Yellowstone
An update and an excerpt from my new big story in Mountain Gazette 201.
Hi, I’m Ari, and this is my newsletter where I send updates about my work as a longform journalist. You’re receiving this because you subscribed some time ago. You can always unsubscribe below (but please don’t).
It has been about a month since my big Yellowstone Club story came out in the new issue of Mountain Gazette. Thank you to all the MG readers who’ve sent me kind notes about the piece. Some nine months of reporting and writing and six weeks of fact-checking and editing went into this feature, as did much care from my team of editors and fact checkers: Mike Rogge, Kim Stravers, and Hannah Truby.
A lot of people have asked me what’s going to happen with the Cottonwood case. Bozeman-based Cottonwood Environmental Law Center is suing the Yellowstone Club under the Clean Water Act, alleging the club is polluting the Gallatin River. My reporting found the evidence highly credible despite the club’s attempts to discredit Cottonwood. Next week, the United States District Court for Montana will set a date for a jury trial. I plan on publishing a follow-up article online when there’s a verdict to report.
If you’d like a copy of 201, I believe some are still available for new Mountain Gazette subscribers. Otherwise, if you’re in New York, you can find it on the shelves at McNally Jackson.
And now, here is a short excerpt:
As a general rule, I prefer not to get arrested while I’m reporting. Although it probably would have been good for my career, given the circumstances that day, it sounded like a lot of paperwork, and I’d woken up with a pimple, which I did not want to preserve in perpetuity in a mug shot. I wasn’t doing anything illegal, though an absence of illegal activities does not preclude law enforcement from arresting someone. In fact, one of the people I was with, John Meyer—a lanky and quirky biologist turned environmental lawyer turned candidate for mayor of Bozeman, Montana—previously had been arrested for the exact thing we were then doing.
It was the first of September, 2023. We were walking up a river.
As I trudged through rushing water, wearing waders and trail runners, it occurred to me that I had never asked my editor if he would cover my bail. I thought it was a good thing that Meyer is a lawyer. Not that he does criminal defense. And not that he’d agreed to represent me. The opposite, actually. He joked that Mountain Gazette would cover everyone’s legal expenses—not just for me, but also for him, the photographer the magazine sent with me, and a ski bum who’d been roped into our adventure. That wasn’t going to happen.
You must understand that this isn’t an ordinary river. It’s the drain beneath a gold-plated toilet. Its water flows through a heavily guarded place seen by few besides ultra-wealthy vacation homeowners and the people hired to serve them—a private ski and golf resort in Big Sky, Montana, called the Yellowstone Club.
To join the Yellowstone Club, one has to be more than rich—like, “owning a jet” rich, plus power and influence. The resident member list, capped at 864, has included celebrities like Ben Affleck and business leaders such as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The initiation fee to join is $500,000, and annual dues are $78,000. Resident members must also buy a condo or house inside the club, with prices in the many millions. The club trademarked the term “Private Powder,” which sounds like a product intended to relieve swamp crotch, but I digress. There is a ski mountain with 22 lifts and more than 100 trails, with an approximate annual snowfall of 300 inches, according to the club. It has an 18-hole golf course designed by champion golfer Tom Weiskopf.
“The Yellowstone Club represents the pinnacle, or inevitable telos, of the trajectory of extreme wealth concentration in the United States,” wrote Justin Farrell, professor of sociology at Yale University, in his 2020 book Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West.
At a time of mounting resentment toward the ultra-wealthy, and as the climate crisis forces us to reconsider the American glorification of excess, I wanted to learn about this place that epitomizes the most lavish of mountain lifestyles and how it intersects with the community around it. Montana has experienced a dramatic influx of wealth since the turn of the century, and with this growth have come environmental challenges as well as soaring real estate prices that put financial stability out of reach for many working people there. It’s a topic at the center of Montana politics. In a September 2023 campaign video announcing his bid for governor, Democrat Ryan Busse decried the upper class, promising to uphold the values of the old—the ostensibly authentic—proletarian Montana. “It pisses me off that Greg Gianforte [the current governor] just wants to sell this state to his rich buddies and turn it into a playground so only they can afford to live and play here,” he said in the video. “Me and Gianforte? It’s a tale of two Montanas.”
To get started, I wanted to sample the Yellowstone Club’s multi million-dollar views. Security is tight; the club won’t let just anyone drive in, and my request for an official tour was denied. But I’d heard of another way around the castle gates: by waterway.
The Gallatin River is a prime trout habitat and a destination for recreation. It pours into the Missouri River, traveling through numerous communities and ecosystems en route to the Gulf of Mexico. And it has been suffering in recent years from large-scale algal blooms, which can be caused by nitrogen from inadequately treated wastewater, among other byproducts of development. Excessive algae harms aquatic life, and nobody wants to raft or fly-fish in a river that looks like a neon-green Slurpee. This is a problem on many sections of the Gallatin, but the tributary that runs through the Yellowstone Club, in particular, is on the Clean Water Act section 303(d) list, meaning its water quality was designated as impaired by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.
In September 2022, Meyer hiked roughly 3 miles up the river into the Yellowstone Club to obtain water samples as evidence for a lawsuit alleging that the club is polluting. Montana’s stream-access law allows recreation in rivers that pass through private property as long as you stay below the high-water mark, which Meyer insists he did. Still, according to court documents, the sheriff got a call from someone inside the club, and the Madison County attorney charged Meyer with criminal trespass. The charges were dismissed in July 2023 for lack of probable cause, so I reached out to Meyer to ask if he would take me up there. As it turned out, he was already planning another trip, and he welcomed me to join.
Continued in Mountain Gazette 201.