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Best Midwest Ski Resorts: Drive Instead of Fly!
- Heather Vergara
- Dec 31, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 4
Skiing out west is blissful, but getting there can be exhausting and expensive. Sometimes you just need quick and easy. Here are the best Midwest ski resorts you should try with your family. You can drive instead of fly!
Perfect North | Bittersweet | Crystal Mountain | Boyne Highlands | Boyne Mountain | Nub's Nob | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Vertical feet | 400 | 350 | 375 | 552 | 500 | 427 |
# runs | 23 | 20 | 59 | 55 | 60 | 53 |
# chairlifts | 5 | 6 | 6 | 8 | 8 | 10 |
Skiable acres | 100 | 100 | 103 | 435 | 415 | 248 |
Drive time from Zionsville. IN | 2 hours | 4 hours | 6 hours | 7.5 hours | 7.5 hours | 7.5 hours |
We’ll start with the closest ski resort to Zionsville, Indiana where we live, which is outside Indianapolis.
Perfect North - Lawrenceburg, Indiana
Perfect North is less than a two-hour drive, which is perfect for a quick day trip, especially if you're inexperienced and don’t need long runs. However, given Perfect North is in southern Indiana, check the weather before you go to ensure you won’t be skiing on grass.
Perfect North: Perfect for beginners but check the weather and make sure there's snow. You can go snow tubing, too!
Catering to beginners, this resort includes a 50-minute lesson with every lift ticket and utilizes a moving walkway instead of tow ropes to get beginners to the top of the bunny hill. We took our kids here when they were 5 and 8 for their first time skiing. The free lesson went by quickly, so we signed them up for the next-step lesson, and my husband and I did some skiing on our own. By the end of the day, my youngest was going up and down the bunny hill with ease, and my oldest was riding the chair lift with Daddy! And they were hungry for more!
This lesson plan became our strategy no matter where we skied - the kids did half-day lessons in the morning to get better instruction than we could offer, and we got some alone time to ski. Then we would meet up after lunch and all ski together in the afternoon. Now, the kids beat us old folks down the hill!
Perfect North also offers two terrain parks and snow tubing as well as a holiday light show in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so mark your calendars for next year!
Bittersweet - Ostego, Michigan
About 4 hours from Zionsville, you’ll find a few ski slopes near Kalamazoo, Michigan. The best by far is Bittersweet! While the “resort” is in the middle of nowhere and doesn’t offer shops or nightlife, the Lodge is lovely, the equipment is top-notch, and the lifts are smooth and fast. You’ll spend a lot of time on the lifts here because the runs are short, but I think this is the best skiing a short drive from Zionsville.
Bittersweet trail map
We’ve now been to Bittersweet twice. Once we stayed in Kalamazoo, which is about 30 minutes from the resort. The second time we rented a house in South Haven, a Lake Michigan beach town about 45 minutes away, and we enjoyed playing on the beach, ice skating, and strolling downtown when we weren’t skiing.
Bittersweet: Kids in ski school while we ski on our own, the Cramer cousins joined us year 2, Ava conked out at aprés ski
Crystal Mountain - Thompsonville, Michigan
About 6 hours from Zionsville, you’ll find the picturesque village of Crystal Mountain, a miniature Vail, Colorado, with the ski lodge, restaurants, cottages, villas, a hotel, and ice skating rink all at the base of the slopes. The resort is pet-friendly, so we brought our dogs, Tootsie and Teddy, and they enjoyed walking the paths with us before and after skiing.
Crystal Mountain offers 58 downhill runs and four different ski areas, one of which we didn’t even find until the tail end of our second day - The Backyard, which became our favorite. Runs are still on the short side, but that’s to be expected of Midwest ski resorts. Food options weren’t plentiful, but were adequate. And there’s plenty to do when you aren’t skiing, like the Crystal Mountain Spa, snowshoeing, ice skating, horse-drawn surrey rides, snow biking, cross-country skiing, outdoor laser tag, golf simulator, and more! We will be back!
Crystal Mountain: Charming village and all the winter activities!
Boyne Highlands, Nub's Nob, and Boyne Mountain - Harbor Springs, Michigan
The best skiing “nearby” is a 7½ hour drive up to Harbor Springs, Michigan, where you can ski three different resorts - Boyne Highlands, Nub's Nob, and Boyne Mountain. We’ve been twice now, and while I don’t love that long drive, the runs and snow are significantly better if you go further north. Boyne Highlands offers the most amenities - various accommodations onsite and multiple restaurants, but it’s not as charming as Crystal Mountain. Highlands also offers the fastest and warmest lift in the Midwest - a high-speed 6-seater lift with heated seats!
However, we love the skiing best at Nub's Nob, despite its barebones amenities. The combo of Boyne Highlands one day and Nub's Nob the next is perfect. Boyne Mountain is further down the road and offers more runs than Highlands, but not as many blues.
We stayed at the Boyne Highlands Lodge the first visit and in a VRBO a few miles away the second visit.
Boyne and Nub's Nob: Love seeing the kids grow up on the mountain!
Nubs Nob trail map
Boyne Mountain hosts a holiday light show called SkyBridge Michigan, the world's longest timber-towered suspension bridge surrounded by a sea of shimmering lights. The area is also beautiful in the fall, where you can see autumn’s colors for miles from the SkyBridge!
Boyne Mountain Skybridge: Beautiful in winter and fall!
In summary, if you want decent skiing a short drive away, you can't go wrong with Bittersweet. If it's a cold and snowy winter, Perfect North is a great daytrip option, especially if your group is mostly beginners. If you want bigger mountains, longer runs, and better snow, then you need to go further north. Check out the charm of Crystal Mountain or the Boyne area for three different resorts you can ski in one trip!
The drive time to Boyne is comparable to the flight plus drive time to Colorado or Utah, but for the Midwest resorts, you have the convenience of bringing your own car with all your gear versus trying to pack it all to fly. And lift ticket prices in the Midwest are significantly less expensive! While I prefer skiing out west, we love having the option of skiing closer to home, especially when we're planning last-minute and can't swing airfare prices or that much vacation time.
Heather Vergara is a former PepsiCo marketing executive who left the corporate world to be a Mom and never found her way back. Instead, she focused on her passion for travel and adventure and created Show Them the World, a travel concierge service for busy families longing to reconnect and see the world together. She's now a Million Dollar Advisor with Gifted Travel Network, a Virtuoso agency. Heather has helped hundreds of families experience Hawaii, Alaska, Costa Rica, the Caribbean, Italy, France, Greece, England, Croatia, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Africa, Iceland, National Parks, and more to come!
Heather has an MBA in marketing from Indiana University, a Digital Marketing Executive Education certificate from Columbia University, and a BA in Journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives with her husband, two kids, and two furry dogs in Zionsville, Indiana.