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Skiing is supposed to be freedom: the cold air, sparkling mountains, and skis cutting smooth, fast arcs across freshly fallen snow. And yet if you’ve done it recently, you know that few places have the capacity to produce misery and rage like a crowded resort. The traffic! The parking! The lift lines! By the time you even make it to the summit, the trails are skied off and crowded, increasing the likelihood of an accident like Gwyneth Paltrow’s 2016 collision with a retired optometrist on a beginner run in Deer Valley. Now add a litter of querulous children who “hate skiing!,” can’t carry their own gear, let alone put it on, and won’t be pacified by syrupy machine-dispensed $5 hot cocoa, and it’s a recipe for emotional collapse that’s as expensive as it is self-inflicted.
The great luxury of skiing wasn’t always quite so masochistic. But interest in the sport reached new heights following the pandemic, as remote workers became less anchored to city cubicles. Plus, in recent years, two private-equity-backed firms, Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Company, acquired 52 of America’s best ski resorts. In Utah, Vail grabbed Park City and neighboring Canyons, and Alterra took Deer Valley. In Vermont, Vail has Mount Snow, and Alterra has Sugarbush. Both companies put their collection of ski hills on multi-mountain season passes, which cost about a thousand bucks for the year. At the same time, they increased the price of day passes to, in some cases, more than $300. Now, anyone who wants to ski more than a handful of times per year (and can do math) is a holder of Vail’s Epic pass or Alterra’s Ikon pass.
This is what the management consultants call differential pricing, and skiers complain it has enabled America’s record numbers of skiers to act as a powder-crazed swarm that descends across the mountains every time school is out or OpenSnow posts a promising forecast. The pass era offers cost-efficient flexibility, but when the conditions are right, anyone who already bought a pass might want to get their money’s worth. Has this been a net good or bad for skiing? There is plenty of time to debate it in the lift lines.
Some extremely fit and self-reliant skiers are escaping the crowds by strapping on touring skis and trekking into the backcountry, with its attendant avalanche risks. But another subset of truly blessed souls have simply vanished from the lift line as though divinely raptured by the invisible hand of Adam Smith himself. Where have they gone, exactly? Heaven?
Close. They have gone to private ski clubs. Much like how private aviation captured ultra-high-net-worth fliers and left the merely prosperous to grovel for frequent-flier status, these clubs are enabling the richest sliver of Americans to opt out of traditional resorts and preserve not only their sanity but their anonymity. Ski hills have traditionally been a place where the powerful were forced to share space with the rest of us, as when Vice President JD Vance, fresh out of a heated Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in early March, tried to take a vacation at Sugarbush. Vance was met by protesters and hecklers, and he and his family decided to alter their plans. He didn’t have to subject himself to a mob. In 2025, there are more than a half-dozen private clubs across the country. At these mountains, there’s rarely a lift line, and fresh powder may last for a week. Or so I learned when I skied Powder Haven, the residential side of Utah’s Powder Mountain, which was recently acquired by Netflix founder Reed Hastings. Since last year, half of the chair lifts and lodges are open only to club members. The other half are open to everyone, and are in the process of being enhanced by works from artists like James Turrell.
In between runs at Powder Haven, I cruised up to the Skylodge, a set of cozy interlocking yurts straddling the summit. There was no security or formal check-in, and yet the staff of polite and cheerful 20-somethings somehow knew my name. Somebody offered to pull me an espresso. I filled a plate with perfectly moist scrambled eggs and thick-cut bacon from the breakfast buffet and sat down in a fuzzy couch pit. It felt more like the living room of a very generous new friend than what it actually is: a temporary home base for one of America’s emerging class of super-exclusive ski clubs.
Each of these magical winter refuges has its own particular flavor. The shy celebs go for the fortresslike log homes of Montana’s Yellowstone Club, which is in the midst of a major expansion. The Westchester moms point their upfit Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans and Cybertrucks toward the Hermitage Club of Vermont, which was taken private by the mountain’s homeowners during the pandemic. And the LA and San Francisco tech crowd can have one of Powder Haven’s Rivian courtesy cars meet them at the Ogden FBO.
To join these clubs often costs millions of dollars in real estate, plus initiation fees, plus tens of thousands in annual dues—not to mention, sometimes, multigenerational personality vetting. In this way, skiing in America is becoming more like America’s most elite golf and racquet clubs, as well as the private social clubs proliferating across New York City, and less like skiing in Europe, where lift-ticket costs at public mountains remain so reasonable that they’re drawing cost-conscious American skiers.
While eating breakfast at Powder Haven, I took in a vaguely ski-themed John Baldessari on the wall. It paled next to the 300-degree views of the Great Salt Lake peeking through the Wasatch Front and the Bannock Range of Idaho spilling into the northern horizon. Invisibly tucked into the mountains about 20 miles to our south was, I had heard, the next big thing in private skiing, Wasatch Peaks Ranch. Many of my most successful friends are now talking about the new club, where, according to someone close to the project, reclusive VC and hedge-fund patriarchs are putting down seven-figure deposits toward bare lots that start at about $10 million.
Before I started reporting this story, I thought I was clued into the world of private leisure. Some of my earliest memories are of jumping golf carts off the paths at the Congressional Country Club outside of Washington, DC, and trying to explain to my dad how I’d managed to eat 14 Nutty Buddys in a single billing cycle. When I was nine, we moved out west to a farm outside of Sandpoint, Idaho, to ski and be among nature. I went to a fancy East Coast boarding school. In short, I had in my mind a picture of the landscape of wealth and privilege in America.
But private ski resorts are a peephole into another strata entirely—one that’s not only flush but teeming. There are enough ultra-high-net-worth people in America to fill Aspen, Telluride, Deer Valley, and Jackson Hole, among a dozen tony mountain towns. Baby boomers are holding between $84 trillion and $146 trillion in assets, much of which will be inherited by millennials in what economists refer to as the Great Wealth Transfer. Add to that the spoils of the tech boom, American energy independence, the AI trade, crypto, and a fire hose of pandemic-era government spending, and you can start to see how millions of Americans may soon need a fancier place to ski.
At its best, skiing an untracked run hits like the feeling of flight, with the added thrill of conquest. “Have you any idea what the street value of this mountain is?” Curtis Armstrong presciently asks, snorting pure snow through a straw in the 1985 John Cusack ski classic Better Off Dead. But unlike drugs or even diamonds, untracked powder can’t be manufactured, though Lord knows engineers from China to Saudi Arabia have tried. For now, it can literally only fall like manna from the sky. And with winters getting more capricious each year, the new land rush for higher, colder acres is on. If I could buy a mountain and solve all my problems, would I? You bet.
On my second morning at Powder, I geared up in the Skylodge with eight or so of the club’s 170 members—neighbors, as they’re known—for some cat skiing. The club had recently purchased a few thousand acres of additional advanced terrain and will begin construction of a high-speed quad lift there this summer. When it’s complete, Powder Mountain will have 5,000 acres of slopes whose lifts are open only to neighbors and their guests, and another 5,200 open to everyone, making it the biggest assemblage of skiable acreage in the country. The terrain is respectable too. One especially exposed pitch called Neck Beard would make even the best skiers pucker.
The Haven clientele is low-key. No fur. No hubcap-size watches. Nothing that would hint that you are milling around in a yurtful of centimillionaires. On any given morning, you might share a Blue Bottle coffee with the CEO of Blue Bottle. The founding designers of Wired keep a place here. Trump’s ambassador to Greenland (at least until he becomes its governor) is said to be a neighbor.
And there’s Reed Hastings, the unassuming 64-year-old Netflix founder and snowboarder who purchased Powder Mountain out of a nine-figure debt hole in 2023, only two months after leaving the company he started. Hastings had first come to Powder Mountain after “the Vail empire,” as he described it, purchased his home mountain of Park City in 2014. “They put in a bunch of lifts, and it got supercrowded and that was just the push out for us,” Hastings told me. His wife, Patty, got hit by another skier around that time, he says. They sold their place in downtown Park City, until recently home of the Sundance Film Festival, and moved to Powder Mountain in 2021.
Hastings had an early inkling of the industry-wide chaos that burst into full view this past holiday season when Park City ski patrollers went on strike over their $21 per hour pay. They ground the resort to a standstill during what should have been some of its busiest weeks of the year. Lift lines stretched to the horizon; iPhones recorded the injustice. For many well-heeled vacationers, Christmas was, in fact, ruined. (Vail has since given ski patrollers a raise.)
When Hastings built his home at Powder Mountain, it was still a hidden gem of a mom-and-pop ski area that was overshadowed by Utah’s more famous ski meccas like Alta and Snowbird. At the time, it was owned and run by the Summit Series leadership conference, which had purchased the mountain as a base and event hub in 2013. Summit Series set the tone for Powder Mountain as a community of fun-loving entrepreneurs with a flare for Scandinavian architecture, but it ran the mountain into the ground as a business.
In March 2023, Hastings says the Summit founders approached him. “This thing’s going down and we’d rather have you as owner,” Hastings recalled one of the Summit people telling him. “I thought about it for about five minutes.”
Hastings invited Summit alum Alex Zhang to come back as his chief creative officer. Zhang hired Four Seasons designers Champalimaud Design for a new 50,000-square-foot lodge and spa that will break ground this summer. And he commissioned a sweeping art project on the public side of the mountain that will eventually include a Turrell Ganzfeld. Zhang and Hastings bonded over their tours of Japan’s art islands Naoshima and Teshima. “These places become real destinations,” Hastings said. The question for him was: “How do we use this opportunity to make this an incredible place of beauty?”
Zhang took me on a tour of both the residential and public sides of the mountain. We rang a bronze bell by the industrial artist Davina Semo, installed in a handsome stand of firs off the Paradise lift (public), and saw a work in progress by artist EJ Hill, who is hanging carousel horses from the cables of a chair lift (also public).
We drank bone broth at Blue’s, a café (private) built on the back of a snowcat and developed by Liam Goslett, an associate creative director from the film production company A24 who Zhang hired as the Creative Director of Powder. One of Zhang’s friends designed the watering holes (private): tree-mounted cabinets hidden in the woods that will allow neighbors to ski up and pour themselves a drink.
“Reed was like, Just buy the art,” Zhang said. At Zhang’s suggestion, they established the nonprofit Powder Art Foundation.
You can see the vision starting to come together. It’s a place where the privacy sold to superrich people might underwrite a better experience for the people who saved up to visit. Hastings upgraded the Paradise lift to a high-speed quad, cutting the ride time to the summit from 16 to 7 minutes, and announced plans to run another lift up Lightning Ridge that will give the public access to what was formerly a secret backcountry area.
Management’s only unbreakable rule is: Don’t mess with the Powder Keg, the much-loved on-mountain dive bar where locals still dance on the tables after last chair. “It’s creating a place that I want to be part of the community for the next 30 years,” Hastings said. “The thing that pulled me in was the uncrowded skiing, but then as you get to know everyone up here, they’re all like, Oh, we want to ski here until we’re 90.”
Private skiing might be having a moment, but the concept isn’t new. A 1970 Sports Illustrated article, “A Cold Country Club for the Real Cool Crowd,” noted that “nowhere are people more underfoot than on the ski slopes of the crowded Northeast and, suddenly, here is the Windham Mountain Club.” A Windham club-invitation card published in the story was refreshingly candid: “The historical American solution to the rapid growth of participation sports has been the private club concept. Those persons of more than nominal means who desire to enjoy a sport to its fullest have joined together to control the number and attractiveness of their associates.”
Windham, located two hours north of New York City, was popular with the Kennedy-and-Skakel set in the ’60s and ’70s, but it spent most of the intervening half century as a regular public ski area and is currently on the Ikon pass. Two years ago, though, Windham announced a new residential club with exclusive dining, valet, clubhouse, and early-ups for members. CEO Chip Seamans told me he’d explored a partnership with private helicopter service Blade, but the resort was holding off until it could be sure that the charters from Manhattan wouldn’t be too disruptive. “Plenty of places to land a helicopter,” he said, of the mountain.
The blueprint for modern private skiing is the Yellowstone Club. Founded in 1997 by Tim Blixseth, a colorful Oregon-bred timber magnate and real-estate developer with multiple bankruptcies under his belt, the YC, as it’s known, was mankind’s first attempt to put an entire Rocky Mountain behind a velvet rope. The club has attracted some high-profile members, like, reportedly, Bill Gates, Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel, and Tom Brady and then wife Gisele Bündchen.
“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.
Wasatch Peaks Ranch, which was started in part as an antidote to the Yellowstone Club, is owned by a consortium of member families, the person close to the project told me. They said that the county has approved WPR for 750 housing units, but the club will cap membership at 450 families. They’re about half full, and each member family went through a multi-month, multi-generational vetting process, the person added, describing something that sounded to me a little like a Park Avenue co-op board interview, fraternity rush, and 90 Day Fiancé rolled into one.
“You only get to build the community once, and they’re being extremely thoughtful about the culture,” said this source. “They actively turn away people who are very financially qualified.” Wasatch Peaks Ranch members “could be your next-door neighbor,” a former on-snow employee told me. “You’d have no idea. I mean, nobody was there to flash anything.”
One semi-pro skier who recently visited WPR as a guest explained the experience to me. “I carried my skis into the building, which I very quickly learned is not what you do. They looked at me appalled. You don’t carry your skis. It’s a whole thing,” said the guest.
“There’s free hand warmers. You have to sign a waiver—no photos, no GPS tracking, no video, no media. They’re very clear about that.” (Despite the prohibition, WPR shows up on fitness tracker Strava.)
After check-in, an airport-style shuttle drives you to the resort, where a gondola takes you to a mid-mountain lodge (which is in Sprung tents for now, though construction will begin on a comfy permanent structure this summer). Once you’re on the mountain, an app serves as your trail map and your lift pass to access the high-speed heated bubble quads. “There was plenty of terrain to be had, but you could also just be on groomed blues,” said the guest. The ski patrol, they added, “have got the best job in the entire world. There’s nobody there! They’re just skiing blower pow.”
The guest estimated there were 50 or 60 people there. Three-generation families with an East Coast vibe, wearing Ivy League business-school pullovers. “It felt like money didn’t exist. We went to go get lunch and a random person just walked up to me and asked me what I wanted for lunch, and I told them and then it just came out.”
“There were a lot more people watching football in the lodge than skiing,” the guest recalled. “It felt like where those people could go to be normal.”
Sounds like paradise. But a tasteful, intentionally dull paradise. It was hard to understand what all the secrecy was about.
“Why people hide from the press I have no idea,” the venture capitalist told me. “I guess they are fearful of another book like Billionaire Wilderness coming out.”
And then he surprised me: “Are you around Friday to ski?”
Since he mentioned it…Billionaire Wilderness is the 2020 book-length study on the residents of Teton County, Wyoming, and the Yellowstone Club, written by Justin Farrell, a Wyoming native and professor of sociology at the Yale School of the Environment. The book encompasses journalism, data analysis, and a qualitative ethnographic study of the effects of the ultra-wealthy on local communities and environmental conservation. But the thing that makes it such a memorably blistering critique is the earnestness of Farrell as a mustachioed, cowboy-booted Jane Goodall, dutifully observing the wealthiest primates the planet has ever produced. “Why do they emulate the rural working poor?” he writes. “Why do they love Wrangler jeans?”
“I’ve been reporting that book my whole life,” Farrell told me. “As a kid, I just saw things happening. I saw hotels going up. I saw friends moving out. I saw new ski resorts expanding.
I saw agricultural land disappearing.”
A popular move among the billionaires flocking to low-income-tax Western states is to buy up property adjacent to their homes through conservation easements, which are tax write-offs for agreeing to keep land undeveloped in perpetuity. Conservation easements have exacerbated housing shortages for service workers and extended their long, dangerous commutes while allowing landowners to guiltlessly freeze development at the exact moment they personally arrived.
Farrell was initially welcomed into Yellowstone (thanks, mostly, he writes, to his Yale affiliation). But when he used public tax data to find out who had houses in the club and wrote them polite letters inviting them to be interviewed, he became persona non grata. Some of those who did agree to be interviewed felt personally attacked by the book, according to Farrell, but others email him to ask for advice about how to be better environmentalists and community members, which he routinely gives. Some ski-town problems are intractable. Others can be fixed if people want to fix them.
“If you’re there, you see it very clearly,” said Farrell. “The way that this culture is romanticized but not supported.”
In New England, a Goldman Sachs alum (and college-era friend of mine) had recently returned from skiing at the Hermitage, as a guest. “Well, Hermi-tazh, first of all,” she corrected me.
The Vermont ski area, formerly known as Haystack Mountain, was converted to a members’ club in 2011 but struggled to comply with—okay, the owners flouted—environmental regulations and went through Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2019. Again, developing private ski areas may seem cool at the moment, but it’s risky business. The Hermitage’s general manager, Bill Benneyan, explained to me that, in 2020, about 200 homeowners of the defunct mountain “came together, pooled their money, said, ‘Let’s buy all the assets and figure out how to operate this thing sustainably as a member-owned, member-governed nonprofit.’ ” The initiation fee is $100,000, and annual dues are between $19,000 and $20,000, and unlike the Western clubs, members need not buy a home to join.
The club has a 90,000-square-foot timber--framed lodge and four lifts, but “it doesn’t look like a ski resort,” my friend told me. “That is, you’re in nature and there are homes scattered throughout. You don’t really go out without instructors. Everyone is paired up and there are people watching, making sure you’re okay.”
Everyone is on a first-name basis, she says, and everything is heated. “You sit down on the chairlift; it’s heated.”
The amenities fall somewhere between “ridiculously nice” and “over the top.” “They have an arcade and a movie theater. The kids are walking around without their shoes. And I’m used to living out of our ski bags. I kept trying to reach back into my bag, and then somebody would come by and be like, ‘Let me take that for you.’ They don’t want to see bags around. They want you to feel like you’re in someone’s living room.”
A theme was emerging. Like at Powder and the country’s most elite golf and social clubs, once you’re inside, the illusion that everything is on the house is carefully maintained. “You can’t pay for anything,” she said. “There’s candy everywhere, and it keeps racking up on somebody’s bill, but I don’t know how.”
The fantasy of communitarianism is lovely for adults, who have a sense of reality and the value of service work, to engage in on vacation. But does never letting your children carry their own skis risk breeding entitlement?
“We are raising our children differently,” my friend said, “and liked it that they didn’t know what the word valet meant until we got to Vermont.”
“The kids, when their parents aren’t watching, are definitely in charge,” she continued. “They were going up to the fancy part of the coffee shop, getting these fancy hot chocolates, bringing them out to their friends that weren’t allowed to have them. I was just imagining what it would be like once the bar opened.”
Maybe they’ll make really gracious hosts and dinner dates one day. (Benneyan noted that the teenage kids often become assistant instructors.) And about those valets: When they returned my friend’s car, they’d organized it, cleaned the windows, and squared away the kid debris in the back seat. “I was like, what happened? It’s cleaner than when I left it. It was amazing.”
At Powder Mountain, I took a couple of cat laps with the members. It hadn’t snowed in weeks and the warm, windy storm the previous day had blown about four inches of styro-foam snow into the basin we were skiing. It skied better than it had any right to but still served as proof that you can bring the most thoughtfully curated group of people to the most carefully preserved terrain, but Mother Nature will still have the final say on whether the skiing is any good.
There’s something about Powder that, once you’ve been there, makes it difficult to dismiss the concept of private ski mountains. Maybe it’s that you actually can buy taste. Maybe it’s that the excess is paying for nature and anonymity, things many of us can get for (relatively) cheap. Or maybe it’s just really hard to argue with the purity of the desire to ski powder.
As the semi-pro skier, who was recently a guest at Wasatch, put it: “I don’t know how I feel about private ski resorts and the amount of wealth that goes into it in general. But I had a harder time feeling gross about it after. I dunno if that’s because the skiing was so good or it wasn’t as obnoxious as I was expecting it to be. You can understand it.”
I could understand it too, though truthfully, I was still hunting for some exceptional skiing.
I took shelter from an early February rainstorm at the Hinds Country Store, in Peterson. A trucker-hatted ski patroller still wearing his avalanche beacon was filling up his white Wasatch Peaks Ranch F150. “You guys getting snow up there?” I asked.
“It’s snowing on top,” he replied. “But about mid-mountain it’s turning to graupel.” Lousy, in other words.
Even Wasatch Peaks Ranch was no match for the weather. And as for the Park City venture capitalist who invited me to ski there, I did the right thing and turned him down. This story would come out and everyone at WPR would know whose guest I was.
“I’d hate for you to get yourself crosswise with Tiger and the other members for hosting a reporter,” I told him.
And who knows what’s in store for me. America seems to have no plans to redistribute the snow in the near future, but if I play my cards right I might still, somehow, find an extra $10 mil somewhere. And then I’ll need a few friends on the inside who can vouch for my sterling character.
Grayson Schaffer lives and skis in Santa Fe, New Mexico.