Big Sky

Big Sky Overview

To say Big Sky is unique would be an understatement, though perhaps not from the standpoint one might assume. First, let's start with what Big Sky is. As a 'Census-Designated Place' it's not a town, and thus has no town government. It's more of a dispersed community and a collection of real estate projects that surround the Big Sky Ski Resort and Yellowstone Club. The unique history of these two resort communities makes them different from nearly every other ski-town across America, and that legacy drives the character of the community today. Both the Big Sky Ski Resort and the Yellowstone Club own the physical mountains that the resorts occupy: Lone Peak and Pioneer Mountain. By contrast, most other resorts take out leases from the Forest Service rather than own the land on which they operate. The main perk provided by the latter for you and me is that these land parcels remain public so that some level of access persists for everyone, not just ticket holders during operating hours. While Big Sky is often the picture-perfect slice of Montana sold to tourists, it has little in common with the rest of the state. In Montana, public lands are generally upheld as one of America's best ideas and are vigorously protected. Here in Big Sky Country they seem to be managed for profit rather than public utility. That's not to dispute the rights of Big Sky's residents; rather, it's a matter-of-fact for the many who are abruptly met with one of the hundreds of 'No Trespassing' signs that dot Big Sky's landscape. For the modern Big Sky recreator, there are a myriad of public lands access issues to navigate, and luckily a few easements to help you get there. The story behind why these easements are needed is rooted in nineteenth century railroad land grants. Those land grants gave away alternating square mile parcels of public land to railroad companies as an incentive to build tracks and spur westward development. The product today is often referred to as checker-boarded land: in map view the alternating tracts make a chess board, with trapped white public parcels surrounded by black private parcels. Since then, the Forest Service has been dealing with the inevitable migraine of aggregating public land into coherent blocks that can be used for conservation, recreation and extraction leases. A slow deal-making process called parcel swapping has landowners and the Secretary of Agriculture negotiating to reach that objective. By the late 1960's two differing ideas for the future of the Madisons began to emerge, one from the storied Montana Senator Lee Metcalf and another from developer/news anchor Chet Huntley and the newly incorporated Big Sky, Inc. The Madison Range was largely still checker-boarded as the Northern Pacific Railway Company had sold much of its holdings to The Burlington Northern Company (B.N.C.), a logging company. Burlington Northern's extensive logging operation had been coalescing its holdings into coherent blocks around Jack Creek and Lone Peak by trading tracts they had already logged for untouched public ones with the Forest Service. Huntley likely saw this unique aggregation of private holdings as a road to development for his new ski area, presenting a lucrative position where the resort could own and sell nearby real estate as the resort grew in popularity. At the same time, Lee Metcalf saw potential for one of the nation's largest wilderness areas, a 600,000-acre designation for grizzly, elk, and wolf habitat. However, after riding a 1960's wave of Wilderness Area designations, Lee Metcalf's efforts slowed with push back from various logging and snowmobile interest groups, stalling his vision for the Madisons. The B.N.C. sold a portion of its land around Big Sky to Chet and Co., and the Big Sky Ski Resort began development. The 70's brought untimely death to both heroes of our story, but Chet's and Lee's differing visions for the Madison Range pushed forward, nonetheless. Big Sky Ski Resort opened in 1973 and rapidly developed its adjacent luxury real estate parcels. Then in 1983, the senate passed the Lee Metcalf Wilderness and Management Act, actualizing Lee's wilderness concept for the Madisons, albeit in a severely compromised fashion. The bill protected only 242,000 acres of wilderness across four unconnected units, while orchestrating large buyouts and land swaps with the B.N.C. This ceded some 190,000 acres from wilderness protections by stripping those lands of their Wilderness Study Area protections and reverting them back into National Forest. To conservationists, the most harmful result of this concession was the expansion of the already large aggregation of private land within the National Forest. B.N.C.'s private holdings around Lone Peak, Pioneer Mountain, Jack and Cedar Creeks would grow as they swapped less favorable parcels from elsewhere in the National Forest system for adjacent parcels to their existing assets. While this did 'untangle' many checker-boarded holdings, it cut Lee's main wilderness corridor in half, separating the existing Taylor-Hilgard WSA into two smaller areas; the Taylor-Hilgard Unit and the Spanish Peaks Unit of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. The area in between would allow for continued unfettered expansion of Big Sky and the newly minted resort community without even so much as a town government to oversee the development (not a town, remember?) The 1990's brought the next boon for expansion, after a handful of congressionally approved land swaps paved the way for the Yellowstone Club's development and the further aggregation of private land around Lone Peak. The result today is two ski resorts and a major town in a space that was originally slated to be part of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. Instead of untouched habitat on the western border of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, we have 40 million dollar houses that sit empty for most of the year, an entire mountain that's completely off limits to everyone but the top tenth of the top 1% and another mountain that requires expensive day passes to visit. Some regard this as one of the largest conservation screw-ups the Forest Service has committed in Montana, while others have come to regard the product of this compromise as home. However you look at it, there's no getting around the conclusion: centuries of bungled land policy and the subsequent compromises paved the way for development of a once pristine and public area for the financial benefit of a minuscule few. From a skier's point of view, the ski resorts might not be an issue (at least the one open to the public), but the adjoining real estate that blocks access to peaks and public land alike surely strains the relationship between the greater Montana community and their seasonal Big Sky neighbors.

Zones Covered