Posted on: Saturday, January 1, 2005
Yellowstone Club lures big rollers to Big Sky privacy
By Sallie Hofmeister
Los Angeles Times
BIG SKY, Mont. —There's no dry cleaner here, no car wash, nowhere to get a blow dry or a manicure. Looking for a sushi restaurant? You'll have to settle for a buffalo burger at the Corral Bar & Grill. The closest place to park your private plane is at the airport in Bozeman, an hour's drive down a two-lane road.
Big Sky is no Aspen, Colo. But the super rich are flocking here anyway.
The lure: the Yellowstone Club, a private, millionaires-only resort community whose amenities more than make up for Big Sky's lack of a traffic light or a designer boutique. Occupying 22 square miles of mostly wilderness, it's the only private club in America that owns a ski mountain and a world-class golf course.
News Corp. President Peter Chernin joined two years ago, and just before Christmas, he and his family stayed for the first time in their newly built house, on a double lot near the top of Andesite Mountain. Next door, Steven Burke, the president of Comcast Corp., is planning to break ground on his new home this spring. Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp., owns the two lots next to Burke's.
"Sometimes you have to pay to play," says the Yellowstone Club's Web site, which explains that in exchange for an initiation fee of $250,000, a required property purchase of $1 million to $10 million and annual dues of $16,000, members enjoy a gated wonderland that offers 40 hiking and biking trails, rivers perfect for fly-fishing and an 18-hole course designed by former pro Tom Weiskopf, who is a member.
So few skiers use the 2,700 feet of vertical slopes that a blizzard can take weeks to pack down, guaranteeing so much untracked snow that the club has trademarked the slogan "Private Powder."
Perhaps as important, the resort, whose borders are discreetly patrolled by helicopter, employs a 28-year veteran of the Secret Service as its "director of privacy."
"Once you go there, you have to join," said Brad Howard, a Los Angeles real-estate developer and Yellowstone Club member who is building a $6 million home, complete with an artist's studio for his wife.
But when he first applied, he admitted, "I wondered if they would like me."
That's because just being rich does not guarantee entry. Members also must heed the personal motto of Yellowstone Club founder and timber magnate Timothy Blixseth: Check your ego at the door.
"I've given some members warnings. I've returned some checks," said Blixseth, 54, who said his ideal Yellowstone Club applicant possesses not only a minimum of $3 million in liquid assets (a membership requirement), but also impeccable manners. "Our target member is a good, down-to-earth, humble person who is thankful for his or her success ... No jerks allowed."
This marketing strategy — call it only-nice-rich-people-need-apply — sets the Yellowstone Club apart from other enclaves, from Malibu, Calif., to Maui, where the very privileged gather.
The Yellowstone Club wouldn't exist but for two clever deals that Blixseth executed in the 1990s that together made for one of the largest government land swaps in history.
By that time, Blixseth — a high-school dropout who grew up on welfare in rural Oregon — had made a fortune in the timber business, gone bankrupt, and become a millionaire all over again. Making his primary residence in Rancho Mirage, Calif., he built Porcupine Creek, a 240-acre private golf course, in his back yard.
Then, he and his business partners made a trade with federal officials, who wanted to prevent development of 164,000 acres the businessmen owned adjacent to Yellowstone National Park. In exchange, the entrepreneurs received about 100,000 acres in the Bozeman-Big Sky area.
The influx of millionaires has caused some tensions. Some old-timers worry that the jet-setters will destroy the small-town serenity of Big Sky.
