Marketers for the Yellowstone Club billed it as “authentic Montana.” It ultimately came replete with armed guards, a private downhill ski area, an eighteen-hole signature golf course, riding facilities, massive guest lodge, a network of roads, and other amenities carved in the habitat where Gutkoski used to hunt elk. The lots alone were sold for millions of dollars, and the cost of constructing homes ranged from around $5 million to $25 million. Among the 350 or so official club members who were on the board or owned lots (one had to be a bona fide millionaire to get in): former US senators Jack Kemp and Bill Frist, former vice president Dan Quayle, former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, Swedish women’s golf professional Annika Sörenstam, American cyclist and Tour de France champion Greg LeMond, and Bill and Melinda Gates. Blixseth believed that, by the time he was finished, he would add another five hundred millionaires to his exclusive enclave.
Turner is a quick study of people. He does not say anything to disparage the Yellowstone Club members. He considers the Gateses his friends and extraordinary people in the world of global philanthropy. He also downhill skis every year at Big Sky. But he was disgusted by what was happening to the land that was nearly saved from bulldozers.
Blixseth took a potshot at Turner, and his comments seemed to imply that the bison baron from Atlanta wasn’t getting smarter as he was getting older. Otherwise, if he had the sense of a real entrepreneur, he would emulate Blixseth as a land developer.
“It’s his land,” Turner said of Blixseth privately. “He paid for it fair and square, but we’ll see who’s still here in a couple of years and who proves to be smarter.”
Across the mountain from the Yellowstone Club, Turner was slowly and discreetly increasing the size of his bison herd even while recovering from the disaster that had been the AOL Time Warner merger.
In addition to his ecological restoration projects and the launch of his Ted’s Montana Grill restaurant chain, he was traveling in support of nuclear arms reduction and initiatives such as eradicating polio and reducing malaria in developing nations. He also was making major contributions to environmental organizations like the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, groups devoted to keeping large public landscapes intact. He even served on its board of directors.
He remembers getting word from his ranch hands of how grizzlies were returning to the Flying D. They had been largely absent for half a century.
Veteran wildlife biologist Chuck Schwartz, who recently left his job as director of the Yellowstone Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team (a research unit within the US Geological Survey), shared an observation: “The critics of Turner said he was way out there on the fringe of reason when he replaced cattle with bison. When you look closer at what he’s trying to accomplish, it makes perfect sense. With beef cows and sheep, in an attempt to make them docile, humans have bred certain traits out of those animals to make them easier to grow. But in doing that, those animals have become more vulnerable and less capable of surviving in the Wild West, especially with predators.”
Schwartz also referred to the wave of human immigrants flooding to the northern Rockies, drawn to its wildness and natural beauty yet refusing to take responsibility for where they choose to build their dream homes. After decades of suffering declines, Yellowstone-area grizzlies are at last recovering, only because of habitat protection efforts.
But Schwartz says Big Sky, the Yellowstone Club, and other nearby developments have reversed progress for bear conservation in the heart of the Madison Mountains. Essentially, they are constricting the ability of wildlife to move through the landscape. He describes Big Sky as a gauntlet filled with “human minefields” such as ever-increasing numbers of people, garbage, smells emanating from barbecue grills and restaurants, roaming domestic dogs, traffic, homes, and high concentrations of hikers, horseback riders, golfers, mountain bikers, and all-terrain-vehicle enthusiasts. The expanding footprint of development represents a “sinkhole” for bears. If bears and wolves and mountain lions pass through, they have a fairly high probability of getting into trouble with people and having to be destroyed.
“Think about it. All of these temptations and obstacles are presented to grizzlies which, for the most part, want only to avoid people,” Schwartz says. However, if a bear chases someone’s dog that was hounding the bruin, the bear is blamed. If a mountain biker comes barreling down a trail and meets a grizzly mother with cubs, and the bruin acts defensively, she is labeled a menace. If a golfer on one of the high-elevation links at the Yellowstone Club spots a grizzly crossing a fairway, the bear will most likely be trapped and removed.
Schwartz says that because of changes in management implemented by Turner, the Flying D, as a point for comparison, has yielded a large block of secure habitat, a net gain for grizzlies.
Prior to his coming west a few decades ago and then leading the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Clark had been a revered community organizer for Greenpeace who helped call attention to “mountain top removal” mining methods in West Virginia and Kentucky.
“Why does private stewardship matter in the contrast between Turner and Blixseth?” he asks. “Well, in the East, I witnessed the death of special places where simple folk lived. Whole valleys and mountains literally gone, ways of life being altered, and not simply in a minor way,” he says.
“You have to see it to believe it. The rapacious appetite of coal doesn’t only mar viewsheds. Streams and the life forms in them have been eviscerated, people forced from the land, their water contaminated, and wildlife pushed off or destroyed in the process. The impacts of development in the West are different but their impacts are equally as permanent.”
Christopher Boyer, a pilot and aerial photographer who helps conservation organizations document the impacts of sprawl, says Clark’s analogy is appropriate. He has a series of stunning images taken above Big Sky and the Yellowstone Club and he says the degree of intense landscape fragmentation is similar to industrial open-pit mining.
In essence, ecologists say, the combined tentacles of Big Sky, the Yellowstone Club, and neighboring enclaves are producing a form of “ecological decapitation.” When habitat becomes more fragmented and islandized, large-ranging species suffer higher rates of extirpation.
“For animals that run in herds like elk, and for grizzly bears and wolves and even wolverines that seek solitude,” Clark says, “a residential subdivision, even though it has green lawns, represents a giant barrier. When you drop a subdivision out of the sky into the middle of a formerly wild setting, the impacts are basically forever. A forest that is clearcut can, over time, grow back. Rows of trophy homes create the suburbs. If you go to Ted’s house, you can’t even find it unless you know where to look. And it doesn’t cry out, ‘Look at me, I’m a billionaire.’”
Turner, he says, has in fact dramatically shrunk the size of his ecological footprint at the Flying D by reducing the number of buildings, eliminating most of the haying, which allowed water to be left in streams rather than diverted for irrigation, and generally minimizing intensive activity. His home nestles inconspicuously into a hill, and the pond in front of it is value-added habitat.
“He raised the bar for other landowners in the region,” Clark says.
Today, the conservation easement on the Flying D prevents it from ever being subdivided and prescribes how many bison can graze there. In fact, at Turner’s own suggestion, it stipulates that the number of elk and other wildlife that find refuge on his ranch are counted against the number of bison he can raise.
When Turner received praise for putting a conservation easement on his property, Blixseth in turn put an easement on the Yellowstone Club. But he did so after he had carved out hundreds of the most valuable pieces for sale as homesites. Turner’s easement allows for just five more homes to be built across the entire 113,000 acres, one for each of his children. The Yellowstone Club, one-eighth or 13 percent the size of the Flying D,
reportedly recorded $1 billion in real estate sales in less than a decade.
“There’s no question that Ted, had he pursued the same path as Blixseth, could have parlayed his investment into twenty, maybe fifty times what he paid for it,” Clark says. “But I think a better question is: Would there be a place for thousands of elk, deer, moose, and pronghorn to winter? Would grizzly bears and wolves be tolerated? Would there be bison? Would that part of the Gallatin Valley still be pleasant or would it resemble the suburbs of Denver and Salt Lake City?”
Turner says he never wanted to do anything with his land that would earn him a place in infamy. “I want to have the respect of local people. I value it. I want to be able to hold my head high for doing the right thing when I walk down the street in Bozeman,” he says.
A few years earlier, on a winter’s day, Mike Phillips, who oversees the Turner Endangered Species Fund, sped to the ranch from his home in Bozeman. I sat beside him in the passenger seat.
Phillips had been on his couch watching a college football game with his daughter and sons when the cell phone rang. It was Kossler informing him that a ranch hand had spotted what appeared to be fresh wolf tracks in the snow.
Half a decade before that phone call, Phillips had been on the ground in Yellowstone, carrying some of the first wild wolves back to the Park for release after a sixty-year absence. Phillips went to work for Turner in 1997, and has since maintained close ties with his biologist colleagues in the National Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service.
“Having wolves on the Flying D is something Ted always hoped would happen,” Phillips said at the time. “He would deposit them there himself if he could, but doing that is illegal and there is no way to contain them. But if wild wolves legally re-established in Yellowstone wander outside the park and find their way to the D, he is all for it.”
Preparing for that day to arrive, Phillips said, was always an unspoken part of his job when Turner hired him away from the National Park Service. He notes that given the ways wolves disperse, constantly probing for opportunities to establish new territories, it was inevitable they would reach the Flying D.
He hands me a memo sent to Turner and his son Beau dated January 27, 1999. It begins, “Given your keen interest in wolf conservation I thought you would appreciate knowing that during the last few days wolf tracks were detected just east of Upper Green Hollow by our carnivore survey team. Also, apparently Jim Averitt saw a wolf near that area about the same time . . . This may be the same wolf (or wolves) that friends of mine detected as they were skiing near the Spanish Creek campground just south of the Flying D in late November. They cut the tracks of three wolves. . . . As we discussed several months ago, it remains just a matter of time before wolves settle the ranch.”
Turner was left ecstatic by the news. Three years later, I was with Phillips when he drove his pickup truck as far as it would take him into the ranch interior before snowdrifts left the road impassable. With only two hours of daylight left and a cold wind sandblasting the ground with fresh snow, he knew his time to cut tracks was short. In time, he found a single pattern of tracks that were too large to belong to a coyote. Here was more prima facie evidence.
He jotted a few remarks in a pocket notebook and headed back to the truck. He couldn’t wait to inform Turner. “Ted is always keenly interested in details about wildlife on his properties. He was overjoyed that wolves were adopting the Flying D as a home.”
Eastward from our knoll was the bright glow from Bozeman and its suburbs. “I’ll bet most people in this valley don’t have a clue how close they are living to wolves,” Phillips says. “Most would be excited by it. They might think differently about the landscape around them if they knew.”
As with bison and grizzlies, Turner had started to close another broken circle on the “D.” Every major mammal known to exist in the Rockies at the time of Leif Ericson’s arrival in Canada could now be found on his ranch: grizzlies, wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, lynx, coyotes, foxes (red and gray), bighorn sheep, wolverines, elk, moose, mule deer, whitetails, pronghorn antelope, badgers, and bison. Few other private properties in the Lower 48 can claim the same distinction.
After Phillips delivered his wolf update to Turner, he briefed Ed Bangs, his friend with the Fish and Wildlife Service, who for years was the agency’s national wolf recovery coordinator. Bangs notified the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department. Bangs understands the paradox of how information works and can balloon into hysteria. The peripatetic canids roaming across the Flying D had not killed any household pets or livestock in the neighborhoods around the ranch; and even though no harm had come, Bangs assumed there might be needless panic if he and Turner publicly made a big to-do about a wolf being in the middle of the Gallatin Valley. For now, they would allow wolves to enjoy an invisible presence, albeit keeping government wildlife biologists fully informed.
Turner knew it would take time before male and female wolves had their first litter of pups on the Flying D. In fact, it wouldn’t happen for a few more years. He didn’t know how long it would take before he would have a chance to have a personal encounter himself.
Meanwhile, the Yellowstone Club had become a showcase of its own—albeit for different reasons.
Dennis Glick, founder of the community conservation organization FutureWest, has worked for forty years as an environmentalist, including stints in Latin America for the World Wildlife Fund where he helped establish a system of national parks. He spent nearly a decade with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and Sonoran Institute scrutinizing private development. In fact, he was the only conservationist with a land use planning background to testify against the Yellowstone Club at the permitting phase. He knew there would be construction jobs created, but at what cost to the land?
“I asked the local county commissioners to think about the real meaning of sustainability and Montana’s competitive advantage in the world. When all of the construction at the Yellowstone Club is over and the Wild West gold rush moves onto another town, what are you going to be left with? At the end of the day, it comes down to us looking ourselves in the mirror and asking, ‘What do we really value? What makes Montana Montana?’”
The Yellowstone Club won approval from elected officials, and Blixseth went to work skillfully promoting his project. He loved to wine and dine impressionable journalists, who almost never wrote probing newspaper or magazine stories mentioning environmental impacts or questioning the glam of material excess Blixseth was pitching.
In the wake of the bursting dot.com bubble and following the domestic terrorism attacks of September 11, 2001, real estate in Montana defied the cooling down that occurred nationally. The Yellowstone Club actually seemed to pick up momentum. By the middle of the first decade of the new century, Blixseth’s net worth had skyrocketed. In 2006, McMillion with the Bozeman Daily Chronicle wrote: “Today, Forbes Magazine estimates his net worth at $1.2 billion, and most of that was made in Montana. For him, it started with about $3 million in cash.”
Blixseth, in fact, decided to take The Yellowstone Club concept to still another level. Receiving a $375 million credit line from Credit Suisse, he and his wife, Edra, bought European castles, chateaus, ranches, a tropical island, and a golf course in Scotland, among others. “Yellowstone Club World,” his new creation, would cater to a higher layer of über-affluent, and promised to give members basically time-share vacations to live out their lavish fantasies. The couple even bought an antique throne made of carved mahogany.
This was the man who had once said, “I don’t like most rich people. They can be arrogant.”
Blixseth planned to build a spec home on 160 acres at the Yellowstone Club that would, he said, be one of the most expensive personal residences ever sold in the United States. Called “The Pinnacle,” the log home would top out at fifty-three thousand square feet of living space. The asking price would be $155 million,
or almost eight times what Turner had paid for the entire Flying D.
Scott Bosse, a conservationist with the group American Rivers, wrote a terse commentary on a blogging site: “Tim Blixseth may have an address in Montana, but he will never be accepted by Montanans as a fellow citizen. Flaunting one’s wealth and wasting valuable natural resources are the most un-Montana-like values I can think of. How many century-old trees will be cut down to build Mr. Blixseth’s shrine to the human ego? How many more gas wells will have to be drilled on the west’s public lands to heat this monstrosity?”
Bosse rejects the vision of the “New West” that Blixseth was aggressively selling to the rest of the world. “While more and more of the wealthiest people on Earth—think Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Ted Turner—are learning that the best way to leave a lasting legacy is to donate their money to build schools, cure diseases, and take on the issue of global warming, Mr. Blixseth’s idea of a legacy is to build a $155 million playhouse so a fellow billionaire can move into his private neighborhood. How sad.”
“This was craziness. People were rolling their eyes,” says Dennis Glick of FutureWest. “I don’t know what the poster child of delirium is, but there were a lot of people pointing to the Yellowstone Club and shaking their heads in disgust.”
Old Joe Gutkoski, who was once turned away as he tried to cross-country ski across one of his old haunts acquired by the Yellowstone Club, said it was Ayn Rand’s material objectivism writ large. “Blixseth’s message seems to be: It’s all about me, me, me in my overstuffed McMansion, driving golf balls down the fairway as elk scramble for cover, sitting on my throne, drinking overpriced port by the glass and looking down on other people. Is this what our country has become, that these are the kind of people we aspire to emulate?”
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 18