Laurie and I had accompanied the entire Kircher family to Las Vegas to see their father and husband inducted into the National Ski Hall of Fame. This is an honor that he should have received forty years ago.

I first met Everett Kircher in the spring of 1948 at Sun Valley Idaho. Pappy Rogers, the general manager of Sun Valley, had decided to sell the twelve-year- old, Dollar Mountain chairlift. It was the first one ever built anywhere in the world, and its old wooden towers and metal sheaves were going to be torn down and moved to Michigan by Everett.

Pappy Rogers wanted $5,000 for the lift, but Everett beat him down to $4,800. Then Everett and his ski school director, Victor Gottschalk, started taking the lift apart bold by bolt. They eventually took several tons of ski lift stuff to nearby Ketchum ID and put it all into a Union Pacific freight car. Once it got to Michigan they would put it up on a mountain that Everett had bought from a farmer for $1 because it was too steep to grow potatoes.

Eight months later in December of 1948, Boyne Mountain opened with large billboard signs proclaiming that it was the highest mountain in Michigan, at an altitude of 410 feet! In 1954 when Everett hired Stein Eriksen to run his ski school, big time skiing arrived in the Midwest.

By then, the single chairlift had been converted to a double and during its long life, it was converted into a triple, then a quad chairlift, and finally into the first six-passenger chairlift in the world. Today the same drive shaft and crown gears that drove the original 1936 Sun Valley chairlift are driving that six-passenger lift.

In about 1956, Everett was fishing in Tennessee where he discovered the town of Gatlinburg and decided to lease the nearby mountain. He then bought his second antique chairlift from Sugar Bowl in California for $11,000. He moved it to Tennessee and started running it as soon as Boyne closed for the winter. He charged $5 for a ride up the lift in the summer. This gave Everett a twelve-month source of income…something no other ski resort owner in America has ever had.

Since those days, his four children, Steve, John, Amy, and Kathy have taken over running the ski and golf business. They have expanded Boyne Mountain ownership into other ski resorts making it the largest family held, ski resort company in America. They own and operate Boyne Mountain, Boyne Highlands, Gatlinburg Tennessee, Crystal Mountain, Snoqualmie Summit, Alpental, and Hyak in Washington, Brighton in Utah, Cypress Bowl in British Columbia, Big Sky, Montana, and just recently they purchased Loon Mountain in New York, along with Sugarloaf and Sunday River in Maine. They also own and operate eleven golf courses stretching from Florida to Michigan.

To put that many ski resorts in perspective, on Saturday, January 26, 2008 they sold over 77,000 ski lift tickets in one day. However the electric bill to run the snow making machinery at Loon in New York for just the month of December was $965,000, which helped provide a lot of freedom and fun for a lot of people

Unfortunately we lost Everett six years ago to kidney failure after he had been on a dialysis machine for ten years. Just one week before he died he was deer hunting, and he shot and killed an eight-point buck with a crossbow.

Everett set the tone, method, and style for recycling stuff sixty years ago with purchase of that original Sun Valley ski lift. His sons, John and Steve, even recycled the Gondola from Palisades Tahoe.

Recycling is a good idea.


Editor’s Note: This is one in a Tahoetopia series written by Warren Miller, legendary ski cinematographer. For other columns by Warren, click on Warren Miller.