Best powder 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.

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.

Taos Ski Valley is the surprise no one tells you about until you go. High New Mexico desert at 2805 metres, dry Southwest powder that falls light and stays light, and a base village of adobe and pine built by a Swiss-French refugee in 1955. Above it rises some of the steepest patrolled terrain in North America.

Whitefish Mountain is the gem of northwest Montana, the locals just call it Big Mountain. It rises 700 metres above the small lakeside town of Whitefish, with Glacier National Park visible across the Flathead Valley. On cold foggy mornings the firs turn into snow ghosts, frozen white sculptures lining the upper bowls.