Peak Experience -- Tram Enhances Big Sky's European Flavor, Provides Access To Tantalizing, Untamed 11,161-Foot Lone Peak Summit

BIG SKY, Mont. - The tram car rose, like an elevator with windows, above the cliffs of Lone Mountain, centerpiece of Montana's Big Sky Resort. Most of the shattered rock and snow below was unskiable. A boulder trundling from the top terminal would bounce two or three times, no more - then a long silence - before snuffing into the basin snowfields 1,400 feet below.

The cable slowed, and the 15-passenger car docked at a summit station blasted from vertical rock. Two skiers worked their way down The Big Couloir, the only snake of uninterrupted snow through the north-side cliffs. They looked like ants sliding down a frozen hallway between rock walls. Couloir is French for "hallway" or "corridor."

For practical and political reasons, timberline has been the ceiling for new lifts, while up above, summit pyramids stand inaccessible, aloof, out of bounds. This Big Sky tram is unique in the American West. It's reminiscent of the Alps, where ski lifts, including trams, some of them big enough to hold 120 people, go boldly to the top, way up above the tree line to the highest, least-tamed skiing there is.

In one sweeping, Austrian-engineered stroke last year, Big Sky opened the most Euro-like skiing experience in the United States. By "Euro," I mean the peak experience. You step off the tram at 11,150 feet. Twenty steps and 16 vertical feet higher is the summit proper - Lone Peak - a wind-blown snow cone with room for a dozen people and views in every direction.

There, at the base of the lifts, like miniatures on a model train set, are the clustered buildings of the Mountain Village: a compact commercial core, one high-rise hotel and about 1,500 condo units set among the pines. The Montana sky is indeed big; it is huge, especially from the peak, where you feel as if you have been thrust up on the tip of the world.

By "Euro," I also mean ungroomed, unapologetic, even dangerous terrain - not just the radical test piece of The Big Couloir, which requires checking in with the ski patrol and carrying avalanche rescue gear - but miles of unbounded, soul-freeing slopes on the south and east sides. There are no trees, no trails per se, just snow and rock and place names like Hanging Wall, The Wave, Bone Crusher and Dictator Chutes. In a twist on the rules of cool at other, less precipitous ski areas, many of Big Sky's hottest skiers wear helmets.

Lone Mountain and thousands of acres at its base are privately owned, a remnant of 19th-century railroad grants that checkerboard southwestern Montana. No permission to build the tram was required.

Big Sky's general manager, a quick, boyish, 38-year-old Michigan native named John Kircher, pilots the corporate jet and lives in an 800-square-foot cabin six miles down the valley. He lives to ski and he skis every day, very fast.

He knew the resort didn't need to go to the summit to be successful. An isolated, purpose-built, family-oriented destination with a reputation for ego-soothing, intermediate runs, Big Sky had grown modestly but steadily for nine years. Kircher suspected that with the extreme weather and terrain up there, the tram might not pay for itself for a long time.

It wasn't, strictly speaking, a practical move. But he just couldn't shake the power of the peak, a white triangle above a dark pine carpet. It dominates every photograph of the condo village, the lake, the golf course. Lone Mountain already symbolized Big Sky. Why not deliver people, including himself, right to the point of its cone?

It didn't hurt that, in so doing, Big Sky can now claim the "most total vertical feet" in American skiing, eclipsing Jackson Hole's 4,139 by 41 feet. There is a trick to the math. Jackson's vertical is all one piece, top to bottom; ski it without stopping if you can. To experience Big Sky's total vertical, you have to ski from the peak to the village - a substantial 3,650 vertical feet - then ride up onto adjacent Andesite Mountain and ski to its lowest point. Call it "continuous skiable vertical" vs. "total vertical feet." It's a marketing ploy to be sure, but now that Big Sky has joined the truly big boys, there is no shame in exploiting the numbers. Even the Euros do it.

The tram fits in at Big Sky in another way. For a resort so identified with a Western gestalt, it actually has deep European, specifically Austrian, roots. NBC anchorman Chet Huntley, a Montana native, was the force behind the initial development. But Huntley died a year after the lifts opened in 1973, and his corporate partners decided to sell. The new owner was, and still is, Boyne USA, the Kircher family corporation that also owns Boyne Mountain and Boyne Highlands ski resorts in Michigan as well as the Brighton ski area in Utah.

In 1976, Everett Kircher, John's father, sent Salzburg native Robert Kirschlager from the ski school at Boyne Mountain out west to run the school in Big Sky. The soft-spoken Austrian has been there ever since, as ski school director for 20 years and, now that the reins are firmly in the hands of his protege, Hans Schernthaner, as the more ceremonial director of skiing.

Austrian-run ski schools were the norm in America, starting in the 1930s when disciples of the great Hannes Schneider crossed the pond to proselytize in the ranges of the New World. Their discipline and camaraderie were at the heart - some would say the romantic soul -of the early years in U.S. skiing. But such schools are the exception today after decades of Americanization.

At Big Sky, where half of the full-time staff is Austrian, the atmosphere at morning lineup is formal, precise; no instructor dares be late. And, once out on the piste, there is no question about who is the client and who is the boss. There is also a sense of style that is missing at many American ski areas, an abiding sense of skiing as elegant, effortless - albeit important - play. An Austrian folk ensemble might be playing at lunch. And your instructor, in the Alpine tradition, might stay with you for a drink after skiing. His is a mountain-born grace, and his job, his inheritance, is to share it.

If the mountain and the ski school at Big Sky are Euro-inflected, the clientele most decidedly is not. On my first gondola ride out of the village, my cabin mates were wheat farmers from North Dakota. The kids were sweet, polite and excited, and Mom mentioned how Big Sky was their favorite place to ski and "only" 12 hours from their home on the plains.

"Well, that's if you're speeding, which we were," she said with a blush.

Locals don't let the notoriety that comes with living in what writer William Kitteridge called "the last best place" go to their heads. As I was saying good night to new friends one evening in the Huntley lobby, they showed me a bronze of a bull elk in a little alcove. The animal was about a foot high, with a fine autumn rack, and he was stepping over a downed log in the bronze high country. And there, almost invisible in the tableau, someone with a Montana sense of humor had placed a half dozen, desiccated, real elk droppings.

This is not something, if I had to guess, the Austrians would do.

------------------ Big Sky: If you go ------------------

Big Sky offers guided tours of the radical terrain off the Lone Peak Tram for advanced and expert skiers at $150 for a half day, $250 all day.

Lone Mountain Ranch, six miles from the resort, has 45 miles of groomed and set cross-country track in addition to luxury cabin accommodations (minimum seven-night stay, including all meals, starts at $1,950 for two people).

The only hotel at the Mountain Village, the Huntley Lodge, offers simple comfort, walk-to-the-lifts convenience, indoor/outdoor swimming pool, a dining room with grand views of the peak, and nightly poker (low-stakes gambling is legal in Montana) in Chet's Bar. Rooms: $169-$245 double occupancy; packages available.

Right next door is the pricier and more opulent Shoshone Condo/Hotel: $289-$512 per room, double occupancy; packages available. Three hotels and more condos are available down the valley in the Meadow Village with free shuttle service to the mountain.

Buck's T-4 restaurant and hotel, on U.S. Highway 191, 15 minutes from the resort, is famous for its gourmet wild game and Montana steaks.

Yellowstone National Park is just 18 miles south. The 4x4 Stage runs daily shuttles to the West Yellowstone gateway, where visitors can arrange snowmobile and snow-coach tours.

There are 100 flights a week into Bozeman's Gallatin Field, 43 miles from Big Sky. Airlines include Northwest, Delta, Horizon and Skywest.

Big Sky Resort Central Reservations: 800-548-4486.