The Reserve at Moonlight Basin

Overview: The Reserve at Moonlight Basin is a private Jack Nicklaus Signature course in Big Sky, set high in the Madison Range. The layout occupies a large, quiet mountain property with native grasses, pine forest, open meadows and long views toward Lone Peak and the Madison River Valley. At roughly 8,000 yards from the back markers, it has championship scale, but its most distinctive quality is the space between holes and the way the routing moves through the alpine landscape. The course asks players to combine distance with careful attention to elevation and changing landing angles.

History: Moonlight Basin partnered with Jack Nicklaus to create the Signature course, which opened in 2016. Construction and development work had been under way for more than a decade before the full course reached its present form. Nicklaus Design describes the course as an 18-hole private layout at about 7,500 ft of elevation, while the local community account explains that the designers worked across a large property and sought to minimise disturbance to sensitive natural areas. That approach is visible in the generous open spaces between fairways.

Did You Know? The Reserve was built on an unusually expansive footprint of about 900 acres, with the golf holes separated by broad tracts of landscape. The result is a round in which the surrounding mountain environment remains part of the experience even when a hole is framed by trees or native grass.