By Christopher Solomon/High
Country News
Steve Jenson twists the
throttle of his hornet-colored snowmobile and rockets up the empty ski slope.
At the top, where the motionless chairlifts wait, Jenson finally slows, and
cuts the engine. The shattered quiet of southwestern Utah’s high country knits
itself back together. At 10,300 feet in the palm of the Tushar Mountains,
frosted Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir stand as silent as penitents in the
December snow. The air smells of balsam and wintertime. A romantic would say it
smells like Christmas; a cynic, cash. That’s because Jenson and his colleagues
are transforming this troubled but scenic ski area into an über-exclusive
resort to rival the finest anywhere. And in the process they hope to make
themselves a great deal of money.
“This is going to be our
temporary upper lodge,” Jenson says. He’s dismounted and is pointing at
something a snowball’s toss away from the lifts. The building is vintage early
’80s, the windows now dark, a slab of plywood nailed ignominiously over the door:
the shuttered ski area’s upper day lodge. We are here just six weeks after the
Mt. Holly Club has begun selling memberships, and a certain amount of squinting
is required to see Jenson’s vision. “We’re doing a full remodel on it,” says
Jenson, the club’s president and CEO. “We’re doing a ‘European mountain feel’
— stone, timbers, some sort of a metal roof with patinas. Stone floors
and hardwood floors. Venetian plasters on the walls. A nice, exposed,
big-timber ceiling. There will be a restaurant, a lounge for people to have a
glass of wine at night. A ski shop and a sales office.”
That’s just to kick off.
“This whole flat area you see up here” — with a finger he lassoes several
acres of snow and fir — “this will all be the Village Center” — a
40,000-square-foot main lodge. Spa. Boutiques. Tennis courts. He throws his
arms wide to embrace, well … nothing but brooding spruce. “This is going to be
the heart of the resort, right here.”
Oh — but he’s nearly
forgotten the golf! “The golf course surrounds this part of the resort,” Jenson
adds, spinning. Afterward, as we motor around, he’ll point out black and green
PVC pipes that periscope from the snow, marking future tees and landing areas:
the schematics of a dream.
And yet something else
lingers in the air besides Jenson’s vision and the nip of frostbite. A closed
ski area is a melancholy thing. Snow drifts in the doorways of vacant lift
shacks. A sign for a ski run called “Rocky Raccoon” dangles forlornly. But it’s
more than that: There’s a curious, low-humming tension. It’s fed by the
flame-red placards — “Private Property — Mt. Holly Club —
Members Only” — that are nailed to most vertical surfaces, and by the
memory of the people back at the clutch of slopeside condos. None of them
smiled or waved as Jenson and his colleagues arrived.
Almost no one is making new
ski areas anymore. The slopeside dirt of the established Vails and Tellurides?
Gobbled up long ago. If you’re an entrepreneur daring to dream an outsized
dream — say, building a posh country club on snow for the world’s richest
people — you need a blank canvas upon which to boldly sketch your gilded
ambitions. But what happens when you find such a place, only to discover that
not all the natives share your passion for superlatives, your awe of stardust?
Well, then you have two choices. You can woo the people until they swoon. You
can shower them with goodwill and understanding, and bond with them over the
contested dirt until the sweet-smelling lily of compromise blooms.
This is a story about the other
choice.
Beaver, Utah, seems an
unlikely exit for Shangri-La.
Beaver, population 2,500, is
the seat of Beaver County, a tongue-depressor-shaped county in basin-and-range
country. Here, a vast landscape that John McPhee once called “a delirium of
sage” spraddles beneath southwest Utah’s parched sky, interrupted only by
sudden cardiac jags of mountains. Located almost exactly halfway between Las
Vegas and Salt Lake City, it is a place in-between: the kind of spot where an
industrial hog farm relocates when it doesn’t want to bother anyone. Talk to
residents and you get the sense that many of them love this place precisely
because of this in-between-ness — because it is neither Here, nor There.
It is a county one-third the size of New Jersey with just 6,500 residents and
not a single traffic signal. But it does possess one troubled ski area.
Eighteen miles east of town,
up a twisting canyon where heat-loving piñon pines yield to water-loving
aspens, lies the modest ski hill long known as Elk Meadows. Skiing first began
there 35 winters ago, and struggled nearly from the start. Some five different
owners came and went; at least three of them declared bankruptcy. Observers
often blame the absence of a large nearby population centre.
“It’s essentially become a
running joke with residents because nobody’s lasted,” said Gene Gatza, who was
general manager when the mountain closed for the final time in late 2002.
“There have been all kinds of promises,” said Gatza, who still owns a cabin by
the slopes.
“You’re always going to hear
this: ‘There’s huge potential up there.’ ”
The latest to see potential
were the Jenson brothers. Steve Jenson, the president and CEO of the Mt. Holly
Club, is the former president and CEO of NStar Inc. and North American
Lighting, a lighting and electrical company that engineers projects like Mobil
refineries and service stations. Marc Jenson, 48, is Steve’s older brother and
director of marketing. He has a reputation in Utah as a hard-money lender,
offering short-term, high-interest loans, or bridge loans, to individuals and
companies. In 2002, he extended one such loan to Elk Meadows’ cash-strapped
owner, who defaulted and declared bankruptcy. Mt. Holly Club investors later
acquired the property from a lender.
I met Marc Jenson a week
before Christmas in the Salt Lake City suburb of Holladay, in a post-war
rambler that he’d bought several years ago. He’d had it completely remodeled
and now preferred that visitors call it the Cottage. An artificial creek
holding brook trout coursed through a yard with a high fence. Inside, the
Cottage felt like some European nobleman’s alpine hunting cabin — thick
wooden ceiling beams the color of bitter chocolate, refinished pine floors,
19th century Henri Schouten pastorals on the walls. In a bedroom a duvet cover
of Egyptian cotton bore the logo of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Jenson explained
that potential Mt. Holly Club buyers could come here before heading to Beaver
to get a taste of the club’s rustic sumptuousness.
Jenson himself seemed of a
piece with the Cottage — attuned to the finest things, and out of place
with the neighbourhood. Charismatic and intense, with a close-shorn head, he
wore fashionable green boots, a heather purple cashmere sweater neatly tucked
into True Religion jeans, an oversized gold Dolce & Gabbana belt buckle. On
one wrist a chunky gold watch demanded attention. “It’s Richard Mille,” he told
me when I asked about it. “It’s very expensive.”
Jenson grew effusive as he
spoke about his vision for the Mt. Holly Club. A master plan calls for 1,204
homes and luxury condominiums spilling across 2,000 acres of revamped ski
slopes (Ted Ligety, who clinched the 2008 overall World Cup giant slalom skiing
title in mid-March with a Mt. Holly Club sticker on his forehead, is the club’s
director of skiing) and along the new fairways of a Jack Nicklaus Golf Club,
one of just 25 in the world. Would-be members will pay $250,000 just for the
privilege of buying dirt at Mt. Holly, plus $25,000 annually, and are required
to purchase property immediately. The first piece of the first phase — 21
“estate lots” averaging about an acre and bordering Fishlake National Forest
— was approved by the county in November. Prices start at $1.5 million.
Jenson said he expected those prices to go up over time. The club expects many
of its memberships to be bought by the very affluent from the coasts.
Though Marc Jenson said he
and his brother had been thinking about a private club for a decade, he was
quick to acknowledge a debt to the Yellowstone Club in Montana, the paragon of
the genre. Yellowstone members must pay $300,000 and buy property in order to
enjoy 2,200 acres of the club’s trademarked “Private Powder.” Bill Gates, Tiger
Woods and Dan Quayle all own property there. Existing homes for sale start at
$4 million. Jenson added that a lot at the Yellowstone Club recently sold for
$16 million. “We thought, ‘We can do that.”
Is this what the ultra-rich
want? I asked.
“We have a philosophy that
people of means are largely urban, but they have this wilderness fantasy,” he
said. Once they have their daily hike or swim in the Great Outdoors, “they want
to go back to a lodge and have a glass of wine and tell their friends about the
bear they saw.”
The Mt. Holly Club will be
more like a resort than a home in the woods, he explained, offering abundant
nature (national forest wraps the property) without depriving affluent clients
of the comforts and amenities they expect, even at an altitude of 10,000 feet
— including a movie theater, no tee times, and “the kind of service that
you get at the world’s finest hotels.” The club said that it had sold more than
five memberships in the first few weeks after opening. A spokesman declined to
provide updated membership numbers except to say that “there has been
significant interest.”
Entrepreneurs who’ve aped the
Yellowstone Club have met with mixed success. In mid-2005, a group of investors
led by Bob Foisie bought Vermont’s Haystack Ski Area and soon announced the
creation of the Haystack Club, a private resort with a plan to build 450
townhomes and condos, and a heli-pad for people coming from Manhattan. Today,
all that remains are a gatehouse and a few townhomes. The club’s treasurer, Tom
Cross, blamed last year’s lack of snowfall.
Outside Plymouth, Vt.,
investors bought long-dormant Round Top Mountain and opened the Bear Creek
Mountain Club to the first private skiers in 2001. Today, 47 families pay up to
a $25,000 membership for a chance to use the postage stamp-sized ski area and
its clubhouse.
Even the Yellowstone Club hasn’t
been without troubles — most dramatically, a lawsuit by Tour de France
winner/investor Greg LeMond, and an increasingly bitter divorce between club
founder Tim Blixseth and his wife. In the process a picture has emerged of a
club that’s a financial mess, albeit a gilded one. At press time, Tim Blixseth
had reportedly agreed to sell his stake in the club to his soon-to-be ex-wife
as part of the divorce settlement, and give Edra Blixseth full control of his
erstwhile dream.
Still, the idea of the private
ski area remains very viable, argued David Dillon, former president of the
Vermont Ski Areas Association and former marketing director of the Haystack
Club.
“There’s always a market for
exclusivity,” said Dillon. In fact, this past winter the Florida-based Ginn
Company gained approval to build an exclusive community of 1,700 high-end homes
and condominiums and a private, 1,000-acre ski mountain on 5,300 acres of land
adjacent to the mining burg of Minturn, between the world-famous resorts of
Vail and Beaver Creek. Wolf Creek, a small ski area and resort in Utah’s Ogden
Valley, about 45 minutes from Salt Lake City, announced in April that it has
transitioned into a private club and resort, with real estate.
The concept of private ski
areas is hardly new to North America, though there have never been many, and
the motivation behind them has changed, said John Fry, author of The Story of
Modern Skiing (2006; University Press of New England). Originally, scarcity
drove their creation; ski clubs started them simply in order to have a place to
make tracks, said Fry. Ski areas designed purely to be exclusive evolved later.
That trend dismays Fry,
former editor of Ski magazine. “It just seems like a different type of spirit
is coming into skiing, with this $25,000 to have a parking space next to the
lifts, or a private dining room in the lodge,” he said, mentioning amenities
now available even at “regular” upscale resorts. “It’s a reflection of our
broader society, a greater divisiveness between the poor and the wealthy”
— or in skiing’s case, he corrected himself, between the merely affluent
and the own-their-own-jet set.
Next week: Unlikely
Shangri-La Part II — Winning over the residents of Beaver
Seattle writer Christopher
Solomon writes frequently about the intersection of recreation, culture and the
environment. He is a former Seattle Times reporter.
This story first appeared on August 18, 2008, in High Country News (www.hcn.org), which covers the West's communities and natural-resource issues.