by Kate Groetzinger
Center for Western Priorities
Long before Doug Burgum became the man in charge of 500 million acres of America’s public lands as Interior secretary, he was doing real estate deals inside an ultra-exclusive private resort in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem built on former public land.
The Yellowstone Club—a private ski resort, residential community, and golf club outside Big Sky, Montana—charges membership initiation fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Undeveloped lots inside its gates have sold for as much as $10 million. Its membership list is a who’s who of tech billionaires, celebrities, and financial elites including Justin Timberlake, Tom Brady, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Bill Ackman, and Warren Buffett. It’s also a club with a long history of conflict over water, trails, and access to public land.
Founder Tim Blixseth purchased approximately 146,000 acres of private timberland from Plum Creek Timber Company in Montana in 1991 and then conducted land swaps with the US Forest Service to consolidate scattered parcels into a contiguous, developable area adjacent to Big Sky. These exchanges were enabled by acts of Congress and are informally known as the Gallatin land swaps. From a conservation perspective, the purpose of those swaps was to remove the checkerboard pattern of alternating private-public land ownership in the Gallatin Mountain Range so that it could be better protected as federal wilderness.
Through those swaps, Blixseth’s company securred a 15,200-acre parcel just southwest of Big Sky in the Madison Mountain Range, on which he opened the Yellowstone Club in 1999.
Burgum’s YC Club backstory
Burgum’s ties to the Yellowstone Club began in December 2007, when Burgum—through two holding companies he controlled, Lone View LLC and Lone View II LLC—entered into a real estate deal with Yellowstone Development LLC to acquire multiple development lots inside the club’s gates. Deeds conveying three lots were placed in escrow, to be released pending the completion of the sale. According to the North Dakota Secretary of State business records, Burgum’s Lone View II LLC was formed just one day before the agreement was signed, specifically to receive those deeds.
The Yellowstone Club, which was struggling financially at the time due to financial fraud committed by Blixseth, never completed the sale. In 2008, it filed for bankruptcy. As part of its reorganization plan, the club—operating as Yellowstone Development LLC—rejected Burgum’s purchase agreement. Burgum responded by filing formal objectionsto the bankruptcy confirmation plan and three separate Proofs of Claims as a creditor, naming himself personally alongside his Lone View LLCs, in proceedings before the federal bankruptcy court.
His dispute was ultimately resolved with CrossHarbor Capital Partners, the Boston-based private equity firm that acquired the club out of bankruptcy. In May 2009, Burgum agreed to drop his objections in exchange for six reconfigured development lots inside the club, deferred membership dues and property owners association fees, a $300,000 membership deposit deferral, and up to $20,000 in engineering and legal fee reimbursements.
° ° ° °
° ° ° °
Today, Burgum owns a $22 million condominium at the Yellowstone Club through his Lone View LLC. He also holds a separate ownership stake in the club itself through an entity called YC Holdings LLC, which state records show is the Yellowstone Club’s own operating entity, registered at CrossHarbor’s Boston address. That stake paid Burgum approximately $22,000 in 2024. He made between $100,001 and $1 million the same year renting out his condo.
When Burgum filed his financial disclosure as President Donald Trump’s nominee for Interior secretary in January 2025, he disclosed both interests—and it appears he divested from neither. It’s unclear what he did with the six lots he acquired in the bankruptcy settlement, though none appear in the financial disclosure form he filed when he became Interior secretary, suggesting he likely sold them at some point between 2009 and 2024.
A bad neighbor to the public?
Burgum’s ties to the Yellowstone Club go back almost 20 years and reveal that Burgum has a deep interest in the club’s success, despite it being a bad neighbor to public lands. The Yellowstone Club, of which Burgum is now a partial owner, has been embroiled in a number of environmental and social scandals. In 2016, a Yellowstone Club wastewater pool overflowed, sending more than 30 million gallons of sewage into the headwaters of the Gallatin River, a popular fly fishing and rafting destination. Locals were outraged, and the club paid more than $350,000 in penalties for the spill.
The club’s owners also have a long record of acquiring and restricting public land access. The resort itself was, of course, built on former public land. More recently, a CrossHarbor subsidiary orchestrated a land swap with the Forest Service in Montana’s Crazy Mountains, a deal the Yellowstone Club helped broker behind closed doors while publicly denying any interest in developing the area. CrossHarbor owns a luxury golf resort in the Crazy Mountains and has worked to consolidate its land holdings in the range. The controversial swap, approved by the Forest Service shortly after Trump took office, transferred nearly 4,000 acres of public lands into private hands and permanently ended public access to two historic trails that had appeared on federal maps for over a century. Roughly two-thirds of the more than 1,000 public comments collected by the Forest Service opposed the swap.
That approval came the same month Burgum was sworn in as Interior secretary. As secretary, he has fast-tracked controversial mining project proposals and put together massive oil and gas lease sales benefiting corporate CEOs at the expense of taxpayers and our environment. And he is purportedly partnering with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to explore selling public lands to address the nation’s housing shortage. Any large-scale efforts to sell public land would primarily benefit luxury developers, like the current developer behind the Yellowstone Club, Discovery Land Company, which is developing projects similar to the Yellowstone Club throughout the West.
CrossHarbor faced more bad neighbor allegations in 2024 when its Crazy Mountain Ranch golf resort began illegally diverting water from Rock Creek to irrigate a newly constructed golf course without a valid water right. Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation sued the ranch in 2025 to halt the unauthorized irrigation, and a judge ultimately declined to levy fines but warned the ranch to be more careful.
Private gain from public land?
While Burgum was not directly involved in the Crazy Mountains land swap between CrossHarbor and the Forest Service (which is part of the Department of Agriculture, not Interior), his ties to the Yellowstone Club and its developers are cause for concern, according to Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush. He told Floodlight News that Burgum “shouldn’t be involved in residential development on public lands while he owns [a stake in the Yellowstone Club].”
Compliance with ethics laws is a low bar, especially in an administration that seems eager to bend the law in favor of officials with deep ties to the very industries they regulate. For example, the Trump administration rushed to issue an ethics waiver in March to allow self-proclaimed “cowboy lawyer” Karen Budd-Falen to oversee grazing policy within the Interior department, despite being a commercial public lands rancher herself.
She stands accused of abusing her power to favor ranchers, including herself, and has even admitted it publicly. The same situation could easily arise with Burgum, who is himself a real estate developer. Burgum’s office refused to say whether the secretary would recuse himself from any decisions involving the Yellowstone Club or its affiliates when asked about it by Floodlight News, saying only that he “has complied with all federal ethics requirements.”
The question is not whether Burgum filed the right paperwork, it’s whether a man who has spent nearly two decades accumulating financial interests in a resort built on former public land and who co-owns a stake in the operating entity of that resort—in addition to a real estate firm that owns much of downtown Fargo, North Dakota—should be in a position to make decisions about how America’s public lands are used, sold, or traded away. The public deserves an Interior secretary who represents their interests, not those of his billionaire buddies at the Yellowstone Club.
NOTE: The story above is published with permission of its author and the Center for Western Priorities.
Also read these stories from Yellowstonian:
