By Jean Arthur
Cover photo courtesy of Big Sky Resort
From 11,166 feet above sea level, the view of several mountain ranges will include a new-this-winter glassy spectacle below snow boots of one of North America’s most challenging double black diamond runs, so steep it seems like a Montana mountain-man tale.
Thanks to Big Sky Resort’s glass Kircliff viewing platform at the top of Lone Peak and Lone Peak Tram, skiers, riders and foot passengers can catch mystical sights from a steel and glass box at mountain summit. A 360-degree blink reveals Montana, Idaho and Wyoming mountain ranges, plus an over-the-toes glimpse of shredders on triple-black diamond run Big Couloir.
Kircliff’s viewshed also includes Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, where the legendary explorer, mountain man and storyteller Jim Bridger found his way among the steaming, bubbling and erupting landscape after scouting and fur trading in the early 1800s.
Bridger, the raconteur, described shooting at an elk. The bullet mysteriously missed. Bridger moved closer to the ungulate only to discover a wall of glass that acted like a giant telescope. He claimed the elk was actually 25 miles away. He also spun a yarn claiming to have discovered a petrified forest with petrified birds singing petrified songs. Yellowstone indeed has glass Obsidian Cliffs and a petrified forest, remnants of pyroclastic activity thousands of years ago.
Just a few dozen miles from Yellowstone’s northwestern boundary, Big Sky Resort will crank up the new 10-person Explorer Gondola on Dec. 20, 2025, which now reaches the Lone Peak Tram base for a village-to-summit lift network. Non-skiers can ride both Explorer and then the tram to the summit of Lone Mountain and the new glass indoor observation space. Explorer Gondola replaces an original 1973 double chairlift as the resort celebrates 52 years of skiing and riding, and a bit of the old mountain men-explorations too, from glass, cantilevered off the mountain’s edge. https://www.bigskyresort.com/
