There’s no way this Big Sky Resort will last as a business, Martel remembered thinking. It was an hour away from Bozeman and lift tickets were $2, twice as expensive as Bridger Bowl, he recalled.

It wasn’t until Gary and Martel were riding the lift that they realized they had perhaps the ultimate one-up on early rising skiers in Gallatin County. After checking out which chair number they were riding — because the two always liked to ride either the first or last chair — Martel looked down and saw his lift ticket read “000002.” Gary’s read “000001.”

The two had bought the first lift tickets printed at Big Sky Resort.

“I keep mine in a little spot at the house, kind of a memory,” Martel said.

Aside from Lone Peak towering over the resort, Big Sky in 2014 is almost completely different from what it was 40 years ago.

Back then, there were four lifts, including a gondola, and a handful of buildings. A group that included Chrysler, Northwest Airlines, General Electric and the Montana Power Co. owned and operated the resort. Martel was nearly correct about its business prospects. Big Sky’s first few years saw a recession and an energy crisis and the death of its figurehead, Chet Huntley.

Now it has 22 lifts, a tram, hundreds of buildings and is owned and operated by Boyne Resorts, a family owned business based in Michigan.

“It could’ve folded,” said Doug Bing, owner and president of Blue Ribbon Builders, a company he founded in 1975, one year after first arriving in Big Sky for work. “With Boyne picking it up (in 1976)… it was a major turning point.”

And since last fall, the resort’s future is as secure as it has ever been. Boyne partnered with CrossHarbor Capital Partners, a Boston-based investment firm that owns the ultra-exclusive Yellowstone Club and Black Bull Run outside Bozeman, to buy Moonlight Basin and the nearby Spanish Peaks community.

The move closed about a month before Big Sky Resort opened for its 40th winter season, giving it more than 250 named runs covering more than 5,750 acres and 4,350 vertical feet, making it one of the largest ski resorts in North America.

Secure, if unknown

The move brings all of Lone Peak under one ski area for the first time. But that’s about the only confirmed result of the transaction. Neither Boyne nor CrossHarbor are releasing information about developing the area, other than to say that future development will be coordinated across the area.

“This is a patient and thoughtful process. Everyone is spending a lot of time getting input, exploring options and thinking about what’s best,” Taylor Middleton, Big Sky’s general manager, wrote in an email to the Chronicle.

Middleton, who was suffering from laryngitis this past week, went on to explain in the email that both Sam Byrne, CrossHarbor’s managing partner, and Stephen Kircher, president of Boyne Eastern Operations, are long-term thinkers who are passionate about the skiing industry and the Big Sky community.

However it develops, Big Sky and its surrounding community will continue to have an outsized impact on southwest Montana’s economy. Big Sky brought in $1.2 million in bed tax revenue through the first nine months of 2013, according to the most recent numbers from the Montana Department of Commerce. That accounts for nearly 20 percent of all the money raised by the tax on hotel and motel rooms in the Yellowstone region. The region includes five counties: Gallatin, Park, Sweetgrass, Stillwater and Carbon.

Big Sky’s 3 percent sales tax brought in more than $3 million last year, according to the Big Sky Resort Tax Board, which collects and administers the tax. The money is divided among projects in the community and goes toward emergency services, parks, trails and tourism development in the unincorporated community that straddles Gallatin and Madison counties. Collections in the first half of the 2014 fiscal year are up 21 percent from that, Middleton said.

“There is an incredible economic engine in Yellowstone Country and in Gallatin County specifically,” said Mike Garcia, director of Voices of Montana Tourism. “I can only imagine that it’s going to grow significantly.”

He noted that tourism is about a $3.3 billion industry in Montana and that Gallatin County accounts for more than $550 million of that figure.

“The economic driver of Big Sky is maybe not fully appreciated by most people,” said Ryan Hamilton, project manager for the Big Sky Town Center.

“You appreciate it when you have a downturn. When it goes away, you can feel it,” added Bill Simkins, the town center’s developer.

And right now, area developers appreciate that Big Sky is out of the recession.

Builders are starting to turn to pre-Great Recession business practices, such as constructing condominiums and homes on a speculative basis, said Doug Bing, owner of Blue Ribbon Builders.

He feels the consolidation of all the public resorts in southern Gallatin County is going to be the third-biggest moment in directing the area’s future. The previous two, in Bing’s view, were Boyne purchasing Big Sky Resort and the Yellowstone Club forming in the mid-1990s, which he called “a substantial shot in the arm for the resort.”

“I think all the remaining players here, and the new players, I think they’re all kind of on the same page,” Bing said. “You must be a lover of the outdoors. That’s our greatest asset here… It’s also what I hope remains.”

He’s also confident the area will retain its character. It already has retained that sense of wilderness, Bing said, despite the growth its felt over 40 years, going from a dirt road leading up to a handful of lifts to a community that grew 89 percent between 2000 and 2010 and that is breaking ground on a hospital.

“That’s not bad for a place that had a dude ranch, a one-room school, and a couple of roadside taverns 40 years ago,” Middleton said in an email.

‘World-class terrain’

The biggest change over 40 years is the amount of skiing.

Martel, who’s now in charge of 150 employees around Montana as president of Martel Construction, remembered being apprehensive when the resort opened up skiing off Lone Peak with the tram in 1995.

“(My brother and I) made a couple turns down it and turned to each other and said, ‘This was a really, really good idea,’” Martel said. “It’s world-class terrain.”

Gary now lives in Seattle and works as general counsel of MultiCare Health System. He and his family ski Crystal Mountain, another Boyne-owned resort, that’s about 80 miles southeast of Seattle. But he and Martel still get together at least once a year to ski the mountains around Bozeman.

“The development has created an amazing skier’s mountain. It’s not very crowded at all,” Gary said.

It’s unclear what the development will mean for other Montana ski hills and winter tourism as a whole in the Treasure State. The state office of tourism launched a “Go Deeper” campaign to promote Montana as a ski area this winter, timed almost perfectly with the Big Sky-Moonlight merger.

Jeff Schmidt, general manager of Red Lodge Mountain and head of the Montana Ski Areas Association, said the association is “pleased to see Spanish Peaks operating again, as well as stabilization to the Moonlight terrain and community.” He added that the spring association meeting will include a discussion of how those changes have affected the area’s skiing community.

Whatever the future holds for Big Sky and its impact on southwest Montana, it’ll likely include those first two ticket holders.

“If all goes well, we stay in good health, that’s what we’ll do when we get old,” Gary said.

Jason Bacaj may be reached at jasonb@dailychronicle.com or 582-2635.