Big Sky Resort Brand Guidelines: Chet Huntley’s 1973 Montana Resort, Run by Boyne Since 1976

A newscaster’s resort on Lone Mountain.

Big Sky Resort sits on Lone Mountain in southwest Montana, about 50 miles from Bozeman, and takes its name from the state’s nickname, “Big Sky Country,” English Wikipedia says. It was the project of Chet Huntley, the Montana-born NBC newscaster who had co-anchored The Huntley–Brinkley Report before retiring, and it opened in December 1973, with its main base at about 7,510 feet on the mountain’s eastern face.

The resort and the town around it were built from almost nothing. In a 2023 column for the local newspaper Explore Big Sky, written for the resort’s 50th anniversary, Taylor Middleton, then Big Sky Resort’s president, wrote that when the development team arrived in 1970 the area had no lifts or hotels, and no paved roads, municipal water, post office or reliable electricity and phone service. The first lifts, English Wikipedia says, were an enclosed gondola carrying four skiers per cabin, the Lone Peak triple chair, which reached a bowl below the summit, and the Explorer double for beginners; a fourth lift on neighbouring Andesite Mountain followed.

The early business was short-lived. Middleton wrote that an oil crisis and recession slowed travel and property sales in the mid-1970s, and that the development group sold the resort in 1976. English Wikipedia names the owner at that point as Chrysler Corporation, which had decided to divest its real-estate development assets. The buyer was Boyne Resorts, the Michigan ski company of the Kircher family, and Boyne’s own timeline lists 1976 as the year Big Sky Resort “becomes part of Boyne Resorts.”

Lifts, a tram and a bigger mountain.

Under Boyne the resort kept adding lifts. Middleton wrote that it began installing them almost immediately after the purchase and never stopped, and that Big Sky was Boyne’s third ski resort and its first in the West. English Wikipedia traces the line on Andesite Mountain: the original double chair was renamed Ram’s Horn in 1978, replaced by the Ramcharger high-speed quad in 1990 and by Ramcharger 8, an eight-seat chairlift, in 2018. A second Andesite chair in 1979 lowered the resort’s base, and a used triple chair from Keystone, installed in 1999 at Lone Moose Meadows, lowered it again.

The defining lift is the Lone Peak Tram. The original aerial tramway, built in the autumn of 1995, took skiers to the 11,166-foot summit of Lone Mountain and opened up its steepest terrain, English Wikipedia says. A replacement tram, built by the lift maker Garaventa, opened to the public on 19 December 2023, Explore Big Sky reported a week earlier, as part of the resort’s 50th-anniversary season. In December 2025 the resort opened the Explorer Gondola, a 10-person gondola linking Mountain Village with the tram, and Kircliff, an observatory with a glass floor at the summit; Explore Big Sky reported both in October 2026 as the centrepiece of “Big Sky 2025,” a decade-long investment plan.

The mountain also grew sideways. In July 2013 the resort bought about 200 acres on Spirit Mountain from Spanish Peaks, a private club, and in October 2013 it merged with Moonlight Basin, its neighbour on the north side of Lone Mountain, English Wikipedia says. Middleton called the Moonlight integration the largest ski expansion in the resort’s history and wrote that it cemented Big Sky’s claim to be the “Biggest Skiing in America.” Its press kit now gives 5,850 acres of terrain and a vertical rise of 4,350 feet, and English Wikipedia counts 40 lifts.

Away from the snow, the resort runs hotels and conference space at its Mountain Village, including the Summit Hotel completed in 2000 and a village centre opened in 2007, and summer rides on the tram began in 2012. In October 2026 Explore Big Sky reported that readers of Condé Nast Traveler had voted Big Sky the No. 1 ski resort in the United States in that magazine’s 2026 Readers’ Choice Awards.

How ski resort operators present themselves.

Ski resort operators sell a place before they sell a product, so much of their public image is built from the mountain itself: lifts, groomed runs and snow-covered peaks, photographed and published by the companies themselves. The corporate site of Alterra Mountain Company goes a step further, printing map coordinates beside its mountain images. Each resort’s own pages carry the practical layer — lift and run status, webcams and a trail map. When Deer Valley added 200 acres and seven runs for its 2026/27 season, Alterra announced them by acreage and by the name of the new lift.

Naming is a large part of the work. Trails, lifts and bowls carry their own names, and new lifts are announced by name: Deer Valley’s Keetley Express and Hail Peak Express are two from its recent expansion. Above the resorts sit pass products. Vail Resorts’ Epic Pass and Alterra’s Ikon Pass, launched in January 2018, group many mountains under one season pass, and Alterra says the Ikon Pass now reaches more than 70 destinations. Pass tiers, partner days and reservation rules become part of the vocabulary skiers learn.

Digital tools extend that system. Resort websites invite visitors to download a mobile app, and some groups have bought the technology behind their sales: Alterra says it acquired Aspenware, a resort e-commerce and technology business, in May 2022. At Alterra, loyalty is framed through pass benefits, such as an extra night for pass holders who stay three nights at Deer Valley and discounted lift tickets for friends and family.

Behind the resort names sits a quieter corporate layer of pages on owners, leadership, values and portfolios. When Alterra was named in 2018, The Denver Post reported that the aim was not to forge a new brand but to build a platform that would elevate the individuality of each resort. Deer Valley’s own website keeps its name up front and links to Alterra Mountain Company in its footer.

A family-owned resort inside a Michigan company.

Big Sky Resort is owned by Boyne Resorts, which describes itself as independent and family owned and operated. On its website the company dates its start to a land purchase in northern Michigan in 1947 by Everett Kircher, who developed Boyne Mountain there, and says it is still owned and led by the Kircher family, with Stephen Kircher as chief executive. Middleton wrote in 2023 that the Kircher family and Boyne had owned and run Big Sky for 47 of its 50 years in business. In 2026 Explore Big Sky named Troy Nedved as the resort’s president and chief operating officer.

The resort’s presentation leans on its single peak. Its press kit calls Lone Peak “iconic,” describes 300 degrees of skiing from the summit, and says the resort has North America’s most technologically advanced lift network, which is the company’s own description. Ikon Pass and Mountain Collective holders can ski there, English Wikipedia notes, and Middleton wrote that the resort joined national ski pass programmes as part of keeping up with changing times.

For a design guide, Big Sky Resort shows how a name borrowed from a state nickname and one recognisable mountain can carry a resort through five decades and a change of owner. Compare Boyne Resorts, the family company that has owned it since 1976, and Jackson Hole, another Northern Rockies resort with an aerial tram. For this guide we use deep ink blue, a sky blue, a pine green and snowfield white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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