Across the Tetons nestles Grand Targhee, tailor-made for anyone who wants elbowroom by day but cares little for nightlife. Essentially, it is a place to ski your legs into
stumps, then kick back, relax and ignore the world. With 500 inches of average annual snowfall and no snowmaking, this small resort’s slogan is, “Snow from Heaven, Not from Hoses.” Feather-light powder falls often, piles up deep and lingers from storm to storm in hidden pockets all over the mountain.

Four chairlifts access two adjacent peaks. Fred’s Mountain tops out at 10,000 feet, where the trees are sparse. Actually, they aren’t widely spaced, but in mid-winter, 15- and 20-footers are buried so deeply that they look like saplings. Other than European-style pistes groomed on ridegetops and the faces of open fields, everything is left ungroomed. Three ridges and deep drainages between them offer a perfect mix of intermediate to high-expert turf on nearly 2,000 feet of continuous vertical.

Peaked Mountain’s 500 acres of lift-served terrain feature two main routes and numerous options through the trees. Targhee’s fabled snowcat operation ferries small guided groups into an additional thousand acres and runs up to 2,400 vertical feet of untracked powder higher on the mountain.