Yellowstone Club, 3/25/2001

Tony Crocker

Administrator
Staff member
Ski journalists were given an unusual opportunity to ski at the private Yellowstone Club ski area just south of Big Sky. For details on the diverse activities and membership requirements, check their website.

Yellowstone Club's terrain is easily visible while skiing the south side runs from the top of Lone Peak at Big Sky.
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What you notice is 800 acres of impeccably groomed north and east facing runs with 3 high speed quads but almost no people on the hill. There is also a long ridgeline with numerous steep chutes (3 of which we sampled) of around 800 vertical above the groomers, and a gladed backside. There's about 2,000 acres of skiing at an elevation range of 7,200-9,900 feet now, with eventual buildout to 4,000 acres. One can only imagine it with a couple of feet of fresh powder.

Here we approach the club after passing through the security gate.
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Our journalist group of 20 people was probably their busiest day in 2001 since Christmas. Warren Miller was their ski director and gave an introductory speech and answered questions at breakfast in the then modest base lodge. Now that is the site of the Warren Miller Lodge.
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Warren is no longer with us, but now Scot Schmidt is the Yellowstone Club's ski ambassador.

Development progress in 2001: There are 16 mid-mountain cabins for prospective members to stay.
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Nearby is the beautifully decorated Rainbow Lodge for guests and prospective members, carved wooden eagle here by windows with Lone Peak view.
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70 memberships had been sold and the first 20 houses and a lift connecting to Big Sky were to be built in summer 2001. For summer use, a Tom Weiskopf golf course was also built soon thereafter and the Yellowstone Club property contains 14 miles of fly-fishing streams.

Grooming was of impeccable quality but flat spots got sticky about midday with the warm but overcast weather.
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Brandi Miller was the guide for the advanced group:
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Brandi then moved us over to the Pioneer Ridge expert terrain.
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First up was Hourglass Chute.
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Stein's Run was the highlight in terms of snow quality and a sustained steep fall line.
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All of the NASJA members regrouped for a sumptuous lunch at the upper mountain Timberline Lodge, greeted by Marketing Director Charlie Callandar.
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Small world! Charlie was one year behind me in high school at Webb in Claremont. Charlie is still in management at the Yellowstone Club after the tumultuous bankruptcy during the Great Recession.

Here I am before lunch.
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Dick Needham, editor of SKI Magazine for 25 years:

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Dick Needham hired me to write resort guides and snow analyses for the Inside Tracks subscription Newsletter from 1997-2002. These articles qualified me to join North American Snowsports Journalist Association in 1999. I gave Dick a local's tour of Mammoth at my first NASJA annual meeting. Two years later I got the invite to Yellowstone Club in conjunction with NASJA's annual meeting at Big Sky.

NASJA members at Timberline Lodge:
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Recent NASJA president and occasional FTO writer Martin Griff is at left.

After lunch NASJA had a Q&A with some Yellowstone Club representatives.
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Charlie is addressing us here.
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At left is Jon Reveal, who was in charge of mountain operations. Warren Miller visited Jon in a Billings hospital in 2015 and wrote a quite interesting bio article. Jon's health has recovered enough for him to take on the job of reviving the Tamarack resort in Idaho.

After lunch we took a backside groomed run. The backside has open glades at the top, but the trees close out about halfway down, so some trails are cut to a cat track returning to the Lake lift. From the top of Lake my guest Garry Klassen and I left the group and skied to the base.
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We had to hit the road by 3PM because I had a late flight home from Salt Lake.
 
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In slack season I'm adding to archives. I thought my day at the Yellowstone Club would be a good TR to scan and include film print pictures. More background info:

Wikipedia summary history

5 page FTO thread on the bankruptcy

Best detail reference of the bankruptcy in that thread
Unfortunately many of the other articles referenced in that thread have broken links now.

Current Yellowstone Club trail map:
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All of the Pioneer Mt. lifts were there in 2001. Eglise Mt. is relatively new. The lifts/trails in the lower part of the map are "real estate lifts" to provide ski-in ski-out access to homes. Some of those lifts also provide access to Big Sky.

There are about 500 members now. They are still selling new properties, 4,000 - 8,000 foot duplexes or triplexes for $6M - $19M.

Cross Harbor Properties, new owners of the Yellowstone Club, also assisted in bailing out the Spanish Peaks and Moonlight Basin bankruptcies. Those properties are integrated into Big Sky now while Yellowstone Club remains private.
 
What a coincidence; I was thinking about the Yellowstone Club yesterday and about to do a FTO search for it, then I saw this post (I thought that Admin was the one who'd visited YC, not Tony).
 
How tracked up were the steeps? EG one would think only the patrol would even be competent to ski it, but maybe there are one or two uber-rich that actually know how to ski?
 
EMSC":2uf1sr7q said:
How tracked up were the steeps? EG one would think only the patrol would even be competent to ski it, but maybe there are one or two uber-rich that actually know how to ski?

I was there at a very early stage, which is why journalists were invited. No homes had been built yet.
Our journalist group of 20 people was probably their busiest day in 2001 since Christmas.
I don't think we saw anyone else there in 2001 who was not an employee.

I have never bought into the stereotype that there is some kind of inverse relationship between one's bank account and ski ability. The obvious point is that skiing is not and has never been a cheap sport so there are barriers to entry with limited resources. I have also read that a high proportion of expert skiers started before age 10, meaning their parents invested some time and $$$.

Snowave's reference mentions that the average Yellowstone Club owner spends 60 days a year there. I'm sure a lot of that time is in summer but there have to be a significant number of members skiing 20-30 days a season there.

One of the other recent articles mentioned that peak attendance during Christmas Week is about 2,000 members and guests, though I'm sure quite a few of those don't ski much.
 
Snowfall claims are more realistic than at Big Sky.

From Yellowstone Club website:
https://yellowstoneclub.com/ski/":7qfisaig said:
Pioneer Mountain is the star of YC, with a peak elevation of 9,860 feet and an average of more than 300 inches of snowfall each year.

From Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Club":7qfisaig said:
Snowfall averages approximately 300 inches a year and is very consistent from year to year and week to week. Although it is one of the few western ski resorts located east of the continental divide, the area receives consistent light snows. The club's tagline is "Private Powder" and this is made possible by frequent snows and low skier traffic.

I still have the souvenir hat:
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