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[Peter]

New Moguls for Yellowstone Club
Rocky Divorce Spurs
Sale of Elite Enclave;
Where Gates Chills Out
January 4, 2008; Page W2
As business partners, and as husband and wife, Tim and Edra Blixseth built Yellowstone Club and turned it into the nation's most successful playground for the super-rich.

The private golf and ski community, nestled in the Montana Rockies, boasts more than 300 members, including Bill Gates and Steve Burke of Comcast. Membership costs $300,000, not counting the $18,000 in annual dues or the millions of dollars it costs to buy a home there.


Private Entrance: The Gatehouse of Yellowstone Club, in the Montana Rockies
Yet now, the Blixseths have decided to sell the exclusive resort, motivated in part by their increasingly contentious divorce.

According to people familiar with the negotiations, the Blixseths are in talks to sell Yellowstone Club for an estimated $400 million to $600 million. The buyer is Boston-based Crossharbor Capital, a real-estate and private-equity firm run by Samuel Byrne, a longtime club member. Mr. Byrne declined to comment. The talks are still ongoing and a deal could be announced in the next month or two.

The sale marks a new chapter for the club, which redefined the luxury, vacation-home business in the past five years and became a Rocky Mountain refuge for the rich and famous. With its exclusive membership requirements (early members had to be worth $3 million or more), tight security and private golf and ski courses (with no waiting lines), Yellowstone Club has the feel of a family-friendly village, albeit one where all of the locals are multimillionaires or billionaires.

The Yellowstone sale also signals the end of the Blixseths' high-profile attempt at a peaceable divorce. As reported in the Wealth Report last year, the Blixseths initially divided up assets worth up to $2 billion, without resorting to dueling attorneys or courts. They divvied up private jets, cars and various homes and properties, and they planned to remain co-owners and partners in Yellowstone.

Yet over the past year, their amicable split turned bitter, as the two started tussling in the California courts over various businesses related to the club. Their working partnership at Yellowstone also started to crack, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Blixseth, while declining to give specifics on the deal, says the divorce was "certainly among the factors" in his decision to sell. But he said the main reason was his desire to focus on several larger business projects he has in the works, including a 5,000-unit real-estate development south of Palm Springs, Calif.

"Sam Byrne and his team are great implementors," he says. "They have the ability to take a project that's already been started and take it to the finish line and maybe make it even better."

The Blixseths are expected to remain as advisers and promoters of the club. For the past two years, CEO Dieter Huckestein, a former hotel executive, has been managing the day-to-day operations.

Mr. Blixseth says he intends to exclude from the Crossharbor sale a large estate he's building called Pinnacle, which, when completed, he plans to put on the market for more than $155 million.

His estranged wife is not saying goodbye to Yellowstone, either. Although Ms. Blixseth says she plans to focus more on her tech start-up, Blxware, she's also keeping property at the club, as well as a family residence.

"Yellowstone is like a baby to me, and it always will be," she says.

The sale comes at a challenging time for the club, with the real-estate market (even at the high end) coming under increasing pressure. Yellowstone expects to add about 500 additional members before it closes to newcomers. Its success has spawned imitators such as the Mount Holly club in Utah, which is also touting skiing and golf, although the development (slated to open in 2008) has been dogged by problems.

Members say the sale is a positive for Yellowstone, since it removes what had become a growing uncertainty over its ownership. Another cloud was lifted recently with the settlement of a lawsuit against the Blixseths filed in 2006 by cycling champion Greg LeMond; the suit alleged that when he and others tried to sell back their interests in the club, the Blixseths offered a price that was a fraction of the shares' value. Terms of the settlement haven't been disclosed.

"We all knew about their divorce and the difficulty they were having with their club partnership," says one member. "It became a distraction for everyone. Now, we'll have a new owner, the suit is settled and we can all get on with the club's future."

Mr. Blixseth, who made his millions in the timber trade, and his wife founded the club in the late 1990s, after they acquired 13,500 acres near Big Sky as part of a complex land swap with the government. The couple originally planned to use the land as a private vacation spot with a personal golf course. But when their friends asked to join them and build homes on the site, the Blixseths decided to add a ski lift and turn the Yellowstone into the first members-only golf and ski community. The club was controversial in Montana, where ranchers and environmentalists objected to public lands being transformed into a walled-off Eden for the well-heeled.

Membership exploded with the wealth boom of the past decade, as more young families with large fortunes were looking for havens to play. Today, Yellowstone members can ski on 2,000 acres of trails (including one called EBITDA), and tee off on a Tom Weiskopf-designed golf course -- all protected by a security team run by a former Secret Service chief.

Still, Mr. Blixseth says he has no regrets about the decision to sell.

"I'm looking forward to going to the club as a guest and not worrying about whether someone's hamburger is medium-well-done or well-done," he says. "I'm going to actually enjoy the place. I plan to ski an awful lot."

[kstrange3]

Where did this article come from?

[skisox34]

I was looking at their website and does anybody know what a "transverse "no-tensioning" lift" lift is?

[kstrange3]

skisox34, on Jan 10 2008, 10:22 AM, said:

I was looking at their website and does anybody know what a "transverse "no-tensioning" lift" lift is?

Its a lift that transports skier traffic over a flat area. The one at the yellowstone club goes over a river.

[skisox34]

Is it a surface lift?

[Jonni]

It's a chairlift, but I believe what they mean is that there isn't any tensioning system built into the lift. It is self tensioned by way of the cable and load. I'm not sure if this is correct, but this is what I have heard to be the case in contruction of these types of lifts.

[kstrange3]

Jonni, on Jan 10 2008, 11:26 AM, said:

It's a chairlift, but I believe what they mean is that there isn't any tensioning system built into the lift. It is self tensioned by way of the cable and load. I'm not sure if this is correct, but this is what I have heard to be the case in contruction of these types of lifts.

That is correct. No slope means that no tensioning is needed.

[kstrange3]

kstrange3, on Jan 10 2008, 02:08 PM, said:

That is correct. No slope means that no tensioning is needed.

Sorry, that was not correct what I meant to post was no rollback device req'd

[Peter]

There is no tensioning. It can sag a lot without it mattering because it is so high off the ground.