Where are the Aspens, the Sun Valleys, the Whistlers of tomorrow? After spending two months last year crisscrossing the United States by car and motor home to visit 175 ski resorts, we found what we think are 10 rising stars. Enthusiastic skiers for many years, we saw a lot of compelling ski areas, but the following up-and-comers stood out--they all had made noticeable, large-scale improvements in the last few years, and were enjoying the personal, word-of-mouth approval that fairly wings from skier to skier. Everyone knows about the perennially hard-to-get-into places but--especially this year, with record Western snowfalls putting everyone in the mood for skiing--we predict: These resorts are the ones to watch.

Big Mountain, Mont.

It was a small but telling clue: On our first visit to Big Mountain a couple of years ago, we met more than a dozen people--dog sled mushers, ski instructors, celebrities, ski bums-cum-waitpersons--who had relocated recently from Aspen. And everyone in town vociferously denied, a little too vociferously it seemed to us, that Big Mountain is just like Aspen was 20 years ago.

Tucked between Glacier National Park and Flathead Lake in Montana's far northwest hard by the Canadian border, Big Mountain is so vast and clean and beautiful it makes the heart ache to look at it. (Big Mountain should not be confused with the also-laudable ski resort of Big Sky far to the south near Yellowstone National Park.)

Folks around Big Mountain said the winter of 1993 started last August when several inches of snow fell. A new fixed-grip quad chair is in place to serve four new beginner runs, the first of a series of improvements and expansions for the resort, along with new trails and new snow-making and grooming. And the fact that celebrities like San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana and actor Jim Nabors have built million-dollar log houses in newly gentrified Whitefish hasn't changed the happy condition that Big Mountain has nonexistent lift lines, or gentled the resort's occasionally rowdy night life.

There are three communities here, within a few miles of one another--the commercial town of Kalispell, which locals describe as "the place with the airport, the mall and the K Mart"; the arts and crafts town of Bigfork, with its Tirolean chalets and organic vegetarian restaurants, and the residential town of Whitefish, which in winter helps feed and lodge skiers at Big Mountain.