Virtual Time Machine—An Ode to the Lone Peak Tram

An Ode to the Lone Peak Tram

Story and Visuals by Bob Allen

Big Sky Resort will open next Wednesday with much fanfare. After 27 years of groundbreaking service and daily non-stops to Lone Peak, the beloved old tram has been retired and replaced this season with a gleamingly new, reconfigured, and relocated, state-of-the-art 75-passenger Doppelmayr masterpiece that will forever change the flavor and character of skiing the Peak.

In anticipation of this ambitious resort milestone sucking all of the oxygen from the ski media in the coming weeks, allow me to offer a virtual throwback tribute to the tin can that Big Sky skiers grew to love. More importantly, the gargantuan big mountain terrain that it accessed.

Back in the day, the rumors of lift access to the imposing Lone Peak seemed nothing short of pure fantasy. Having hiked to the 11,166 foot summit a handful of times where one run was an all-day-sucker, just the thought of catching a lift to the top inflicted feverish leg burning, hot-lap dreams.

As the creator made Lone Peak. April, 1995 - prior to dynamite.

Gondola broken? Just drag guests to The Bowl.

If the wait staff and bartenders on this mission had cell phones, we would have called in late for our shifts as we got lost AF in the lodgepole hell at the bottom of the South Face.

If there were rules to be broken, Alex Jacobi was the man for the job.

Proving critics wrong - doing hard stuff in rear entry boots.

Early-ups are the best.

Who needs explosives? Dave Stergar blowing stuff up.

Dave Stergar. Big Cooler.

An argonaut trenching into the Darkside of the Moonlight

The fantasy officially ended and reality set in on June 1st, 1995 when the commercial helicopter contract kick-started the project in earnest. Shortly thereafter, the peak’s profile was dynamited to make way for the tram’s upper terminal. The goal was to have it fully operational in just 6 short months.

For the skiing public it was as if heli-skiing was suddenly added to a season pass over the summer. The Lone Peak Tram debuted as the best ski gift ever on Christmas Day that year in a simpler time in this corner of the world. Before the bourgeois influence of the Yellowstone Club, it was still the wild west in terms of resort sophistication and destination appeal. The Big Sky ski experience was more duct tape and a whole lot less mink fur trim. One could still see Montana from the summit.

Perched on a bench in The Bowl - that was determined to be an island of safety - the bottom terminal and its space-age concrete and steel architecture was straight out of our childhood Erector® set dreams. On a good day, the 15-passenger cabin could speed up its 2,828 feet of single span cable gaining 1,450' elevation in 5 minutes. Step into the transport device and 300 seconds later step out into a different world where conditions varied between blissfully sublime and vertigo induced shear terror. Time Machine, indeed!

The base structure was so engineered because there was no bedrock in which to anchor it. Buried beneath the Andesite shale is a rock-ice glacier that was predicted to move downhill in the following years potentially throwing the cable out of its specified compliance. The initial lifespan for the original configuration was predicted to be only 10 years. The fact that it lasted for twenty-seven is testament to solid pocket-protected mathematics, back breaking hard work and no shortage of dumb luck.

The retired lower terminal still sits, without cable, like a hub of a wheel with chutes and couloirs radiating out in all directions. Every ski line was visible to those standing in the tram line, a captive peanut gallery if ever there was one. It was immediate SHOW TIME when dropping in from above where you can go from hero to zero with a hook-of-an-edge. Tomahawking yard-sale crashes always received the loudest applause and heckling. Pump the brakes, we’re coming in hot.

Lone Peak revealed its secrets to us slowly. Having left an extensive P-tex trail around the mountain for the better part of three decades, I suffered from the creative ennui that comes from the photographer’s dilemma of been there, shot that. Photos all looked the same—different storm cycle, color of Gore-Tex or top sheet graphics. Disillusioned with inflicting the same photography on a another perfectly good ski day, I longed for a medium to keep me engaged. In 2015 I rekindled a long-time interest in 360° still photo capture.

Unlike the rectangular crop of a traditional still photo where the BTS context is hidden, the challenge when shooting spherical panographs is to make them compositionally interesting in all directions, an infinitely more daunting task. Revisiting old photo haunts with new-found tools and redirected vision provided a proof-of-concept landscape in which to refine technique and craft; shooting full-frame Nikon source images that still require old-school photo chops. My boomer brain suffered greatly the process of learning the backend software required to stitch the images, wrangle AWS storage, and publish spherical .html content in a user-friendly manner. Oof! Old dog, new tricks.

Without further prelude, below, I offer you an Ode to the Lone Peak Tram: An immersive 360° tribute to the magical machine itself, as well as to those who enabled us to ride it. A shout out to the Pro Patrol whose job it is to control some of the steepest, most weather battered inbounds terrain on the planet. Thank you! And here’s to the operations and maintenance crews who kept the wheels spinning all these years, sometimes with just a lick, prayer and the occasional WHACK of a sledge hammer. We appreciate you! At lastly, to all you athletes that put up with the shenanigans in the name of art - buckle up cupcakes, let ‘em rip!

In the face of inevitable change, Lone Peak remains steadfast in its immense badassery.