Boyne Resorts Brand Guidelines: A 1947 Michigan Ski Hill, a Sun Valley Chair & Big Sky

One run, one chairlift and a warming hut.

Boyne Resorts began in northern Michigan in 1947. English Wikipedia names its founders as Everett Kircher, Jim Christianson and John Norton, who bought a steep hill in the north of the state; Philip Potempa, writing for the Post-Tribune in December 2024, describes Kircher as a Detroit businessman who bought 40 wooded acres from a state senator who thought a ski hill an odd idea. The company’s own pages differ on the date: its home page says it was founded in 1947, while its history page says Kircher founded it in 1948 and that it has been family owned since 1948.

The first lift came from Idaho. The founders bought a single chairlift from Sun Valley, the resort the Union Pacific Railroad built in 1936, and moved it to Michigan. The company says it arrived by train in 1947 and calls it the first chairlift ever built, a description the Post-Tribune repeated in 2024, adding that parts of it are still in use. At the start Boyne Mountain had one run, that chairlift and a small warming hut, the paper says. The company dates the official opening to 1949.

The early decades were about Michigan and machinery. The company says Kircher developed a snowmaking machine, the Boyne Snowmaker, in the 1950s. In 1954 Boyne opened a scenic chairlift at Gatlinburg in Tennessee as a year-round attraction. It bought the Harbor Highlands ski area in 1961, the company says — later Boyne Highlands and now The Highlands — and installed a triple chairlift there in 1963, which the Post-Tribune described as the first triple chairlift in the world. A four-person chairlift followed at Boyne Mountain, dated 1964 by the company and 1965 by the paper. Golf came next: the Heather course at Boyne Highlands, designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr, opened in 1966. The Norwegian racer Stein Eriksen taught skiing at Boyne Mountain from 1955, the Post-Tribune reported, and a restaurant at the resort carries his name.

Big Sky, Utah, Maine and a buy-back.

Boyne moved west in 1976, when it bought Big Sky Resort in Montana, which had opened in December 1973; English Wikipedia says Boyne had earlier passed on chances to buy Telluride and Jackson Hole, and that Kircher transferred ownership of the company to his children the same year. Brighton, outside Salt Lake City in Utah, followed — in 1986 according to English Wikipedia, in 1987 according to the company. Crystal Mountain in Washington joined in 1997, and Cypress Mountain near Vancouver, the company’s first Canadian resort, in 2001; Cypress was the venue for the freestyle skiing and snowboard events of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

The largest step came in 2007. Boyne bought Sunday River and Sugarloaf in Maine from the American Skiing Company, and took over the leases on The Summit at Snoqualmie in Washington and Loon Mountain in New Hampshire, using sale-and-leaseback arrangements with CNL Income Properties for several of its resorts, English Wikipedia says. In 2016 CNL sold the six leased ski resorts to Och-Ziff Capital Management, and in March 2018 Boyne bought them back, along with the Gatlinburg attraction. Crystal Mountain left the group in 2017 through a share exchange within the founding family and passed to Alterra Mountain Company in 2018, the same source says. In 2021 Boyne added Shawnee Peak in Maine and, the company says, went back to its original name, Pleasant Mountain.

Lifts remain the company’s favourite way to tell its story. Its timeline lists the Lone Peak Tram at Big Sky in 1995, the eight-seat Ramcharger 8 chair at Big Sky in 2018, and nine new lifts across its resorts in 2023, including a new 75-passenger Lone Peak Tram. Away from the snow, it opened SkyBridge Michigan at Boyne Mountain in October 2022, a pedestrian suspension bridge 1,200 feet long and 118 feet high, the Post-Tribune reported, after opening the Gatlinburg SkyBridge in Tennessee in 2019, the company says.

Mountains, lifts and the companies that run them.

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 parent above independent mountain names.

Boyne Resorts is still owned by the Kircher family, with Stephen Kircher as chief executive, the company says, and the Post-Tribune described the business as family-owned in December 2024. English Wikipedia places its base at Boyne Falls, and the company’s website gives a Petoskey address. English Wikipedia counts ten ski resorts in six US states and British Columbia, from Big Sky in Montana and Sugarloaf in Maine to Cypress Mountain near Vancouver; the company also lists golf courses, the Inn at Bay Harbor on Lake Michigan, Gatlinburg SkyPark in Tennessee and the Boyne Country Sports shops. It calls itself the largest independent mountain resort company in North America.

The company presents its properties as separate brands. Its destinations page says each one celebrates “its unique character and local heritage,” and each resort trades under its own name and website. What ties them together for guests is BoyneRewards, a loyalty programme that the company says spans eleven of its locations, with points earned and spent on skiing, golf, dining, shopping and lodging.

For a design guide, Boyne Resorts shows how a family company can keep a quiet parent name above a set of independent mountain brands. Compare Big Sky Resort, the Montana resort it has owned since 1976, and Jackson Hole, another American resort with family owners. For this guide we use a pine green, a lake blue and a chairlift red with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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