The first full issue is hitting newsstands
The New West Magazine: Premiere Issue Hits Newsstands, Mailboxes
The premiere issue of The New West magazine, a new regional publication focused on covering design, development and community in the Rocky Mountain West is hitting newsstands and mailboxes this week. Click here to complete a survey to get the magazine free or sign up for a paid subscription here.
The magazine is available on these newsstands in Missoula: Shakespeare & Co., Fact & Fiction, the Good Food Store and the University of Montana Bookstore. Other bookstores and newsstands will soon carry the magazine across Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and eastern Washington.
At 68 pages, this is our first full issue and we think you'll find it even broader and deeper than our preview edition released earlier this year.
The cover photo at right depicts Mike Horst, a ranch hand who lives and works south of the Bears Paw Mountains in Montana. The story, written and photographed by Anne Medley, tells of calving season on a family ranch and in the backdrop is the story of how even in the face of corporate agriculture, trophy ranches and soaring land prices, two families are holding onto something much bigger than just a family business.
This issue's "Project Watch" section details the bankruptcies of five posh resorts in the region and the issue is anchored by a profile Bill Foley, the billionaire founder of Fidelity National Financial and new owner of Whitefish Mountain Resort and Mackenzie River Pizza Co. and, well, lots of other stuff. And, he may just be getting started.
The best way to check out our magazine is to subscribe. We want to know who's interested in The New West, so we have made the magazine available free to qualified subscribers who answer a short questionnaire.
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In The New West magazine: Design Showcase
Have Your Ranch & Develop It, Too
The Sand Creek Ranch sits on about 850 acres of Wyoming prairie near the Big Horn Mountains and the small town of Buffalo. It's the kind of place a real estate developer might dream of slicing into pieces of Western paradise. The ranch, like hundreds of others across the Mountain West, is worth far more with cul-de-sacs than cattle.
John Jenkins, who 40 years ago helped his newly widowed mother downsize from a large spread on the Powder River to this smaller ranch, has a powerful reason to protect the property and to preserve a portion of its, and his, agricultural heritage.
"I want to keep it open. I cast my mother's ashes to the wind out there on the big meadow," says Jenkins, who recently retired after a career as an oilman and political consultant. "But, realistically," he adds, "because I'm a businessman, I know that its highest and best use is really as real estate."
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Essay: In The New West magazine
The Family Farm, Version 2.0
I spread my sleeping bag on the floor and crumpled my coat for a pillow. I put the bag where my bed used to be.
The room still smelled the same. Aside from the echo, there was something homey, something warm, the smell of a vanilla candle still lingering in the empty walls. My brother and I were at the now vacant house for the night. It was Thanksgiving, and we wanted to stay somewhere familiar. The land had sold, but the house hadn’t yet, so we would stay the night on the floor in my old bedroom.
Facing me, in the wall, was a small hole about the size of a heel. My brother and I had been fighting about something teenagers fight about and, in a tantrum, my foot connected with the wall. My brother had laughed. I was 16 at the time.
I had forgotten about the hole, hidden by a dresser long ago. As I ran my fingers over it one more time, my brother walked in, shaking his head. He always told me I was too sentimental about this place. It’s just a house, just a farm. They’re just walls. It’s just dirt.
He didn’t believe it either.
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In The New West magazine
Real Ranch Living: Not Everyone is Selling Out
It's 2:30 a.m., and Bud Boyce, 75, fumbles in the dim light of the pickup cab for the controls of the mounted spotlight.
Outside, the beam cuts the blackness, illuminating clouds of warm breath and glassy eyes as it pans from left to right, then back again across a herd of more than 250 Angus-Hereford cows, all pregnant and ready to give birth.
The cattle huddle in dark masses. Bud plays the light across them, carefully watching for a cow in labor or a newborn calf. With no signs of a delivery-in-progress and no new calves since the last check three hours ago, he wheels his pickup back toward the house and lurches down the frozen drive. In three hours, he'll do it again. Then, ranch hand Mike Horst will take over.
It's a grueling schedule, part of what makes ranching a lifestyle, not a job.
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In The New West magazine
Montana’s Cash Cowboy
If you didn't know any better, you might think William Patrick (Bill) Foley II was just another retiring baby boomer looking for golf courses, open spaces and the chance to recapture an idealized childhood of summertimes on the family ranch. A frank man with an almost goofy charm, he speaks of his love for Montana, his concern for the landscape -- and the joy he gets bombing around the backcountry on an ATV or a snowmobile.
But the truth is, Foley isn't very good at leisure. He's got the fancy log home on Whitefish Lake, five West Coast wineries, the huge cattle ranch near Deer Lodge, and the requisite private jets, but he can't seem to help turning everything into a business.
Foley appears to be in a much better spot than most of the Wall Street moguls, Silicon Valley financiers and high-rolling property developers who see the surging "amenity economy" in the Mountain West as the next great capitalist frontier. In some ways, he's representative of the breed: a very rich man who's become enamored with the West, and whose first instinct is to buy it.
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Another Harbinger of The Crunch
Idaho’s Village Green Development Files for Bankruptcy
The Village Green at the Valley Club, a new high-end subdivision and golf course development in Ketchum, Idaho, filed last week for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, owing more than $24 million to its creditors.
The development plan includes 43 custom homes -- valued at about $3 million each -- and a nine-hole Tom Fazio golf course, but so far only 13 homes have been completed and only seven of those have been sold, according to developer Henry Dean.
"We expected to do a lot better," Dean said. "We just fell off of our pro forma."
It's the latest in a string of bankruptcies among developments in the West, from Tamarack Resort in Idaho to Promontory Club in Utah, further evidence that the high-end real estate market in the West has been deeply affected by the credit crunch.
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In The New West magazine: Project Watch
The High-End Real Estate Market: They Went Bankrupt?!?
The national real estate pullback and the credit crunch, combined with several years of sky-high construction costs, have some luxury developments in the New West on the ropes.
While bankruptcy is an imperfect prism through which to view the effects of the market slowdown, these five cases offer rich glimpses into the operations and financing problems.
More bankruptcies are undoubtedly on the way. The B-word has even been thrown around as a possibility at the vaunted Yellowstone Club, where the divorce of owners Tim and Edra Blixseth has compounded its woes.
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In The New West magazine: Spotlight North Idaho
Coeur d’Alene Tribe Rides the Idaho Boom
There's a certain optimism and sense of limitlessness to Chairman Chief Allan's air that explains, even better than statistics or testaments to his business acumen, just how the once-destitute Coeur d'Alene Tribe has become an economic power and political player in Idaho.
In his office the 35-year-old smiles boyishly. He's speaking about the tribe's immutable bond to the rolling Palouse region of North Idaho and his sense of mission as chairman: "We look at this tribe as a Fortune 500 company, but it's not ours. We're not doing it for us. We're doing it for our kids."
In the past 10 to 15 years the 2,000-member tribe has undergone an impressive turnaround. Tribal enterprises' total revenue surpassed $300 million in its most recent fiscal year, with about $100 million in earnings. With 1,400 people on its payroll, the tribe is the second-largest employer in Idaho's five northern counties. In 1989, unemployment among tribal members was close to 70 percent. This year, it's in the single digits.
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In The New West magazine: Spotlight North Idaho
Players of the Panhandle
North Idaho has no shortage of real estate developers, but Marshall Chesrown is in a league by himself. Barely in his 50s (retired from the car dealership business since age 39), the self-made millionaire with a high school education lays claim to six high-end developments from Coeur d'Alene to Spokane, his hometown.
Foremost is the Club at Black Rock, which sits on about 600 acres of Coeur d'Alene lakefront property with a golf course and vacation homes. The Ridge at Sunup Bay, on 250 acres nearby, is a private development (residents also get memberships at the club).
Known as a charismatic straight-talker, Chesrown gets high marks from economic planners in Coeur d'Alene. Jonathan Coe, president and general manager of the Coeur d'Alene Chamber of Commerce, calls Chesrown a generous corporate citizen -- giving to the arts and donating land for community use -- and says his developments have helped buffer the area from economic slowdowns in the housing and construction markets.
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