Discover the Big Sky Resort Expansion Highlights
The sun crept over Lone Peak on the morning of December 20, 2025, catching the glass panels of 83 gondola cabins as they hung motionless on the cable, waiting. Below them, a crowd gathered near the Mountain Village base area – resort executives in fleece vests, Doppelmayr engineers in hard hats, locals who remembered when this same spot held a creaking double chairlift from 1973. Someone had brought a ceremonial bell, the kind that rings when European lift manufacturers deliver a new installation. The air smelled like snow and coffee and the particular anticipation that comes before something gets turned on for the first time.
Stephen Kircher, president and CEO of Boyne Resorts, stepped to the microphone. His family has owned Big Sky Resort for 49 years, long enough that pronouncements about the future carry weight. “At Boyne, we think in decades, not quarters,” he said. “The next chapter is already being written.”
Then the bell rang, fireworks popped against the morning sky, and the Explorer Gondola – the fastest 10-person gondola in the world – began to move. It carried its first passengers upward at 7.1 meters per second, a technical achievement that sounds modest until you realize it completes a journey in nine minutes that used to take twenty. At the summit, the new Kircliff observation deck waited, a glass structure offering 360-degree views to anyone willing to make the trip, skis optional.
This was the final piece of Big Sky 2025, a transformation nearly a decade in the making. Twenty new lifts. A complete infrastructure overhaul. An investment exceeding $150 million, spread across years. The completion marked something more than upgraded equipment. It marked proof that the alternative to corporate consolidation – the family-owned, long-term-thinking, build-it-right model – can still win.
The Foundation Huntley Built
Chet Huntley understood timing. After fourteen years co-anchoring NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report, after eight Emmy Awards and a career that made him one of the most recognized faces in America, he retired in 1970 and returned to Montana. Not to rest, but to build. He envisioned a ski resort at the base of Lone Mountain that would rival Aspen, a place that showcased his home state’s beauty and made skiing accessible beyond the wealthy elite.
By December 1973, Big Sky Resort opened with four lifts – a gondola and three chairlifts serving what would become the foundation of a mountain. Huntley died three months later, three days before the resort’s official dedication, from lung cancer. His wife Tippy carried on. The investors who’d backed him tried to make it work. But without Huntley’s voice, his connections, his ability to conjure money and momentum from thin air, the resort struggled.
In 1976, Everett Kircher stepped in. Kircher had built Boyne Resorts from a $1 plot of unfarmable land in Michigan into a skiing empire through relentless innovation. He’d patented modern snowmaking equipment. Installed the world’s first triple chairlift. Turned ski areas into four-season destinations when everyone else shuttered in May. He bought Big Sky for $8.5 million and brought it into a family that thought in generations, not exit strategies.
That decision – to buy a struggling resort in Montana and commit to its future without a timeline for selling – set the terms for everything that followed. When you own something your grandchildren will inherit, deferred maintenance isn’t an option. Short-term thinking becomes a liability. The mountain becomes something closer to stewardship than investment.
The Decision: 2016
For decades, Big Sky grew steadily. Lifts replaced. Terrain expanded. The Lone Peak Tram opened in 1995, redefining what resort skiing could be. But the real inflection point came in 2013, when Boyne Resorts acquired Moonlight Basin and the terrain from Spanish Peaks. Overnight, Big Sky became 5,850 acres – one of North America’s largest ski resorts by footprint.
The infrastructure couldn’t serve it. The lift network, cobbled together over forty years, created bottlenecks and forced skiers into inefficient routes up the mountain. The base area facilities, designed for a fraction of the current visitation, strained under demand. The original 1973 Explorer double chair, the last piece of Huntley’s original vision still operating, groaned upward carrying two people at a time while hundreds waited below.
In 2016, Boyne announced Big Sky 2025. The name wasn’t marketing – it was a deadline. Ten years to transform the mountain’s infrastructure completely. Replace aging lifts. Build redundancy into the network. Create the on-mountain facilities that modern skiing requires. Make the summit accessible to everyone, not just experts willing to navigate three consecutive lifts.
The budget exceeded $150 million, a figure that would grow as pandemic-era supply chain disruptions drove construction costs higher. Most importantly, the plan wasn’t a reaction to competitive pressure or investor demands. It was a choice – the kind of choice that family ownership makes possible. Wall Street doesn’t fund decade-long projects that won’t show quarterly returns. But if you’re planning to own the mountain in 2035, spending eight years building the right gondola makes sense.
The Build
The transformation didn’t happen all at once. It accumulated, project by project, each building toward the next.
In 2016, the Powder Seeker 6 replaced the Lone Peak Triple, cutting the ride to the bowl significantly. Heated seats. Weatherproof bubbles. Individual footrests. The first bubble chair at Big Sky, setting a standard for what would follow. That same year, they replaced three magic carpets in the base area and covered one with a blue dome, protecting beginners from the wind that rips through the Mountain Village.
In 2021, they added the largest snowmaking expansion in resort history – 33 acres across three trails and two terrain parks. The new system meant early-season skiing no longer depended entirely on weather, a hedge against the climate variability that keeps resort operators awake at night.
The Lone Peak Tram replacement came in 2023, fifty years after the original. The new tram holds 75 passengers and runs a longer lift line, starting significantly lower on the mountain. For the first time, reaching the summit required only two lifts from the base – accessible, achievable, no longer the preserve of those willing to spend half their day in transit.
Throughout this period, Boyne built housing. Not token efforts or PR gestures, but actual beds – 186 in the Mountain Lodge campus between 2021 and 2023, another 200+ in the Levinski Lodge complex completed in 2024. By the time Big Sky 2025 wrapped up, the resort provided more than 1,000 team member housing beds, more than five times the ski industry average. The housing costs are subsidized between 50 and 60 percent below market rates, which in Big Sky means the difference between living near work and commuting an hour each way.
Then came the final act. In March 2025, they sold all 125 chairs from the old Explorer lift online in under 30 minutes. Demolition followed. Foundation work through summer, lift component installation through fall. On December 20, 2025, the Explorer Gondola opened – two stages, 83 cabins, heated seats, floor-to-ceiling windows. The mid-station creates a new beginner zone with dedicated learning terrain. The upper terminal connects directly to the Lone Peak Tram, enabling a fifteen-minute journey from parking lot to summit.
At the top, Kircliff – named for the family that’s owned the mountain for half a century – offers views across three states and two national parks. Inside, artist Anthony James’s custom installation, “The Mountain,” adds the kind of detail that signals intention. This isn’t just infrastructure. It’s architecture. A statement about what matters when you’re building for 2075, not 2026.
The Boyne Difference
The ski industry has consolidated aggressively over the past two decades. Vail Resorts owns more than 40 properties across North America, operating them through the Epic Pass model – sell season access in the spring, use that capital to finance operations, monetize everything else from parking to premium lift lines. Alterra Mountain Company controls a major collection of destinations through the Ikon Pass. Between them, they represent the financialization of skiing, the conversion of mountains into portfolio assets managed for quarterly earnings.
It works, mostly. Until it doesn’t. Vail’s 2024-2025 season has been marked by ski patrol strikes over wages, deferred maintenance on aging lifts, and the first-ever decline in Epic Pass sales. When the CEO collects millions while lift mechanics fight for living wages, the math becomes difficult to defend. The model optimizes for margin expansion, not mountain experience.
Boyne Resorts represents something different. Still family-owned after three generations, still private, still operating without shareholders demanding returns. Stephen Kircher’s father Everett bought Big Sky in 1976. His grandfather, also Everett, founded Boyne in 1947 by purchasing a Michigan hill for $1. The company now operates ten ski resorts across North America, generating more than $500 million in annual revenue while maintaining family control.
This isn’t sentimentality. It’s structure. When ownership doesn’t change hands, when there’s no exit strategy because there’s no plan to exit, decision-making operates on different time horizons. You can announce a $150 million project in 2016 and complete it in 2025 because you’ll still own the mountain when it’s done. You can subsidize employee housing at a loss because workforce stability matters more than this year’s EBITDA. You can build a glass observatory at 11,166 feet because legacy has value that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.
“We think in decades, not quarters” isn’t marketing copy. It’s the fundamental difference between family capital and public markets. One builds cathedrals. The other optimizes quarterly comp metrics.
What Growth Costs
Big Sky’s success has created its own complications. The median home price in the area now exceeds $2.5 million. Land values have hit $92,000 per acre. The community – still unincorporated, still operating without traditional municipal planning controls – has grown from a ski town into something more complex. Wealthy transplants. Second homes. A service economy supporting people who can afford $4 million properties while the workers who keep it running commute from an hour away.
The resort’s response has been substantial but insufficient. Those 1,000+ subsidized housing beds help, genuinely. They keep lift operators and restaurant workers living near their jobs, maintaining the community fabric that makes a ski town function. But workforce housing doesn’t solve community housing. The barista, the school teacher, the EMT – they’re priced out too, and the resort doesn’t employ them.
Boyne has made sustainability commitments that exceed industry norms. The ForeverProject pledges net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. They’ve partnered with the Spanish Peaks Mountain Club to use reclaimed wastewater for snowmaking, reducing demand on the Gallatin River watershed. They offset 100 percent of their electrical consumption with renewable energy credits. The resort employs a full-time sustainability specialist who coordinates with local environmental groups and advocates for climate-friendly policies at the state level.
These efforts matter. They represent good-faith attempts to reconcile growth with environmental limits. But physics doesn’t negotiate. More visitors mean more traffic, more infrastructure strain, more demand on water and sewer systems that serve an unincorporated area without the tax base or regulatory framework of a traditional town. The Big Sky community approved a $30 million expansion of the water and sewer district with a requirement that 25 percent of the new capacity be reserved for affordable workforce housing – a creative solution that acknowledges the problem while demonstrating how difficult the math remains.
The honest truth is that even patient capital, even family ownership committed to doing right by the community, creates pressures it cannot fully control. Success attracts more success, which attracts more money, which drives up prices, which displaces people. Big Sky is trying harder than most. It’s still not enough. Maybe it can’t be.
What Comes Next
Troy Nedved, Big Sky’s president and COO, stood near the gondola on opening day and looked upward. “Today marks the completion of a decade-long vision,” he said. “But we’re just getting started.”
The immediate future is already mapped. The gondola’s mid-station will expand into a full learning center with additional magic carpets and dedicated beginner terrain. The upper terminal is planned as the site for a major food and beverage hub – multiple dining options, bars, family-friendly spaces, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at Lone Peak. Future lift projects remain under discussion, particularly in the Madison Basin areas that came with the Moonlight acquisition but have seen less infrastructure investment than other parts of the mountain.
Boyne has made clear they’re not done. Stephen Kircher’s comment about thinking in decades carries weight when his family has already committed 49 years to this mountain. The trust structures are in place for the next generation. His sons are already involved in resort operations. The pattern suggests another fifty years, minimum.
Whether this model can scale beyond Big Sky is an open question. Boyne operates ten ski resorts, but family ownership has natural limits – you can only divide attention and capital so many ways before something suffers. The corporate consolidators can acquire indefinitely, applying the same playbook across dozens of properties. Boyne has to actually care about each one.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the alternative to Vail isn’t another Vail. Maybe it’s a handful of family operations, each committed to their specific mountains, each building for timelines measured in generations rather than quarters. Big Sky just proved it works. The question is whether anyone else has the patience – and the capital – to try it.
The Cathedral
The Explorer Gondola rises through cold mountain air, carrying skiers and non-skiers alike toward the bowl and beyond to the summit. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, Lone Mountain reveals itself in layers – the morning light catching the ridge lines, the shadows filling the couloirs, the vastness that no photograph quite captures.
At the top, Kircliff waits. The glass structure reflects sky and snow, nearly invisible until you’re standing inside it, looking out at the Teton Range to the south, the Madison Range to the west, terrain stretching across three states. Below, the Big Couloir drops away, expert terrain that tests even the best skiers. Above, only sky.
This is what Big Sky built – not just the gondola and the observation deck, but proof that another way remains possible. That mountains can be owned by families who think in lifetimes. That infrastructure investments can span decades. That quarterly earnings calls don’t have to dictate every decision at every resort.
Chet Huntley opened this mountain in 1973 with a vision of something great. He died before seeing what it would become. The Kircher family bought it two years later and spent half a century making the vision real. The Explorer Gondola, the fastest of its kind in the world, replaced the last lift from Huntley’s era. One generation to the next, patient capital building slowly toward something that lasts.
The mountains are patient. They wait. And sometimes, if you’re willing to think in decades rather than quarters, you can build something worthy of them.
