About 50 miles south of the Bozeman, a gondola will take you to the top of Big Sky and it opens up more than 5,000 vertical feet of uninterrupted skiing.
In the early 1950s this was part of the Huntley Ranch. Chet traded the then potential ski resort for Chrysler Motor Company stock. They, in turn, immediately installed a few chairlifts that only went up to where the mountain got steep, built a bunch of condominiums and named it Big Sky. It would be many years before the gondola to the summit was installed and the entire mountain could be enjoyed.
In 1997, Pioneer Peak to the south and its surrounding 14,000 acres began to be developed as the world’s only private ski and golf resort when it installed five chairlifts and began selling vacant lots to fund the development of the Yellowstone Club. Adjacent to Big Sky on the north side, Moonlight Basin, became yet another ski resort with several chairlifts, a great lodge and condominiums and private homes.
At the Yellowstone Club hundreds of trucks enter the club property every day to service the construction industry at this resort. There are 750 employees to manage the facility. It takes a lot of people working hard to give a skier freedom on the side of a hill. It takes a crew of about 60 to run the 15 chairlifts and 36 ski patrolmen to keep you safe on the 14,000 acres of ski runs no matter what the snow conditions are.
Big Sky has 22 chairlifts, accommodations for thousands of people in many condominiums and hotel rooms. Restaurants have a large payroll of hundreds of employees. The number of men and women involved is substantial and is an economic boost to where most of them live, down in the Bozeman area.
At Moonlight Basin, which has five chairlifts, there are accommodations for many more in condominiums and private homes.
One thing that Montana does not have is lots of people and congested highways. Barely 1 million live in the state. The marketing and advertising budget for this entire ski complex is probably somewhat less than a single Colorado resort.
When I first discovered this part of the ski world there was almost no one here. The Yellowstone Club was a startup ski resort and during the first five years I skied here, a crowded day would be less than a half- dozen people riding the chairlifts. What’s not to like about that?
After turning right and left for 73 years, I broke my back three or four years ago and had to quit skiing altogether. Now I spend my time writing about how many permanent jobs can be created by simply building a road to a mountain and opening up for ski resort development.
I have not yet factored into this job creation story the number of people who have settled down in the Big Sky Meadow and the large number of retail stores that have been built. For example there is a K-12 school, a 350-seat performing arts center with full of state-of-the-art equipment, a motion picture theater, numerous restaurants and accommodations for 1,700 employees.
A brand-new hospital with an emergency ward is under construction and all of the equipment that a large city hospital has with an emergency helicopter service to Bozeman or anywhere else. There are now three markets and, according to the Big Sky property owner’s association, there are dozens of commercial structures in the Big Sky Meadow. It’s hard for me to remind myself that when I came here in ‘97 for the first time and moved here in 1999 that all of this job creation that is going on today, has occurred since then and it is all based on the undeniable fact that the best freedom of all can be found on the side of a hill covered with snow with a chairlift to get you back to the top.
Let’s hear it for job creation of a simple kind.