is the powder mecca of North America: a skier-only mountain founded by the US Forest Service in 1938, hidden at the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon, buried under 14 meters of snow a year. The lodges are deliberately old-school, the locals divide themselves between Wildcat and Sunnyside, and snowboards have never been welcome.

Snowbird sits at the head of Little Cottonwood Canyon, where more than 14 meters of snow fall each winter on a wall of granite. The Aerial Tram lifts a hundred skiers to Hidden Peak in seven minutes, the Cliff Lodge stands in raw concrete at the base, and there is no village beyond the resort itself.

Jackson Hole is the American resort that locals defend like a religion. Beneath the Tetons rises 1262 m of continuous vertical, the largest in the country, capped by Corbet's Couloir, the entrance test where world-class skiers must commit to a mandatory air. Twenty kilometres away, the cowboy town of Jackson keeps everything beautifully understated.

Where the Eastern Sierra desert collides with a dormant volcano, Mammoth rises in solitary splendour above the Long Valley Caldera. Five storeys of snow a year, runs that stay open through July, and a 3369 m summit that turns the Owens Valley into a sun-bleached map below.

Breckenridge is the highest skiing town in the United States, with a base village above 2 900 m and a lift, the Imperial Express, that drops you at 3 914 m. The Victorian Main Street looks much the same as it did when gold ran out in the 1880s, and the bar scene is louder and younger than anywhere else in Summit County.

Vail is the Epic Pass flagship and the kind of mountain that quietly explains why Colorado became Colorado. A Bavarian-style village at the foot, immaculate Front Side groomers above, and behind the ridge, seven legendary Back Bowls of open powder that have hooked skiers for sixty years.

Site of the 1960 Winter Olympics, the Games that put alpine skiing on American television, Palisades Tahoe still skis like a stage. The 2022 Base-to-Base Gondola finally fused Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows into a single 320 km domain that reaches from KT-22's vertical cliffs to High Camp's lakeview deck.

Grand Targhee sits on the quiet west side of the Tetons and catches some of the most reliable snowfall in North America, around 500 inches a season. The skiing is wide-open powder under huge views of the Grand Teton, with terrain that rarely feels crowded. This is a get-away-from-it-all mountain, reached through the sleepy farm town of Driggs, Idaho, far from any resort buzz. Come here to ski deep snow in peace, not to be seen.

Steamboat is where cowboys and skiers share the same bar, and where the fabled Champagne Powder falls light and dry on aspen glades. In this ranching corner of northwest Colorado, the gondola climbs straight out of Gondola Square and the night-skiing tradition still burns bright at Howelsen Hill.

Big Sky is the largest skiable terrain in the United States, a Montana giant where the iconic cone of Lone Peak rises to 3403 m and the new 2023 Lone Peak Tram, the costliest aerial cable car in North America, hauls you to its summit. Below, 350 km of piste and roughly one skier per 3.6 hectares.

Sixteen kilometres west of Vail, Beaver Creek is what happens when a 1980s developer is told to build the most polished ski village in America and given a quiet valley to do it. A gated, car-free hamlet, escalators between hotels, freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies handed out at three in the afternoon, and one of the best children's ski schools in the world.

The only major resort in the United States that straddles two states, Heavenly delivers Lake Tahoe panoramas from every lift on California time and Nevada time at once. By day, 270 km of pistes drop through pines toward the sapphire lake; by night, blackjack tables glow in the casinos at Stateline.