To Buy a Mountain Range

From the back of a bush plane at Mission Field, the Crazy Mountains were only 20 miles in the distance, close enough for me to see late-afternoon shadows drift across their avalanche-scarred ridges. Here at the airport serving Livingston, Montana, at the northern gateway to Yellowstone National Park, the state’s decadelong economic boom was in full effect. Men in cowboy hats, carrying briefcases, crossed the tarmac. Horns blared in the distance. Then came the other sound I’d come to associate with a state once so empty that, until recently, it had only one representative in the U.S. House: hammering. Human activity was everywhere, yet those mountains on the horizon, the mystical Crazies, seemed frozen in time, artifacts of an unpeopled world placed under glass.

That was where we were headed. As our plane approached, the Crazies rose up like a medieval fortress, sheer walled and glacier tipped, toward the 11,214-foot Crazy Peak. “Any other mountain range in Montana near a large population center, you’d see some kind of human activity,” said my pilot. Around us were dozens of peaks, not a single one with a cell tower atop it or a road zigzagging nearby. There were no transmission lines or high-speed quads leading to a cafeteria in the sky. As the pilot dropped us into a valley, I saw our first sign of civilization, an airstrip. “That’s the Marlboro Ranch,” he said, circling so I could get a better look at the sprawling property. The ranch had at one time belonged to Philip Morris, which used it as a destination in its rewards program for longtime smokers.

For an hour, we explored the range’s upper reaches, darting through canyons and ridgelines cut like broken glass. This was a rare privilege since the Crazies are not just physically daunting; they are largely off-limits to the public and fast on their way to becoming a private mountain range for the wealthy. A range where the public is increasingly unable to hike, hunt, or fish, even though nearly half the spectacular terrain belongs to them as part of the Custer Gallatin National Forest.

It’s an alarming example of a growing trend. The United States is privatizing its natural wonders from Southern California beaches to Rocky Mountain streams. Investors buy up a valley or mountain, fence it off, shoo away the public, and charge rates only the wealthy can afford. Nowhere is this more in evidence than Montana, where former livestock ranches across the state have been converted into fishing and hunting clubs. Montana has been luxurified, from the skyrocketing cost of paying outfitters to shoot a bull elk to the carving of the state into recreational ranches the size of major national parks. (Rupert Murdoch’s Matador Ranch and Cattle, the largest at 380,000 acres, falls somewhere in size between Grand Teton and Sequoia.) The Montana recreation and real-estate boom has helped grow the population by 18 percent, a rate twice the national average, lessening its dependence on traditional forms of resource extraction. But this has also brought to light uncomfortable realities. Montana now has more Realtors per capita than most states. It has become a national leader in golf, not quite the sport they play in A River Runs Through It. And voters across the state are saying their quality of life is decaying.

Public land is a top issue in Montana. A sampling of recent headlines: “Montanans say quality of life getting worse, but support for public lands still strong” and “Survey: 3 in 5 believe quality of life has fallen; public lands support high.” As outdoors connoisseurs, Montanans care intensely about what their land is used for. A great deal of public land in the West essentially exists on paper only, cut off in clever ways by landowners — perhaps none more clever than the exclusive group of billionaires leading the effort to seize the most valuable parts of the Crazies.

This fall, Montana television screens have been saturated with campaign ads featuring squinty old men glowering at the camera and vowing to safeguard the state’s patrimony. The most aggressive came from Tim Sheehy, a barrel-chested former Navy SEAL running for senator. In reality, Republicans in the state, led by Sheehy’s mentor, Senator Steve Daines, have a record of eroding protections for public lands. Sheehy’s Democratic rival, the incumbent Jon Tester, managed to win reelection in 2018 despite Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton in the state by more than 20 points two years earlier. Tester has been a voice for transparency and accountability on public-land issues, but public-access groups say even he has been relatively mute about the Crazies, frustrating some supporters. He is now trailing Sheehy by eight points, according to the latest New York Times–Siena poll, in a race that might well swing control of the U.S. Senate to the GOP.

Curiously, the perpetrators of privatization are never named in these ads, leaving the viewer to wonder: Are they speculators? D.C. bureaucrats? Who is after Montana’s land, and why, in an election year when voters are demanding protection from them, won’t anyone say who they are?

In midtown Manhattan, across Fifth Avenue from Trump Tower, is a conference room with an image of the Crazy Mountains etched on a glass wall. The office belongs to Riverstone Holdings, an asset-management firm that has been a major player in fracking with shale assets in the U.S., Canada, and Argentina. The firm’s co-founder is David Leuschen, a 73-year-old Montanan who in the 1990s began buying ranches in his home state, assembling horizon-spanning sections of landscape the way some developers collect city lots. On one, he reportedly built a cattle operation replete with 2,000 cows, its corrals designed by the animal-rights activist Temple Grandin. According to The Crazies, a forthcoming book by Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Gamerman, Leuschen has a mirrored trailer at the ranch where he artificially inseminates cows himself using the world’s most expensive bull semen. Gamerman said Leuschen enjoys “telling people that he had fathered more than 3,000 babies this way” while blasting “Love Shack,” by the B-52’s, on the trailer’s sound system. (Leuschen denied Gamerman’s claims.)

In 2012, Leuschen purchased what may be the crown jewel of his empire. At the time, Montana ranches were selling at 60 percent below market value thanks to the Great Recession. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as fourth- and fifth-generation Montanans let go of properties that had been created when the West was swiped from Native Americans. In the Crazies, the dominant landowner, besides the federal government, was the Van Cleve family, which owned a dude ranch called the Lazy K Bar Ranch that encompassed several high-altitude peaks, including Crazy Peak. Leuschen saw the listing and bought all 11,000 acres — more than half the size of Manhattan.

Leuschen also has a stake in the investment vehicle that owns the real estate comprising Montana’s glitzy Big Sky Resort near Bozeman. Big Sky includes four ski areas, the most exclusive of which is the Yellowstone Club, where Leuschen is spotted frequently. Founded in 1997, the club contains the “largest concentration of billionaires anywhere outside New York City,” according to Gamerman. With a membership of 900 people, it is the nexus of money and influence in Montana, a bubble wherein the state’s most powerful recreate, rub shoulders, and cut deals. The club epitomizes the new Montana. “Guards watch its gates, and Google Street View doesn’t show its streets,” according to an article by Nick Bowlin published in Harper’s last spring. “It has its own ski mountain, a fire department, and a restaurant overseen by a celebrity chef.”

The club was founded by Tim Blixseth, a legendary dealmaker who saw Montana’s gilded future before anyone else did. Blixseth envisioned a wilderness enclave populated exclusively by Wall Street titans, Hall of Fame athletes, Hollywood megaproducers, and Silicon Valley pioneers. Its residents would be greeted at their front door by high-speed chairlifts to the top of the mountain, and they would golf on fairways with views of the Rockies.

Blixseth originally purchased 164,000 acres just outside Yellowstone from the Plum Creek Timber Company in the 1990s. The area was an ecological jewel where elk calved and grizzlies fed on them. Blixseth then persuaded the U.S. Forest Service to swap it for an even better parcel, a smaller one but with better access to Bozeman. The deal was rushed through two separate acts of Congress without public input. “They flew us back to Washington, D.C., at night,” recalled the appraiser. “We met with the head of the Forest Service. He had a napkin with some numbers on it.” Blixseth’s initial investment was around $5 million for a property now worth billions.

Blixseth ended up in jail after a judge ruled he had violated bankruptcy proceedings by selling a luxury-resort property in Mexico. In his divorce, Blixseth was stripped of the Yellowstone Club, which his ex-wife later sold to CrossHarbor Capital, a private-equity firm with an address in a Boston skyscraper.

Members-only skiing used to be seen as a lousy business model. Unlike traditional resorts, whose profits depend on parking fees and $35 hamburgers, “they’re making their money selling you this $2 million lot where you can build a house,” said Kevin Dennis, co-founder of conSKIerge, a blog about the ski industry. However, the Yellowstone Club proved there was enough interest and money for “private powder” (its trademarked motto) to succeed, and since then private mountains have proliferated, especially out west. Even resorts that aren’t fully private have adopted premium access programs (“early ups”) reserving the best snow for high-payers.

In Bozeman, the Yellowstone Club is a ubiquitous subject of conversation. In the bars and cafés around town, everyone has a story of interacting with Ben Affleck or Gisele Bündchen while working one of the club’s many seasonal gigs — manicurist, ski instructor, babysitter, roofer. Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel are said to have spent the early part of the pandemic holed up at the club. Turn on the radio and you are likely to hear someone rail against the club’s influence, which has become shorthand for out-of-state wealth. Like many a far-off place dense in valuable minerals, Montana has had a complex relationship with capitalism. “We have a history of out-of-staters coming here,” said Randy Newberg, an accountant from Bozeman who hosts a popular podcast about hunting, “and we become like the colonies.”

It turns out, however, that the Yellowstone Club has grown too small for its members and investors — and other wide-open spaces beckon.

The Crazies are about 100 miles from Big Sky. To Montanans, the mountains have long been known as unusual and difficult — an island of raw, uncivilized wilderness. “They have a young quality,” said John Gatchell, one of the state’s best-known conservationists. “When you get into the high country, you have this feeling like it was born a few weeks ago, a very wild feeling and not particularly safe.” The Crazies’ savage slopes have long attracted kayakers, mountain bikers, and snowmobilers along with reclusive animal species like wolverines and mountain goats, making them into one of the most attractive hunting grounds in the state. Some say the Crazies could be a skier’s paradise, too.

For almost a century, a battle has raged in the Crazies between landowners and the public. Like much of the West, the Crazies are checkerboarded: During the country’s westward expansion, Abraham Lincoln, who had been a railroad lawyer, divided the land into squares and gave every alternating one to the Northern Pacific Railway. In subsequent decades, the squares changed owners but the checkerboard pattern remained, seeding the land with conflict. Although much of the Crazies remains owned by the Forest Service, a large part of the range has been de facto privatized by a small group of families who control access points around the perimeter. (John Dutton, the cattle kingpin played by Kevin Costner on Yellowstone, who helicopters around Montana imposing his will, is said to be based on Bill Galt, a rancher who owns one of the largest private spreads in Montana.)

Historically, the Forest Service fought to maintain public access to the Crazies via a dozen or so trailheads. However, in 2021, the Service announced it was studying a deal that would drastically change its direction. In a trade with six private landowners, the agency proposed giving up 3,435 acres of lowland areas for a similarly sized area at higher altitude: valleys and riverbeds, rich in wildlife, for rock and ice that almost no one has the mountaineering skills to reach. Vast sections of the range — including virtually the entire eastern half — would become off-limits to the public. Conservation groups and local hunters freaked out. “They want to take away our access and give it to outfitters and ranchers,” said Hayes Goosey, former head of the Park County Rod & Gun Club. “They’re taking all of the good stuff and giving us crap,” said Brad Wilson, founder of Friends of the Crazy Mountains.

The Forest Service has asserted the deal was driven by land-management issues — it wanted the delicate, inaccessible peaks — while a spokesperson said high-elevation areas can still “offer meaningful recreation experiences.” But according to multiple sources, the agency decided to stop fighting the landowners who blocked trails. The Forest Servicespokesperson insisted the agency has not changed its access policy, while conceding that in “National Forests where there has been long-term disagreement over historic trails, it is common to see a variety of approaches.”

Land exchanges have a foul reputation out west. “Historically, they came from timber or mining companies seeking to expand operations,” said Chris Krupp, an attorney with WildEarth Guardians, a nonprofit that has challenged exchanges. “But now the land-management agencies are receiving more and more proposals from ultrawealthy landowners who want to add on to their ranches, either as big-game habitat or to provide access to other public lands. It has become a tried-and-true method for the rich to acquire public lands to add to their own private retreats.” Exchanges tend to be arcane and opaque, conducted in lawyers’ offices and back rooms. A law-review article on land exchanges — one of the few — called them “an insider-trading scheme between the land management agencies and corporate America.” Many are the sort of strategic deals the Yellowstone Club was founded upon. To stop them, voters can do little except rise up in outrage, which is why the corporations or wealthy individuals that tend to be involved avoid revealing the actual impact of the deal — who benefits and how much land the public gives up.

There are tells, however. Land exchanges are great big real-estate deals and thus expensive. Lawyers, lobbyists, appraisers, and even scientists have to be involved. And the private parties almost always foot the bill. In the case of the Crazies, the private party took pains to minimize its own involvement, while financing the bulk of the transaction costs. That party was the Yellowstone Club.

The club’s dealings with the Forest Service actually began around 2015, when it approached the agency about obtaining a steep ridge on public land at the edge of its private valley in Big Sky. Skiers increasingly demand daredevil terrain, which the club lacks; the ridge, in the Madison Range, would have provided it. In exchange, the club offered some of its own land, but the Forest Service rejected the deal for having “limited public benefits.”

According to Tom Glass, a consultant from Colorado known around the West as a land-exchange maestro, the Yellowstone Club became involved in the Crazies for one innocent reason: It still wanted its expert ski terrain in the Madisons. So it began to “think more broadly,” Glass told me, about using its “financial strength.” Were there other Forest Service projects it could lend that strength to? What about the Crazies? Did the Forest Service want any help persuading the locals to do something they had steadfastly resisted for almost a century?

To facilitate the exchange, the negotiating parties looked to Glass, a private citizen with a long history of helping billionaires like Bill Koch and Les Wexner privatize public land. Soon afterward, Glass, along with Jess Peterson, Montana’s most influential cattle-industry lobbyist, began setting up meetings with landowners, hunters, community leaders, and politicians, including the office of Jon Tester. Glass told them he was putting together a deal that would solve the Forest Service’s issues in the Crazies once and for all, though insiders say he left out who was paying him: not the Forest Service but the Yellowstone Club. (Glass maintained that he did disclose whom he was representing, while the Yellowstone Club denied that the process hasn’t been transparent.)

Glass presented the Yellowstone Club as a neutral party “with no interest in the Crazies whatsoever,” recalls Andrew Posewitz, founder of the Montana Public Trust Coalition. After all, the club had no property in the Crazies. Its resort was in Big Sky. Its involvement seemed to be a simple quid pro quo for its ski terrain in the Madisons, and its financial contributions would be limited.

Tester was skeptical. “Senator Tester has been a champion of public lands,” said John Sullivan, Montana chairman of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the most prominent public-access group in the country. While Glass wanted Congress to push the exchange through in a bill without a mandatory public review, Tester forced the Forest Service to conduct an approval process, which would give Montanans a chance to understand the deal, if nothing more.

Around the same time, a coalition called the Crazy Mountain Access Project sprang to life. CMAP called itself a grassroots, local, “citizen-led” organization, and it used the word access in practically every sentence to describe its mission: access for hunters, access for hikers, access for anyone who wanted to explore the Crazy Mountains. But the group was composed entirely of exchange supporters, including the Yellowstone Club’s director of development, ranchers, and a member of the Crow Nation being paid by Leuschen to garner tribal support. The project’s website derided opposition to the exchange as conspiracy theories based on “myths.” (Leuschen said he “never met” the tribe member, while the Yellowstone Club denied that it provided any funding to CMAP.) “They just thought they could present themselves as regular folks and no one would notice,” said Goosey.

The Forest Service worked hand in hand with CMAP, using it to show that the agency was being transparent and publicly accountable, as Tester had demanded. “It was pure gaslighting,” said Posewitz. “If the club’s involvement had been known, it would have decreased the likelihood of the deal happening.” (The Forest Service denied being “inappropriately influenced by outside interests.”)

In 2021, the Yellowstone Club’s parent company finally revealed that it did have a material interest in the Crazies: purchasing the Marlboro Ranch. No one knew that the property — one of the most expensive ranches in Montana, with turquoise alpine lakes, multiple mountains, and facilities for skiing, mountain biking, and rafting — had been for sale. Forest Service officials claimed to have been blindsided. Even Glass said he had been in the dark. “My reaction was, Oh, my goodness. What am I going to do now?” he told me. He characterized the acquisition of the ranch as unfortunate because it “increases the opportunity for more conspiracy theories.”

By then, the club was quietly shelling out millions of dollars to pave the way for the land swap. In addition to the lobbying, the club was paying, Glass said, the exchange’s transaction costs, which would include the all-important appraisals of the land being given up by the public. Almost no one knows what those appraisals contain. Initially, the Forest Service promised to make them public before the deal was finalized. Later, it said they would never be released. Now, it says they will — but only after the deal is finalized. According to a Yellowstone Club spokesperson, “The proposed land swap is a win-win transaction for the people of Montana, increasing and enhancing public land access and ownership in the Inspiration Divide and east Crazy Mountain areas.”

One morning last winter, I drove to the Crazies and attempted to go hiking. I succeeded, partly. On a county road, fishtailing in mud and snow, trying to find one of the only trailheads on my map before the phone bugged out, I found it hard to escape the sense that the Crazies are virtually moated by private land. The landowners “don’t want to share, and that’s that,” said Goosey. Some will go to significant lengths to control access. One method is to simply lock the public out with a gate, even if it’s a trail the public has lawfully used for a long time.

For decades, the Forest Service opposed such measures. If a landowner padlocked a gate, a ranger would show up with clippers. “But then the Forest Service just stopped,” said Posewitz. “They stopped doing their job.” Starting in 2017, service officials began pressuring rangers to back away from confrontations with landowners, said multiple rangers who requested anonymity for fear of retribution.

That change involved Senator Daines. In 2017, Daines joined a campaign to punish a young ranger who had battled the landowners. The ranger, Alex Sienkiewicz, had infuriated the ranchers by tearing down their “No Trespassing” signs. In the summer of 2016, he sent a staffwide email that read, “This is my regular  reminder: NEVER ask permission to access the National Forest Service through a traditional route shown on our maps EVEN if that route crosses private land. NEVER ASK PERMISSION; NEVER SIGN IN.”

Someone posted his email on Facebook, where it was seen by Chuck Rein, a powerful landowner who formerly headed the Montana Outfitters & Guides Association, an influential lobbying group. Rein has an outfitting operation in the Crazies, charging thousands of dollars per hunt on his land as well as the adjoining National Forest. (“Arise. Kill, and Eat: Acts 10:13,” reads the website for the outfitting business.) And he has allies in the Montana Republican Party.

Daines took up the ranchers’ cause, writing to the director of the Forest Service “to request information regarding Forest Service policy for disputed access points near the Crazy Mountains.” Shortly afterward, the Forest Service launched an investigation of Sienkiewicz, seized his files, and sent him to work at an abandoned mine in a ghost town far from the Crazies. “Daines destroyed Alex’s career,” said Posewitz. “It sent a message to the rest of the Forest Service: Stand in the way of privatizers at your peril.” (Through a spokesperson, Daines said he had “no role in the Crazy Mountain land exchange.” The Forest Service produced no evidence of wrongdoing by Sienkiewicz and reinstated him.)

A former Procter & Gamble executive, Daines has become one of the Beltway’s most influential Republicans, a kingmaker heading the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which recruits GOP candidates for the Senate, and a contender to replace Mitch McConnell as leader of the Republican Caucus. Daines was the first Republican in Senate leadership to endorse Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and has shown a keen interest in energy, natural resources, and public lands. In 2021, he posted a selfie hiking on the Crazy Mountain Ranch. And Daines recruited Sheehy to run against Tester.

Sheehy, who comes from suburban Minnesota, moved to Montana after his time in the Navy and founded an aerial-firefighting company with lucrative government contracts. He also bought a 40,000-acre ranch where he reportedly charges $12,500 for hunting access. On his campaign website, public land is front and center, more prominent than immigration or the economy. But his background alarms public-land advocates, especially his affiliation with the Property and Environment Research Center, a group dedicated to “market solutions for conservation” and public lands. Somehow, Sheehy forgot to mention in his campaign filings that he served on the board of PERC, which has crusaded for the land swap in the Crazies. His campaign was then caught erasing the think tank’s logo from his shirt in ads.

“Sheehy represents a new wave of ultrawealthy folks who see Montana as their personal playground,” said Noah Marion, political and state policy director of the Wild Montana Action Fund. “He has made statements in support of transferring federal public lands. Privatizing these lands would devastate local economies and turn Montana into a ‘pay to play’ state where only the rich can afford to enjoy the outdoors. Do we want a Montana where only the wealthy can afford to enjoy what should belong to all of us?” (Sheehy’s campaign did not respond to requests for interviews.)

What does Leuschen see when he looks at the mountains adorning the glass wall in his Fifth Avenue conference room? The land swap will result in a map optimized for private autonomy, ridding the area of almost any public nuisance, whether that means hunters competing for elk or pesky rangers. And that, in turn, raises property values. “In our business, you say ‘end of the road’ and it’s like you’re holding a gem,” said Colter DeVries, a Realtor with a podcast called Ranch Investor. “Exclusivity is what sells.”

Of all the obscure deals surrounding the Crazies, the most troubling by far is that with the Crow Indians, the last victims of a mass dispossession from the range. The Crow live on a reservation just within viewing distance of the mountains, which are full of the tribe’s sacred sites. Many of the sites are on Leuschen’s land and require his permission to visit. This leverage has naturally turned into a deal: If the tribe supported the land exchange, it could access the sacred sites without calling first. This has been touted as a major selling point of the land exchange, righting a historical wrong and bringing justice to the Crow. But no third-party observer has seen the deal on paper. Given the deeply troubled history of treaties with Native Americans, I inquired with the Forest Service: Is there an actual document ensuring the tribe’s access? The agency couldn’t answer. According to a spokesperson, the deal is between the Crow Nation and Leuschen. (Leuschen denied such an agreement had been reached.)

Meanwhile, at the old Marlboro Ranch, construction has already begun on a new resort, a “private membership experience” called Crazy Mountain Ranch, the lights of which can be seen on the mountain at night. The arrival of the Crazy Mountain Ranch has triggered something of a run on property, including the opening of a distillery by Yellowstone actor Cole Hauser in partnership with Leuschen. “People don’t really get what’s going on,” said a local rancher. “If they did, they would be pissed off. I’m not saying I know what it feels like to be an Indian, but this is just colonization.”

Last year, a website for the ranch debuted, touting:

Big peaks & big skies. Forests, streams & meadows. High alpine lakes. Ranch hands & ranch dogs. The neighing of horses, the bugling of elk, & the distant bellowing of cattle. This is Crazy Mountain Ranch, a welcoming, authentic & beautiful place. Time spent here will always be a rare & wonderful experience, & one that truly embodies the nature & spirit of Montana.

AS INCREDIBLE A SETTING THERE WILL EVER BE FOR THE GAME OF GOLF