Warren Miller Defends the Yellowstone Club
January 3rd, 2009Posted in Skiing in Luxo-land
New West just put up a guest commentary by Warren Miller which he titled “Economic Stratification and the Yellowstone Club”. As Director of Skiing there he probably felt a need to offer up a sympathetic view of the YC in light of all the embarrassing publicity it has gotten since since the club’s financial troubles have snowballed into a high profile bankruptcy. Before the financial mess got to court, the club’s notoriety from lawsuits by well known members, its troublesome environmental record, and its owner’s messy divorce had already claimed national press attention. Spin control seems long overdue.
The way Mr. Miller sees it, the club’s members are victims of their own success. They went to college, got hired, had good ideas, worked hard for extra-long hours six or seven days a week, and became successful and economically stratified -to use Mr. Miller’s preferred term for rich. It’s a conventional argument we’ve all heard before, saying in essence, “I worked my ass off, and if you had, you’d be better off too.” I personally know construction workers who have worked their asses off on projects in the Yellowstone Club five or six days a week, and on the seventh day they worked another 10 or 12 hour shift for somebody else. They’ll never get to become members. What about the the millions of middle class families in this country with both parents working longer hours at multiple jobs just to make mortgage payments and save for their kids college? Yeah, they’re lazy too. And how many millions in tax savings have the YC members enjoyed since President Bush took office? In many cases more than enough to buy their YC memberships, and pay for their homes there too. And how much did the majority of Americans save on their taxes during the same period? About enough for a mortgage payment- if they were lucky. Didn’t something rather important happen a couple of months ago? Like a presidential election in which Americans voted out the pro-greed party because they were tired of CEO’s making hundreds of times what their employees made and then getting huge tax breaks so they could build ludicrously large second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth homes in places like the Yellowstone Club. I think Mr. Miller is a little tone deaf to the huge discontent in America over the unhealthy wealth chasm that now seperates average middle class Americans from the economicaly stratified. He, and other YC members, shouldn’t expect much sympathy when millions of hard working Americans are worried about lossing their jobs and homes due to a crisis caused by the greed of people like YC members (if not in fact by some of its very members, or their friends in high places).
According to Mr. Miller, because these folks are rich, er, economically stratified, they are now famous and can’t go to places like Aspen and Vail, because they’ll be mobbed. Last I knew, Ross Perot was a happy skier at Vail, and he’s far from the only tycoon skiing at places like Vail, Deer Valley, Sun Valley, Beaver Creek, Aspen and Jackson Hole. So in a world populated by millions of very rich people, many of them skiers, if the Yellowstone Club has had trouble selling memberships (which it has definitely been a problem for it), it doesn’t seem like being mobbed at ski resorts is a real problem for the rich- opps!- economically stratified. And, I’ll just bet YC member Dan Quayle is going to be mobbed if he shows up in Aspen or Vail.
I will agree with Mr. Miller that members are entitled to privacy. We all are. Private clubs of all sorts have their place, as long as they comply with all appropriate anti-discrimination laws. Some of the YC members do have legitimate security concerns for themselves and their families. I can sympathize with them and frankly I’m glad they are not going to ski where I ski if they have to have dozens of security people surrounding them and interrupting my enjoyment of a public ski area.
My objection is this. If the few people who really need a high level of security and privacy want it, why did they buy into a club that has not kept a lower profile? Mr. Gates, Prince Bandar and other YC members could easily afford to build their very own Yellowstone Clubs and hardly anyone would know if they did it quietly. But they chose to become members of a club that traded on their presumed status to enhance its reputation so membership would be considered an ultra exclusive status symbol. For this to work, the club had to become well known. It promoted itself by inviting the press, by hiring a skiing celebrity – Mr. Miller, by having a public website, etc… Numerous articles appeared in the national and international press about the club and its founders when it opened its doors and media attention has only grown over the years. Now, when the only news from the club is bad news, how can Mr. Miller and the club expect it not to be widely disseminated? And in the real world of the media that Mr. Miller and other club members have used to their advantage in the past, they should know that just like Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears, they will get no mercy from the press and little sympathy from its readers. Where is Mr. Miller’s famed sense of humor when the cameras are turned on him? It was easy for him to poke fun at the overweight, clumsy, first time skiers on icy Eastern slopes wearing hand-me-down winter clothing as they tumbled and slid helplessly. Can’t they now enjoy it when he and his economically stratified rich friends get upended? Come on Mr. Miller, lighten up. It really is only money.
One more thing Mr. Miller. Would you be where you are today if places like Sun Valley and Aspen had been like today’s Yellowstone Club and restricted access to their lifts to only their rich quests? If you were as poor as you like to portray you were when you were just starting to make movies, how successful would your early movies have been if they were shot only through a really, really long telephoto lens?
Warren Miller Defends the Yellowstone Club | refinancementcredit.com commented:
[...] Warren Miller Defends the Yellowstone Club [...]
troy commented:
Sorry, this is a reprint from a comment I posted in NewWest, but, it’s just as valid here.
I’m not exactly sure what the basis is of all of the negativity. Are you all opposed to wealth? Are you opposed to privacy? Is it jealousy? I’m really not sure, and for me, it’s confusing.
Maybe it’s the term “stratification“… Are you a skier? Well, there are many that can’t afford skis. Do you take joy when someone who can afford more expensive skis than you loses or breaks them? Do you think someone who can’t afford, even the 5th season pair that you’re wearing should envy/hate/ridicule you because you had the audacity to flaunt your 5th season skis around those who can’t eve afford that? Were you simply lucky, or did you work for those skis? My point is: there’s always someone better off than you and there’s always someone worse off.
Most of us strive to better our lives. Some are more successful than others and obviously some emphasize things differently. So, what is really important?
Family, friends, community and life experiences. There’s my list.
I see a lot of knee jerk comments and assumptions about who the members of the Yellowstone Club are, why they’re there, and how they got there. We’re all just people, pursuing our own dreams.
I know you don’t want to hear this part, but, I’m going to repeat it anyway… I grew up dirt poor. My mother was raising three kids by herself working as a checker in a grocery store in Indio, California. Basically a Mexican immigrant ghetto near the Salton Sea, out in the middle of the deserts of south-central California.
All of the “rich” people lived in Palm Springs, probably 30 or so miles away. We didn’t envy them and we didn’t hate them, and didn’t really care that they all packed up and moved away in the summer when it was too hot to stay. Most of the restaurants, clubs, etc. closed for the summer, but, that didn’t affect us, because we could barely afford Shakey’s Pizza once a month. I did hate the heat and wished we could go to a “summer home” that was cooler, but, it just wasn’t possible.
I am who I am. Growing up like this didn’t make me envy the rich. It kept me grounded. I knew that I wanted to be successful and that I needed to get out of the desert. This wasn’t for the sake of money, but, for the sake of raising a family and having some sense of security.
Through good times and bad, I managed to use a lot of my ambition to claw my way through college, working odd jobs, taking out student loans (did I mention my mother was a checker in a grocery store?), applying for scholarships, and getting Really, Really lucky…
Somehow, I managed to end up in the right place at the right time and the dot.com industry fell in my lap. Financially, this changed my life. Practically, it did not. Did I deserve this? Ya, I think so. It was hard work, determination, and a large helping of luck. But, why not? What if it happened to you?
So, after a couple of years at Yahoo!, I found myself thinking that I’d sold myself to the devil. I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do. I wanted to raise a family, hunt, fish, ski… I wanted to experience life. And I wanted my kids to experience life.
About this time, I started looking for someplace where I could build a cabin. Someplace close to good hunting, fishing, skiing, etc. Something that I could have never afforded in my earlier life. So, I stumbled upon this idea that was the Yellowstone Club.
Ten years ago, the slogan was “where families gather”. That, plus the fact that it was near great fishing, hunting and skiing, made me decide to take a look.
When I fist came out to look, it was simply a chairlift, a couple of very small cabins, and a bunch of dirt roads. There were only a handful of members, but, they were really interesting people. I loved it. This was a great place for me, and a great place for my kids… I didn’t care about privacy, and, at the time, it wasn’t a trophy. It was fun skiing, fishing, hiking and would never be crowded.
So, I bought a lot. It was the first lot past the guard gate, with a meadow in front where my then young children could bounce around picking wildflowers, eating wild strawberries, and I could see both Pioneer and Lone Mountain from my deck.
If you could have done the same, wouldn’t you? There was no reputation, no history, just an idea in the middle of paradise.
The next year, I built a log cabin. I redlined a floor plan that I found online, sent it to a log home manufacturer in victor, MT and built my little 3 bedroom log cabin for my family. We loved it!
For the first several years, we lived there the entire summer by ourselves. Nobody else around. We felt part of the Big Sky community, the Yellowstone Club community hadn’t really developed yet. But, by fits and spurts, the Club community also grew.
In the early years, we made many great friends in the club. People that we genuinely like to see and spend time with. It doesn’t matter what they have or don’t have, and, I certainly hope none of them judge me by the fact that I live in the smallest home in the club.
Then something changed… The ownership/management seemed to lose touch of what the club was about to many of us early members… It became a trophy, or what I like to call a Monument to the Robb Report Readers… (For those of you who don’t know what the Robb Report is, it’s a magazine that tells the newly rich what they’re supposed to want, just in case they’re not creative enough to figure that out on their own).
This is not what we wanted. We liked the small, understated lodge we all started with “The Buffalo Bar and Grill”. A small log structure with a kitchen and a bar where we happily squeezed in at the end of the ski day. Nobody wanted the “Caviar Bar”. What a fiasco!
I, like many others, wanted to be in “Montana“, not some surreal interpretation of Montana that proved that money can’t buy taste.
Let’s go back a few paragraphs… Sometime after I built my home in Montana, I found what I was looking for. And I knew it wasn’t printing my own money in Silicon Valley… So, I quit. I completely left the field of technology. I figured whatever was next I would figure out later.
Shortly after, in the spring of 2001, I took a trip up to Alaska to go moose hunting. It was a great experience. Just two of us, dropped off by a bush pilot out in the middle of indescribable vastness. It was a truly great experience for me, fishing for dinner, hunting, living amongst huge brown bears gorging on blueberries, but, it would also become another life changing event for me.
After shooting a moose and hiking it back to camp, we noticed there were no planes flying. For days, no signs of life… No contrails from jets flying the polar route to Asia, no bush pilots… nothing. We new something bad had happened, but, not exactly what. We figured we’d better start the year-long hike to Anchorage when we had our first signs of life… a 1941 Grumman Goose labored in, landed on the lake, tailed in to shore, opened the window and declared “guess what? They blew up the World Trade Center!”.
This had a profound affect on me. I had clawed myself out of Indio, California, or as the locals called it “Barrio Indio Norte”, and now here I was, in an upper financial stratum, all because of the opportunities that I had as an American. It deeply affected me. Other than giving money to charity, I had never done anything substantial back to the great Country that allowed a person with a little smarts, and a lot of ambition to ascend the strata like I did.
So, I did what I thought was the best thing I could have possibly done in that situation… I flew back home, walked into an Air Force recruiter’s office and told them “I have a commercial pilot’s license, and I used to teach in the math school at New York University, What can you do with me?”
Soon after, much to my family’s amazement, I was sworn in and trained in an Air Force Special Ops Command Combat Search and Rescue Squadron. Now, six years later, after 2 tours to Afghanistan, I have successfully completed more than 20 combat rescues. In other words, I flew out in the middle of the night, in an HH60 Pavehawk helicopter, found busted up kids in the deserts of Afghanistan, and got them home safely. Whether you agree or not, I feel like I did my part. My commitment was up almost 2 years ago, I still keep extending my stay in the Air National Guard because I believe in the mission, and I believe that we all need to continue to do what we know is right.
Coming back to the Yellowstone Club… Yes, it’s a mess right now. It’s not what I bought into, but, that’s not because of the members. Sure, there may be one or two that joined due to an ad in the Robb Report. And there may be a couple that are there simply to build a trophy house in a trophy resort… But, if you categorize the members simply as that, YOU ARE WRONG. We the members will navigate the current financial troubles and will do what we can to support the community. For many of us, this is home. This is a place where we have made a commitment and our families will be here for a long, long time…
I consider myself part of the Big Sky community. I play pool and shoot darts at Milky’s, we have dinner at the Corral, we have lunch at the Wrap Shack, and Bugaboo, you’ll see us at the Country Fair and the open air concerts in the summer, the local Rodeo at 320 Ranch on the 4th of July… I support the local businesses and people as best I can. They are my friends and my neighbors. Privacy is not what it’s about for me. My kids will always go to public school, and I’m in Big Sky because I fell in love with the area not because of any trophy, or ad… simply because of an idea… Where families gather. I’m doing everything I can to get back on that course.
So, before you jump to conclusions about who we are and why we’re there… ask yourself, honestly, would you have done the same thing?
kc commented:
would love to give you some insight on what’s really going on….