Sorting an assoiative Array

Hi, I need to get the highest value of a hash. I first just wanted to do an arsort and then access the first value with $data[0], which didn´t work. I guess you can´t access associative arrays by index. So I found this way to do it (as the $data array needs to remain unchanged):

         $temp=$data;
         arsort ($temp);
         $max=reset($temp);

Is there really no shorter way to do it?? Pat