“We joined because it was an awesome place to ski,” said the adult son of an investment banker who spoke to me while skiing with his mom at the YC. “For the first several years we were here—maybe until the mid-aughts—there was no lodge.” If skiers from the adjoining Big Sky Resort had wanted to sneak into the YC, the lifts didn’t even have scanners. “I remember thinking that maybe people didn’t know how easy it was.” The son now lives in Bozeman, Montana, where he works as an aspiring ski-and-mountain guide.
The YC has changed a lot over the 20 years that the family has been going there. The club went bankrupt in 2008 and then struggled through a thicket of legal battles before emerging into profitability under the Arizona-based Discovery Land Company. Today, the Yellowstone Club is well-run but has lost some of its early charm, according to the son. His mother is selling her house and moving on. “It’s crowded with all these people who don’t really care that much about skiing,” said the son. Not that it stops them from getting out there. “Over Christmas and Presidents’ Day here, you might have half-hour lift lines.”
Discovery Land Company has apparently noticed the increased interest, too, and is adding 35 condo units to Yellowstone. In 2022, the developer, which owns more than 30 clubs and residential communities around the world, invested in Homewood Mountain Resort on the shores of Lake Tahoe, in California. In 2023, it filed plans to turn Stagecoach, a defunct ski area near Steamboat Springs, Colorado, into a five-lift, 800-home private ski club. After announcing its intention to take Homewood private, a massive, local backlash prompted Discovery to backtrack. Now Homewood’s home page says, “Smile, Homewood Will Always Be Public.”
If you were looking to hide one of America’s largest private ski clubs, you couldn’t do much better than the naturally secluded folds of land that hold Wasatch Peaks Ranch. It sits across the Ogden Valley from Powder, and from the outside, all that’s visible of Wasatch Peaks Ranch’s 20-square-mile expanse is the tip of a tower crane and a few of the lifts. Though it is still in development, Wasatch Peaks Ranch is, my sources agreed, the most coveted membership in private skiing.
The place has a reputation for secrecy. The club’s CEO, Gale “Tiger” Shaw III, a champion collegiate skier at Dartmouth, two-time Olympian at Sarajevo ’84 and Calgary ’88, and until recently president of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, didn’t return emails. “There are a number of members as you imagine who require [discretion], and it’s part of the program to make it super comfortable to all members so they can enjoy the privacy of the club,” a Park City venture capitalist, who’s a member, told me.
Another person close to the project explained WPR in more detail: “It’s like Alta stacked on top of Deer Valley.” (Translation: the best skiing in Utah on top of the state’s most luxurious groomed-run paradise.) The upper mountain is entirely above tree line. In the fall, elk roam the forests, and the first rounds of golf were played last summer on the 18-hole course designed by famed architect Tom Fazio. The club prohibits posting to social media, and to date, the only reporting about WPR has been in The Salt Lake Tribune and based mostly on now outdated SEC filings, county records, and court documents. Like the ones that arose after a Black Hawk helicopter dropped a chairlift tower while building the main Diamond Peak lift ahead of the COVID winter of 2021–22. Nobody said building a private ski area would be easy.
