| Blixseth's Retreat |
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Page 1 of 5 Billionaire timber baron Tim Blixseth is building the world’s most extravagant vacation retreat. For a mere $3 million, you’re invited. 
A few weeks ago, at about three in the morning, the rough melody of a new song popped into Tim Blixseth’s head. At the moment inspiration struck, he was on his yacht, Piano Bar, which once belonged to the prime minister of Italy. The yacht was moored 30 miles north of Manzanillo, at Yellowstone Club World Tamarindo, Blixseth’s soon-to-open resort on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Last night, at another resort he owns in southern Montana, he finally had a chance to cut and polish the melody into shape. A friend of his, music producer David Foster, was staying at Blixseth’s resort, and helped him craft the inchoate tune into a more-or-less fully formed song. This morning, Blixseth is riding a sort of post-creative high, sitting with Foster in a mammoth timber-hewn ski lodge, musing on the pleasures of songwriting.“Writing a new song is like doing a painting that’s going to be there forever,” says Blixseth. “A painting can burn, but a song can’t.” It would be fair to say that Blixseth, a billionaire, has been more successful than David Foster, a multimillionaire, at accumulating money, and that Foster, one of the world’s most sought-after songwriters, has been more successful than Blixseth at making music. Perhaps inevitably, following age-old grass-is-greener logic, this has made Blixseth more prone to musing on music-making than Foster, and Foster more prone to musing on money-making than Blixseth. “The talent that Tim has for looking at raw land and turning it into this,” Foster says, waving a hand in a gesture that encompasses both the lodge and the mountains that surround it, “is the exact same talent that I have, but in a different way.” The lodge is the centerpiece of the Yellowstone Club, an incredibly exclusive private ski resort that doubles as the flagship of Yellowstone Club World, a string of equally exclusive resorts Blixseth is launching. In the beginning, the Yellowstone Club was not going to be a club at all. It was going to be a private family retreat for the Blixseths and their children. But when he told friends and business associates of his plans to carve a playground of world-class runs into the side of his virgin mountains, Blixseth found that many of them also lamented the long lift lines and crowded slopes of Aspen, Vail, and their other winter haunts. They, like Blixseth, yearned for something better. In fact, they’d pay top dollar for it. And so the Yellowstone Club was born. Admission requirements: a $300,000 right-to-use deposit, $16,000 in annual membership dues, and a commitment to purchase Yellowstone Club real estate. In return: access to one of the world’s most exclusive skiing enclaves. At the Yellowstone Club, the powder stays fresh longer, the slopes are emptier, and the lift lines simply don’t exist. Although the membership roster remains private, the few names that have slipped out reveal a cast of notables from sports, business, and politics: Bill Gates, Dan Quayle, Annika Sorenstam. |
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