Trump Officials, Billionaires and the Quiet Reshaping of America’s Public Lands |
This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action, in partnership with High Country News. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.
At the end of a dirt road along the northeastern edge of Montana’s Crazy Mountains, a simple sign warns visitors they are now entering private property.
For fifth-generation Montanan Brad Wilson, the notice marks a defeat with implications far beyond the Crazies.
“The fate of our public lands and our rights are in jeopardy right now,” Wilson told Floodlight.
Wilson is a former sheriff’s deputy and lifelong hunter. For most of his life, he has lived in the jagged shadows of the Crazy Mountains — their snow-capped peaks and twisting valleys watched him grow from a boy herding sheep on his grandfather’s ranch to a grey-haired hunter tracking elk herds across their remote slopes.
“The loss of this access means a lot to me and everybody else,” he said beside the gate, looking down and hiding the wet corners of his eyes.
The road beyond the gate next to Wilson leads into what was, for more than a century, one of two historic public trails into the east side of the Crazies. The U.S. Forest Service relinquished the public’s access to the trail early last year as part of a land swap with the Yellowstone Club — an exclusive mountaintop retreat for the megarich located 100 miles away in Big Sky.
“It doesn’t make any sense to me to give this up,” said Wilson.
For many Montanans, the swap has come to symbolize the growing influence of wealthy private interests spreading across America’s public lands and provides a glimpse of what could come under the Trump administration.
There are more than 600 million acres of federally owned public lands across America — from iconic national parks and monuments to forests, grasslands and seashores. But now, nearly 90 million of those acres are at risk of some kind of development due to what critics describe as an unprecedented shift in policies under the first and second Trump administrations.
In Arizona, a sacred Indigenous site was handed over earlier this year to a copper-mining company. In Utah, Republican Sen. Mike Lee attached a provision last summer to the federal budget that would have sold up to 3.2 million acres of public land across the West. And just last month, the U.S. Senate voted to overturn a 20-year-old mining ban on federal lands in Minnesota, clearing the way for a foreign-owned copper mine.
Perhaps nowhere in the country is the fight over public lands — and the big-moneyed interests pulling the strings — more on display right now than in Montana’s Crazy Mountains.
“This is a really simple issue,” said Andrew Posewitz, a Montana public lands advocate and the son of a renowned conservationist. “The public had some really good land and some really good access in the Crazy Mountains. Some really rich people decided they liked the Crazy Mountains a lot … And now the public doesn’t have that access.”
Every American — not just Montanans — should care, he warned.
“Because it is very much a harbinger of potentially what could come.”
Perched more than 7,000 feet above sea level, the Yellowstone Club was built atop former public lands acquired through land exchanges with the U.S. Forest Service in the 1990s. It has since converted more than 15,000 acres outside Big Sky into one of the most exclusive communities on the planet.
The club’s membership has included familiar names: celebrities like Justin Timberlake, Tom Brady and Paris Hilton; tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt; and financial elites like Bill Ackman, Warren Buffett and Robert Herjavec.
Inside its gates, the Yellowstone Club has an 18-hole golf course, a concert venue, a movie theater, a dedicated fire department, hundreds of luxury homes and nearly 3,000 acres of private ski slopes. Initiation runs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and an undeveloped lot inside the gate has sold for as much as $10 million, according to Forbes.
CrossHarbor Capital Partners, a Boston-based investment firm, bought the Yellowstone Club out of bankruptcy in 2009.
In the 17 years since, the firm has expanded its Montana portfolio — developed through a subsidiary called Lone Mountain Land Company — to become one of the largest luxury-resort footprints in the Rocky Mountains.
“They’re gobbling up mass swaths of Montana,” said Erik Nylund, who served as a staffer for former Democratic Montana Sen. Jon Tester and met often with club representatives. “They will throw money around at anybody and everybody to get what they want.”
In 2016, the Yellowstone Club drew criticism after more than 30 million gallons of its sewage overflowed into the headwaters of the Gallatin River, drawing over $300,000 in penalties and financial commitments from the company — and outraging locals.
The Yellowstone Club declined an on-camera interview for this story. In a written statement, a company representative noted that numerous lawsuits against the club over its impacts to local waterways “have been dismissed by federal judges” and the club has spent millions to treat its wastewater “to the highest standards the State of........