"Traditionally, private areas have been built with modest budgets on modest hills for middle-class skiers, but that’s changing as the next generation of private areas looks more to elite country clubs than neighborhood ski hills for inspiration."

"Lest there be any doubt about Haystack’s niche, Dillon points out that the club’s helipad is less than an hour by air from Manhattan."

"With the luxury ski market booming, it was a matter of time before plans for a cordoned Colorado resort materialized. The Florida-based Ginn Company plans to invest as much as $4 billion to turn a former Superfund site near Vail into a four-season haven named Battle Mountain."

WHAT NOW
Private Powder
Members-only ski resorts are set to multiply. Will that change skiing?

Published in SKI magazine November 2006.

Fifteen years ago, Mark Kolkmeyer and his family stopped by the Otsego Club, a private ski and golf club in northern Michigan, to buy goggles. “We were headed to a mountain nearby that didn’t have a ski shop. At the time, we didn’t know Otsego was private, but we immediately fell in love with the look and feel of the place,” Kolkmeyer says. The Kolkmeyers soon became members. “Like most new parents, we felt protective of our kids, but at a private resort we could let them roam safely on their own.”

The Otsego Club, founded in 1939 and the oldest club in America with its own ski hill, offered the Kolkmeyers both a sanctuary and a built-in community, as private ski resorts have been doing for decades. Traditionally, private areas have been built with modest budgets on modest hills for middle-class skiers, but that’s changing as the next generation of private areas looks more to elite country clubs than neighborhood ski hills for inspiration. Plans for new private resorts are on drawing tables in Vermont, Colorado and Montana. And while many skiers bristle at what they see as high-altitude elitism, “exclusivity is a real draw for some people,” says Otsego president Kristopher Klay.

Exclusivity is certainly the foundation of Montana’s Yellowstone Club, the six-year-old private resort that’s serving as a model for a wave of imitators. An hour’s drive northwest of Yellowstone National Park on 13,400 acres of private land, the club offers its members the run of a real ski hill—2,200 acres, 13 lifts, a 2,700-foot vertical drop—in addition to a championship golf course and miles of trout fishing. This private Eden doesn’t come cheap: You’ll need an invitation and a minimum net worth of $3.5 million to join. Fees include a $250,000 initiation charge and $16,000 in annual dues—and you’ll have to buy a homesite (they start at $800,000). The steep fees caused a noisy stir when Yellowstone was founded, and many skiers still consider the club anathema to what they see as the egalitarian roots of American skiing. Even so, private clubs clearly offer many skiers something they consider worth paying for.

“Skiing Vail, I’d always be scared of other people,” says Mary Cherne, who’s been a Yellowstone member for five years and skied 80 days last season. “Here, there’s hardly ever anybody on the slopes, so it’s easy to learn, and you always have a choice of powder or corduroy.”

George Derderian, a developer and former ski instructor, joined the Otsego Club three years ago, in part because skiing there “feels like I’m back in the good old days.” Most of Otsego’s 700 families either come for the day or stay at an on-site hotel. In response, the club has ramped up sales of condos and houses— about 40 are scattered on the grounds— which lend a strong sense of community to the place. “Since everybody skiing here is a member, you get to know them, their kids, and vice versa,” Derderian says.

The East’s first private four-season resort broke ground last summer. Owner Robert Foisie spent years shopping for ski area before buying Vermont’s Haystack Mountain last spring. The Connecticut investor had already acquired an 18-hole golf course a mile away from the mountain and had hired ski-industry veteran David Dillon to head up his venture, the Haystack Club, which will cap its size at approximately 1,000 members. “Our model will be executed in a highend fashion,” Dillon says.
The club has expanded terrain, purchased snowmaking equipment and added a gondola to the former Haystack ski area. In addition to the 173-acre ski mountain, the club’s grounds will include an equestrian center and a children’s lodge with a pool, a restaurant and even a computer room for making ski movies. An underground pathway will connect the kids’ lodge to the main lodge, which will include a five-star restaurant, an après bar and a spa. Lest there be any doubt about Haystack’s niche, Dillon points out that the club’s helipad is less than an hour by air from Manhattan. For skiers using more conventional transportation, Boston is a three-hour drive, Hartford about two. “This close to major markets, no other entity offers what we’ll have,” Dillon says.

With the luxury ski market booming, it was a matter of time before plans for a cordoned Colorado resort materialized. The Florida-based Ginn Company plans to invest as much as $4 billion to turn a former Superfund site near Vail into a four-season haven named Battle Mountain. Two years ago, company owner Edward R. Ginn paid $33 million for the abandoned mining town of Gilman and 5,300 acres of surrounding countryside. Plans call for construction of 1,700 homes, 60,000 square-feet of shops, restaurants and bars, a gondola from Gilman to the slopes, a golf course and a hotel that wouldn’t look out of place in the Scottish Highlands. Ginn still has to navigate miles of red tape and some local opposition but says he would like to break ground in 2007.