The idea for the Big Sky Resort is credited to a famous figure in American journalism. As a Forest Service landscape architect, Gutkoski was present in a small room when legendary NBC newsman Chet Huntley, a native of Whitehall, Montana, proposed building a ski destination at the base of Lone Mountain.
“I remember those initial meetings when Chet laid out his plans. The emphasis was on having a development that would generate jobs and revenue yet be compatible with the surrounding land,” Gutkoski says. “I heard him personally say that he wanted to honor the setting, not detract from it. Who could argue with that?”
In those days, ski resorts were purely about the skiing, and had a limited infrastructure at the foot of the slopes. “You thought of them as almost being benign because the bustle of activity occurred in winter when the wildlife had left the high country. When the snow melted, that’s when the people went away. Ranchers didn’t like grizzlies, but the bears, if they were smart, could avoid conflict,” Gutkoski says. In terms of any year-round residents, there was one man, an old hermit, who lived up the valley, and in the summer there would be a few cowboys and maybe a few horseback riders from some of the dude ranches.
Huntley’s dream was slow to form. Montana, with limited commercial jet service, was considered out of the way compared to the ski hills in Colorado, Utah, and Idaho. By all accounts, Huntley didn’t want to emulate the sprawl that defined those other destinations. But unfortunately, Gutkoski says, Huntley died in 1974 from cancer, and so wasn’t there to influence what followed.
“He loved the character of the land at the base of Lone Mountain and he wanted people to experience a sense of awe for nature, not to have human presence be the dominating impression. I think he was kind of dispirited at the end of his life because the idea had not taken off the way he hoped it would.”
As the 1980s ensued, developers dusted off Huntley’s blueprint and tilted toward something more economically ambitious and lucrative. A network of roads was built and lined with lots. Burlington Northern also started clear-cutting huge swaths of its forested holdings.
The old hermit on the mountain, Gutkoski says, disappeared, and the once quiet valley was replaced by hundreds of homes and condos, presaging thousands more, many owned by out-of-state visitors who only use them as second-home vacation properties a few weeks out of the year. Huntley’s sister told a reporter disdainfully: “He always intended it to be a little community.”
“It happened so fast, in retrospect, the development and the logging, that it kind of made your head spin,” Gutkoski says. “The country I used to know had disappeared. What eventually happened on the flanks of Lone Mountain, I believe, would have Chet Huntley spinning in his grave today. It’s not that the people who bought property and live in Big Sky today aren’t nice people. Most of them are. Most of them came from somewhere else. It’s that they don’t know, can’t understand, what was here before. And I think Chet would really have chafed at the way subsequent events unfolded.”
When Turner was seven years old, his parents moved from Ohio to the Georgia port city of Savannah. The Atlantic coastline of his youth was still largely wild and untouched. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, he saw the low coastal country of Georgia and South Carolina get hit by a hurricane of development. It’s one of the reasons that when Turner purchased St. Phillips Island near Hilton Head, he voluntarily attached a conservation easement to the deed so that the land could never be turned into a cookie-cutter golf course resort.
In 1989, Turner correctly ascertained that similar patterns of development would soon be bearing down on Montana. “It didn’t take a genius to recognize,” he says. “I think a lot of people fantasize about having a place in the mountains. What was surprising was the pace. Nobody in the Southeast thought the southern Carolina coastline would look like Florida, but it happened. In Montana, there was just more to lose.”
Not long afterward, the movie A River Runs Through It, which presented Montana as a fly-fishing paradise, attracted a wave of lifestyle pilgrims. Phones in real estate offices started ringing off the hook.
“Over and over again, Ted has demonstrated himself as a man who possesses impeccable timing,” says Chris Francis, a fish habitat specialist who has helped restore trout streams on a handful of Turner’s ranches and today is Turner’s full-time fly-fishing guide. “Ted got here before the worst kind of real estate speculators did.”
Besides the Flying D and the Bar None, Turner purchased the Snowcrest and Red Rock ranches in western Montana for fishing and bison. Their watersheds had been hammered by bovine hooves. The stream banks were suffering from erosion problems that muddied the water and destroyed trout spawning habitat; the corridors held few trees, and the uplands had been grazed heavily by ranchers compelled to pasture more animals than the conditions could accommodate.
“Eventually, that catches up with you, and the land looks like hell,” Francis says. “Ted never sees a property as it is. He envisions what it’s going to look like next year, in ten years, one hundred years down the road.”
“I didn’t want to change the Flying D,” Turner says. “I wanted it always to remain whole.”
Within months of acquiring it, Turner followed the same strategy as he had with Hope Plantation and St. Phillips in South Carolina. Defying the recommendations of real estate experts, he attached a conservation easement to the property. A conservation easement is a voluntary but binding legal restriction that limits what kind of development can occur. It cannot be undone. Landowners are motivated not only to make sure the property remains undeveloped in perpetuity, but tax incentives better enable land to be passed down from one generation to the next.
His easement on the Flying D, drafted by The Nature Conservancy, made conservation history. It was, at the time, the largest of its kind in the country and left some people, used to the old way of thinking, scratching their heads. Some in the Montana real estate industry told Turner that he was making a mistake by encumbering his ability to develop the Flying D to its “highest and fullest potential”—code for potentially slicing it up into tinier pieces if he needed to generate cash. According to the laws, Turner was entitled to save a few million dollars in taxes for diminishing the value of the Flying D by not developing it. But over the coming decade as he increased his charitable giving, he didn’t need those deductions. Some have accused Turner of shrewdly parlaying the easement into a tax advantage, but as his financial advisors point out: If Turner were really that concerned about cutting corners in order to bolster his bank account, it would have been folly to put an easement on the place to begin with. He was motivated, they said, by something other than money.
Soon enough, Montanans would come to understand the accuracy of Turner’s fears.
The battle between citizen conservationists and developers is occurring in most every community in America to varying degrees. But the contrast between Turner and Tim Blixseth is regarded by many as paradigmatic.
In considering these two property owners, it’s important first to consider how frontier policies from the nineteenth century continue to reverberate. After the Civil War, congressional and presidential priorities were to spur settlement and build an intercontinental railroad. The federal government gave railroad companies forestland as inducement, properties that could be timbered for track ties, lumber, and commercial sale. As a result, in Montana and elsewhere, a checkerboard of railroad lands overlaid huge stretches of national forest.
Imagine this alternating pattern stretching for hundreds of miles, wherever track line was built. One stretch reached from the outskirts of Bozeman up the Gallatin Canyon past the Flying D, paralleling the Gallatin River past Big Sky to the western edge of Yellowstone National Park. The private checkerboard squares were often located inside larger national forest boundaries.
When the twentieth century arrived, the checkerboard pattern became a major impediment to sound
, cohesive ecological management. It’s difficult to act in the public’s interest—protecting wildlife habitat, safeguarding watersheds, and fighting forest fires—on private ground. It’s also possible for private ground to be liquidated of its trees right in the middle of important elk range or along a river.
Often the solution, embraced by government agencies and the railroads alike, is to swap land in a way that enables parcels to be consolidated into contiguous blocks. In southwest Montana during the late 1980s, Plum Creek Corporation, the real estate spinoff of Burlington Northern, let it be known that it was open to bargaining. The company had 165,000 acres and a sawmill in Belgrade, Montana. Some of its prime sections were located in the Bridger, Gallatin, and Madison mountain ranges around Bozeman, including terrain that almost abutted the Flying D. Several key sections were located between the Spanish Peaks and Big Sky right in the middle of important corridors for elk, moose, deer, and imperiled species like grizzly bears, wolverines, and lynx.
Turner had a chance to purchase it, his general manager Miller says, but balked, and then later regretted it. “In the moment, none of us knew what would happen on that parcel,” Miller says.
Then The Nature Conservancy quietly made an overture and proposed a deal. The man in the middle of negotiations was Brian Kahn, then The Nature Conservancy’s state director, who also had worked closely with Turner to write the terms of the conservation easement for the Flying D.
An offer of $24 million was advanced to acquire Plum Creek’s holdings—just $3 million less than Turner paid for the entire Flying D. Turner supported the consolidation, and pledged $10 million cash. Innovatively, the plan called for The Nature Conservancy to buy two big parcels and then deed them over to the Gallatin National Forest.
“Ted loves to operate at large landscape levels because he grasps the bigger patterns of what’s going on,” Kahn says. “My discussions with him were all about the conservation value of blocking up lands under single, consistent ownership, getting rid of all those inholdings that brought with them serious risks to habitat and the integrity of the larger ecosystem, of which his own ranch was a part.”
Turner’s offer was a magnanimous gesture, Kahn explains. He wasn’t out to enrich himself. Buying the tracts and giving them over to the Forest Service—US citizens—would accrue huge public benefits for wildlife, hunters, and recreationists.
“If we had pulled it off,” Kahn says in retrospect, “it would have been huge.”
But Plum Creek came under pressure from regional interests that wanted to make sure its forestlands, if sold, would contribute logs to feed the mills. It wanted the deal to help support the timber culture. But lines of communication broke down with The Nature Conservancy.
“Ted got impatient with the delays in the negotiations, which was understandable . . . I think he gave thought to stepping in as a negotiator, gathering all of the entities together and taking the lead,” Kahn says. According to Turner, Kahn’s assessment is accurate.
This was also the early 1990s, and Turner was newly arrived and a controversial figure. He’d made derogatory comments about cattle, and he was married to Jane Fonda, whom political conservatives had branded a traitor for going to Hanoi during the Vietnam War.
“The Nature Conservancy did not want Ted out front and center, as we needed to develop and maintain broad public support to get the deal done,” Kahn says. “But as things turned out, had Ted Turner chosen to step in and had we encouraged it, I think the deal would have gotten done. Hindsight is 20-20. It was our mistake not to maximize the skills of Ted. We know how disarming he can actually be. The consequences of that miscalculation are forever.”
Plum Creek, in the end, rejected the conservation offer. Eventually several sections of the prime holdings were sold to an outside partnership from Oregon led by Blixseth and two brothers named Mel and Norm McDougal. The final purchase price was $27.5 million. Blixseth had, according to some, established a reputation as a wheeler-dealer with timber lands on the West Coast and had already been caught up in one bankruptcy. Ultimately, Montana would give him a colossal second episode of financial problems, but the plot would take years to play out.
Blixseth and the McDougals reached a final agreement with Plum Creek. They embarked upon a plan that would, in some ways, result in the kind of outcome that Turner, Kahn, and other conservationists had desperately hoped to avoid.
The threesome divided off a twenty-five-thousand-acre chunk in the Jack Creek Drainage just over the mountain from the Flying D and sold it to a group of local developers for $6.5 million. Eventually, the parcel would turn into a high-end gated subdivision called Moonlight Basin. Moonlight now features a downhill ski area, golf course, and a wide scattering of homes. Major parts of that tract had been completely logged over, but ecologists say it represented good potential for future wildlife habitat.
Blixseth next turned around and divested the timber mill to Louisiana Pacific Corp. for $9 million, replete with a guaranteed supply of trees. As for the rest of the land, Blixseth did work with conservationists and the Forest Service to safeguard swaths of the Gallatin Mountains stretching north of Yellowstone National Park. But the reasons he gave were never ones based on profound reverence for wild lands. Indeed, as the deals were coming together, he dismissed environmentalists when they raised concerns that he might cut and run. He talked about the value of private property rights and said that he could do whatever he wanted—do-gooders be damned. To generate more cash, he carried out a series of quick, intensive logging operations.
“He had come to saw logs and make money and wasn’t worried about battles with environmentalists,” wrote reporter Scott McMillion in a profile he wrote about Blixseth for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle (it ran on April 13, 2006). “He referred to the property as a ‘tree farm’ and once said he was ‘tired of people saying clear-cutting is a bad word.’”
McMillion quoted Blixseth as saying: “Maybe someplace in this United States of America, somebody needs to draw a line and protect private property rights [to do whatever one wants with the land]. Maybe I’m the guy and that’s the place.”
These lands northwest of Yellowstone National Park functioned as vital big game range for elk, deer, and moose. Conservationists wanted them protected. Blixseth dangled ecologically important pieces of terra firma before the potential green suitors—places he knew they desperately wanted. Buy the forests, was the message, or watch them get razed. The implicit threat of logging forced environmentalists and sportsmen like Gutkoski to plead with the Montana congressional delegation to expedite a series of land swaps that would put the land in the hands of the Forest Service.
At one point, Blixseth theatrically parked a bulldozer at the entrance of one old road leading into the Porcupine Creek Drainage, a beloved hunting area and calving grounds for elk in the center of the Gallatin Range. Someone described it as a bald metaphor. “Metaphoric or not,” he told reporters. “The best way to get a deal done is to keep everybody’s attention on the deal. Everybody paid attention.”
Gutkoski watched all of this play out with horror. “Almost everything Blixseth did,” he says, “was about leveraging a minimum investment of a few million dollars into getting more valuable assets, but he did it by using fear and threatening the possibility of very undesirable outcomes for his holdings. Some might call that shrewd strong-arming. I thought it was shameless and despicable.”
He adds, “The people who later ended up worshipping him forget how crass he was in telling the people to either give him what he wanted or else he’d play the role of robber baron.”
In the end, Blixseth and the McDougals had to put up a small amount of actual cash of their own for their acquisition from Burlington Northern. Blixseth leveraged every piece to his advantage, playing parcels like poker chips. By the time he was done with his horse-trading and Congress had ponied up millions to purchase tracts or trade out lands in the Ga
llatin Range, the threesome had increased their equity position several fold. The McDougals walked away with a multimillion-dollar profit.
Mike Clark, the recently retired executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a regional conservation group, reflects on the outcome of those hastily crafted trades. “At the time, it was a victory because we prevented some valleys from being logged and subdivided, but we had no idea what Blixseth planned as his next step. No one did.”
Blixseth had become aware of the same socioeconomic trends Turner had recognized years earlier. The Rockies were America’s Third Coast in terms of real estate development. Far more money could be made with selling lots in the vicinity of downhill ski resorts. South of Big Sky, he set aside almost fifteen thousand acres of his Plum Creek acquisition for himself.
Blixseth was dubbed “Mr. Hustle” by the newspaper in Bozeman, based upon his reputation for buying land low and selling high. Gazing at the land south of Lone Mountain on a spur ridge called Pioneer Mountain, he announced that he would create the most exclusive high-end, invitation-only gated community—a retreat for mega-millionaires seeking seclusion—that had ever existed in the Rocky Mountain West. He would call his brainchild the Yellowstone Club.
“The contrast between a man like Tim Blixseth and Ted Turner isn’t insignificant at all,” Clark says. “In fact, I think it’s a parable. Putting them side-by-side provides a valuable lesson for modern conservation and the larger decisions that face us all in this world. Each man proffered a very different vision for how to use the natural capital they acquired by buying land.”
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 17