Lutsen is about the best you can do if you are in Minnesota and craving some downhill skiing, but that’s not really saying much. For one, the lift ticket prices (as of 2023) are over a hundred dollars a day, and on-mountain food prices are hitting as high as 60$ for a couple beers and burgers. Most of the runs are blues, but they may as well be green - they’re short, tedious, and chock full of children. The handful of black/double black runs are usually closed and if they are open, expect something that might pass for a boring blue out west. The lifts are old, slow, and most are two seaters that cause giant lines to form with massive wait times. Excited yet? Let’s talk about run/lift closures. Lutsen is notorious for closing their lifts without warning and will not issue refunds when doing so. They closed the main lift for Moose Mountain on 1/28/23 which is home to more than half of their total runs without any warning, and when I asked if I could be compensated the extremely rude female manager at the ticket office tried to bribe me with a $15 voucher (you couldn’t even buy a burger with that on the mountain). Kind of disgusting behavior given that the lift closure was not due to weather but their own stupidity (I heard from another skier that they had actually frozen the lift gears by accidentally pointing a snow blower at it).

If you value your sanity, dignity, or bank balance please ski literally anywhere else than Lutsen, Minnesota.