| Blixseth's Retreat |
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Page 3 of 5  The Oregon-born son of evangelical, welfare-receiving Norwegian immigrants, Blixseth had already put a lot of wear on his bootstraps by the time he married Edra, 26 years ago. Back then, his stable of friends was less luminous and his personal life wasn’t front-page news, but his net worth had already crept into seven figures. He was a successful timber entrepreneur, and although a downturn in timber prices a few years after the wedding would fell his small fortune, he soon managed to rebuild his finances (and then some) by executing a series of audacious deals buying and selling parcels of northern U.S. forest. At the end of one such transaction, Blixseth was left with a big profit and a still huge 30,000-acre chunk of Montana. As it happens, it was on 13,000 of those leftover acres that Blixseth eventually decided to build the Yellowstone Club.Blixseth’s Jeep Commander passes a particularly scenic bend in the road, one from which the sheer scale of his domain is clear. He waves a hand across the valley below, toward the mountain opposite, which he also owns. “The leader of a Middle Eastern nation was visiting the club one time, and when he saw this view, he told me, ‘It’s as though you own your own country,’ ” Blixseth says. If the Yellowstone Club is a sort of country, then Blixseth, as its ruler, has decidedly expansionist goals. It’s hard to believe, when looking at the size of his fiefdom, that this club is just a first step, the cornerstone of Yellowstone Club World. Over the past several years, Blixseth has been snatching up large tracts of land in five different countries, and he is in the process of building at least seven more properties as ambitious as this one, with the intent of eventually creating a globe-girdling necklace of the world’s most exclusive members-only resorts. Properties are scheduled to begin opening this summer. The fuel indicator just flashed. Blixseth is near his destination, but he decides to make a stop for gas first. A quick detour leads him down a dirt road to a sort of ramshackle parking lot for some of the club’s more utilitarian vehicles: pickup trucks, bulldozers, Caterpillars. Blixseth parks beside a huge aboveground gas tank, then gets out and punches an activation code into a panel beside the spigot. “I figure you’re never too big to pump your own gas,” he says, then begins to do exactly that. “I bet you wish your photographer was here now.” There’s a story behind the photographer’s absence. Let’s start with the moral: Tim Blixseth has a schedule as fixed as a stray tomcat. Appointments with him often seem to be locked down, and then suddenly tumble into chaos like so many ice cubes in a martini shaker. Case in point: Blixseth wasn’t originally scheduled to be at the Yellowstone Club until three days from now, which was when the photographer had planned to meet up with him. As exasperating as it can be to get caught like jet foam in the wake of somebody else’s hyperactive schedule, Blixseth’s high-cadence travel habits illustrate an important point: A billionaire can afford to go wherever he likes, whenever he likes. Just as a little money gives freedom from fretting over the basic necessities of food, shelter, and clothing, a lot of money can release you from the burden of set schedules, fixed appointments, and all the other maladies brought on by nine-to-five work. If Tim Blixseth decides to leave somewhere three days before he was due to arrive there, the world will accommodate him. Great effort and hustle may go into this accommodation, a flurry of activity and phone calls, but Blixseth’s way will always be smoothed out ahead of him, wherever and whenever he may choose to go. |
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