Montana’s Big Sky Resort announces new tram, gondola, midmountain sports center
BILLINGS – Big Sky Resort will add a new gondola from its base area, sports center, restaurant venues and a new tram to the top of 11,166-foot Lone Mountain as the final phase of its 10-year, $150 million expansion plan, the company announced Feb. 15.
Family owned by Michigan-based Boyne USA Resorts, the latest upgrades will create an experience rivaling anything in Europe’s Alps, according to Stephen Kircher, CEO and president of Boyne.
“It’s our life’s work as a family and as a team,” he said.
Boyne purchased Big Sky Resort in 1976. Kircher’s father, Everett, started the company in 1948.
Kircher wouldn’t say what the extensive upgrades will cost as inflation has soared in the past year and the pandemic has caused construction material prices to climb.
“We don’t put dollar figures out on anything we do, because it’s all about the experience,” he said.
The work
The upgrades will include a glass-rich gondola picking up skiers near the current parking area and traveling uphill along the route the mountain’s oldest lift, Explorer 2, now takes. At midmountain, a sports center will be built to ensure the base area is less crowded and to provide skiers with access to intermediate runs.
“The never-evers will start at the base,” Kircher said, progressing up the mountain for slightly more difficult runs where snowmaking equipment has been installed.
In the summer, the midmountain area will become a takeoff point for ziplining, a mountain coaster and mountain biking trails. Food service will be available at the transfer point, and for winter users enclosed magic carpets will assist the ski school instructors.
From midmountain, the gondola will continue uphill to the bowl of Lone Mountain near where the Powder Seeker 6 lift loads. At that intersection will be a large, glass-walled dining venue as well as the base area for the new tram.
The tram will replace the existing tram that was erected 25 years ago and provide summer visitors a bottom-to-top experience. Once atop the peak, a viewing area with a glass floor will provide 360-degree views of the surrounding mountainscape and down the peak’s fall line, which may be too much for those squeamish about heights.
Trips to the top will be balanced by the hour to shuttle skiers and nonskiers. The existing tram can move about 150 to 200 people an hour. To reach the terminal in the summer now requires a vehicle ride.
“This is as much about summer as it is about winter,” said Taylor Middleton, president and chief operating officer at Big Sky.
“These are going to be some internationally renowned experiences that I think are going to put southwest Montana on the map in a way that it hasn’t before,” Kircher said. “And give people an experience that is accessible to a broad range of individuals.”
Building
Construction will begin this summer on the tram with the work being completed in phases and expected to take three to five years, depending on the construction cycle.
The work is the latest in an ambitious slate of upgrades the resort has undertaken, including three new high-speed, multiple passenger covered chairlifts, upgrades to on-mountain lodging at Huntley Lodge and The Summit hotel and 45 new mobile guns to manufacture snow. The work has also included the construction of seasonal workforce housing, including 186 beds on the mountain that allows workers to walk to their jobs.
“Keeping up with the technology, making sure that the workforce is well cared for and is experienced, that they have great places to live and they want to be here, so the culture pieces, there are challenges in every one of those components,” Middleton said.
“Probably the biggest challenge is maintaining that very balance and continuing to work on the different aspects of that balance in a sequence that allows us to seamlessly grow,” Kircher added.
Community
As Big Sky Resort has grown, the community around the ski area has continuously expanded. This winter a new luxury resort called Montage Big Sky opened.
Shortly afterward, it was announced that One&Only Moonlight Basin would construct a lodge with 73 guest rooms and suites along with 19 villas, a ski lodge and a spa.
A separate 2,635-unit development has been proposed near the base of the Thunder Wolf chairlift.
Now home to about 3,000 full-time residents, Big Sky can accommodate more than 15,000 during the peak winter ski season and summer months, according to the Big Sky Chamber. To keep the resort, golf courses, restaurants, shops and schools running, about 4,200 workers are needed.
Given the massive investment Boyne Resorts has made at Big Sky, the company could rest on its laurels for a while, but Kircher said with Big Sky’s 50th birthday on the horizon the company is already imagining plans for the next 50 years.
More details, artist renderings and a timeline can be found online at bigskyresort.com/2025.