Big Sky Lone Peak summit
— — the air that thins to nothing at the tram door.
Not only on a wall.
“The summit sits at 11,166 feet, reached by a small steel tram that climbs the last thousand vertical feet of granite. From the top the Spanish Peaks fall away east, the Tetons rise small in the south, and Yellowstone country opens north. People step out, walk three paces, and stop talking. The wind has its own schedule up there.
Big Sky Lone Peak summit, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Lone Peak is the 11,166-foot summit at the south end of the Madison Range, anchoring Big Sky Resort in southwestern Montana. The peak rises above the Gallatin National Forest and looks south toward the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. Since 1995 a tram has carried skiers and summer hikers the final 1,450 feet from the upper mountain to the summit ridge, making it one of the few eleven-thousand-foot summits in the lower forty-eight reachable without a rope or a long approach.
At eleven thousand feet the air carries about two-thirds the oxygen of sea level, and visitors who fly in from lower altitudes often feel it within the first hundred steps. The tram crosses an exposed ridge above the Headwaters, and the wind there is consistently stronger than anywhere else on the mountain. Pilots staging out of Bozeman Yellowstone International, about an hour north, read the lenticular caps over the summit as a weather tell for the whole Gallatin Range below.
The Lone Peak Tram runs through the winter ski season and a shortened summer window, weather permitting. Tickets are sold separately from a lift pass and are capped; the cabin holds fifteen riders and runs on a fixed schedule. The base village sits at Mountain Village, about an hour south of Bozeman on US 191 through the Gallatin Canyon. Big Sky Resort operates the tram; the surrounding peaks fall under Custer Gallatin National Forest jurisdiction.