'Thrill With No Skill' is Boyne Resort’s latest experiential innovation

“Your fourth is here,” said the golf course attendant, smiling.

He’d noticed a Tesla rolling from the practice range to the Heather Course at The Highlands, Boyne USA’s golf and ski resort in Harbor Springs. The electric car’s driver, Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher, soon pulled a driver of his own from his red, white and blue golf bag of clubs covered with matching logoed headcovers from a spring golf trip to Ireland.

The next trip for Kircher, who, like Tesla’s Elon Musk is an innovative disrupter, will be taking Boyne’s senior management on a deep-dive educational and inspirational trip to the Disney Institute in Orlando. He's also fond of quoting “Good to Great” and “Built to Last” author Jim Collins.

Fit and fashionable in window-pane pants, Kircher, a second-generation patriarch CEO – as well as a husband, father and sailor – said he doesn’t get to play much golf. Indeed, a portion of his time on the golf course – one of 10 Boyne operates across its three Northern Michigan resorts – was spent working as he noticed tree branches that needed pruning.

“That limb hanging over the fairway needs to come down,” Kircher called over to Bernie Friedrich, the Michigan Golf Hall of Fame-inducted professional who has managed Boyne’s courses for 40 years.

During a delightful rain delay after the ninth hole, I sipped an Everett’s IPA – the Petoskey-brewed beer named for Kircher’s father - while Kircher corrected signage style at the concession stand.

“Disney wouldn’t do it that way,” he gently explained.

“Stephen is in tune with the big picture and the little details. He doesn’t take his business for granted,” said Kircher’s golf buddy, East Lansing attorney and Lansing Community College Trustee Andrew Abood. On the Ireland trip they, appropriately, drove across the Boyne River for which elements in the Michigan region are named.

There are no snakes in Ireland, but the worldly Kircher tolerated my silly sense of humor when he found the trick, rubber snake I’d hidden on the floor of his golf cart at the Heather Course that morning. When Kircher talked about Boyne USA’s hiring of a scientist known as world’s most sophisticated artificial snowmaker, I proposed a television series in which the acclaimed snowmaker also manufactures blue crystal meth. Kircher even laughed - a little - when I compared Boyne USA’s major new panoramic project – the world’s longest timber-towered suspension bridge, to the classic film “Bridge on the River Kwai.”

“’Skybridge Michigan is one of our exciting, big attractions and it’s about to open this fall. We have a version of it in Gatlinburg, Tennessee which has been a huge success. We found a spot atop Boyne Mountain that set us up for an even bigger reincarnation of that,” explained Kircher, of what he said will become known as “Michigan’s second bridge” after the Mackinac Bridge.

“Skybridge Michigan will be 1,200 feet long, lit at night, and is one of our company's many new ‘Thrill With No Skill’ attractions. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to walk across it but it does take some stomach lining,” said Kircher of Skybridge Michigan which will be 118-feet high but seems much higher since it is stretched above a valley between the peaks of Boyne Mountain’s Disciples and McLouth ski runs. “It looks intimidating and there is a big glass-floored section in the middle you have to cross, so that’s something people will have to get over their fear of.”

Other examples of Boyne’s “Thrill Without Skill” include the Enchanted Trail – a Christmas light walk in the woods; ziplining; water slides; scenic chairlift rides; and, at Boyne’s Big Sky Resort in Montana, the Lone Peak Tram, the cabins of which lift riders up 1,450 vertical feet to the 11,116-foot mountain summit from which guests can see three states and two national parks…including Yellowstone.

Kircher’s main residence is a resort-quality home above nearby Walloon Lake where he lives with his wife Molly and their children just down the lake from Mollie’s father Chuck Clark, the Lansing-based construction mogul.

Boyne Mountain, the company’s first and original property, was founded by Stephen’s late father Everett who secured the property in Boyne Falls for a single dollar 75 years ago. Stephen, through his family’s nature and nurture, is now directing Boyne USA to new heights with plans for decades of constant reinvestment.

“Each of our individual resorts has its own ‘DNA.’ A lot of people probably don’t know that now only about 20% of our business is here in the state of Michigan,” Kircher revealed. “We are fortunate to have expanded Boyne USA to 12 coast-to-coast resorts from Maine to British Columbia.”

Contact Michael Patrick Shiels at MShiels@aol.com His radio program may be found at MiBigShow.com or weekday mornings from 9-noon on WJIM AM 1240.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Boyne Mountain adds 1,200-foot 'Thrill With No Skill' skybridge