Big Sky Planning to Add Direct Flights from New York to Bozeman, Montana
With direct service from San Fran and Atlanta, much of the country already knows about the big skiing at Big Sky. Add neighboring Moonlight Basin, connected by trails from Big Sky, and you have 5,532 skiable acres, more than any other ski area in America, including Vail. The ski area has just received a grant to help implement direct service to Bozeman from New York’s JFK. Many northeasterners already head to Big Sky, lured by the lack of lift lines (there’s less than 100,000 people in a 100-mile radius) and the 4,350 vertical with the last bit of stretch up Lone Mountain (elevation 11,166 feet) reached by a tram. Add the proximity to Yellowstone National Park in the serene winter months, less than an hour’s drive and easily accessible on a day tour, and you have one of the country’s best winter experiences. New this ski season is five new gladed runs off the Ramcharger chairlift.

The Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA) just completed a study with Outside Magazine on how
Speaking to a small group of his constituents in Lyndonville, Vermont, in 1949, Senator George Aiken noted that “this is such beautiful country up here. It ought to be called the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.” The locals took the wise Senator’s advice. The Northeast Kingdom now consists of Essex, Orleans, and Caledonia counties, a large tract of land wedged between the Quebec and New Hampshire borders. In a state known for its rural setting (only Wyoming and Alaska contain fewer people), this is Vermont putting on its finest pastoral dress, with a few holes here and there. Wave after wave of unspoiled hillside form a vast sea of green and small villages and farms spread out in the distance under a few soaring summits. Here, inconspicuous inns and dairy cows have replaced the slick resorts and Morgan horses found in the southern part of the state, and the white steeples are chipped, not freshly painted.
I’ve always visited one Emerald Necklace park at a time, say a stroll around Jamaica Pond or through the century-old maples and gardens at Arnold Arboretum. And that’s pretty much how the great landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, intended-to treat each one of his verdant urban oases as a jewel. But when the Emerald Necklace Conservatory decided to display five works of Japanese fog artist Fujiko Nakaya across all their green spaces, I decided it was time to connect the dots and bike most of the seven-mile long stretch from Olmsted Park to Franklin Park. On display until October 31st in Boston,