Idaho village divided over resort plans

Salt Lake City developers have quietly acquired thousands of acres in southeastern Idaho in hopes of becoming another destination on America’s amenity migration, where hordes of baby boomers are leading the charge west for skiing, golf and water sports.

Bruce Barrett and Brad Auger are promoting their Black Bear Resort, with plans for a European-style mountain village and a 600-slip marina, near where 18-mile-long Bear Lake straddles the Idaho-Utah border.

Even as investors tour the snow-covered site, some longtime Bear Lake County locals fear that the project, including a proposed U.S. Forest Service land swap to expand skiing, will mean traffic, a wildlife exodus and higher taxes.

This is just the latest among Rocky Mountain resort settlements stretching from Colorado to Montana aiming to capitalize on a post-World War II generation whose investment portfolios are flush with a collective $7.6 trillion, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Edging toward retirement, they now want to buy mountain and lake property close enough so the kids can fly in for the weekend.

Bear Lake is 120 miles from Salt Lake City. Logan, Utah, a town of 50,000, is an hour away.

“It’s halfway between Park City and Jackson,” Barrett said of Black Bear’s distance from established resorts towns in Utah and Wyoming. “It’s nearly impossible to find another place to put a resort like this.”

Other places across the West to experience the phenomenon include Eagle County, Colo., or southwestern Montana, now home to ski and golf resorts including Big Sky and billionaire timber baron Tim Blixseth’s private Yellowstone Club. Tamarack Resort, about 100 miles north of Boise, Idaho, opened in 2004 and has sold $500 million in real estate to help finance ski lifts, a golf course and marina.

Kenneth Johnson, a senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire Carsey Institute, said rural, agriculture-dependent counties saw an exodus in the 1990s, but many counties with scenery and recreation experienced substantial migration, often from older newcomers who were followed by younger people eager to sell or build them things.

The 75 million baby boomers born from 1946 to 1964 are active, wealthy and well-traveled, so pulling up roots and replanting them beneath a mountain panorama doesn’t sound so absurd. Johnson’s work shows that scenic rural counties near metropolitan areas such as Denver or Salt Lake City have been even more powerful magnets for older newcomers.

“Not only is it easy for kids and grandchildren to get there, they want to come because it’s such a nice place,” he said.

Bear Lake’s turquoise water is the result of limestone deposits suspended in its 208 foot depths. The limestone is responsible for another curiosity, too, with the lake home to four species of fish found nowhere else: sardine-sized Bonneville ciscos, Bonneville whitefish, Bear Lake whitefish and the Bear Lake sculpin.

The area “is very popular with hikers and hunters who want a more secluded or backcountry experience,” said Dennis Duehren, the Forest Service district ranger in Montpelier. “It’s gorgeous.”

Mountain men including Jim Bridger and American Indians met on the southern shore between 1825 and 1840 to trade. Mormon pioneers arrived starting in 1863, in towns they named Paris and St. Charles. On Aug. 13, 1896, outlaw Butch Cassidy robbed the bank in Montpelier.

More recently, lakeshore towns over the border in Utah including Garden City, famous for its Raspberry Days festival, have been the focus of condominium development, but these second homes have been pushing northward for a decade.

Barrett and Auger have rezoned 2,200 of their 6,000 acres for home sites and commercial development.

Construction includes a Tom Weiskopf-designed golf course, due to open in 2009, off-road vehicle trails and 10 lifts on an 800-acre “terrain park” for tubing and some skiing, Barrett said. That’s small potatoes compared to their eventual aim of a federal and state land exchange in the next decade, so skiing can be expanded to a 9,500-foot mountain.

Barrett wants Idaho to trade isolated parcels of state land located inside Forest Service-managed wilderness or grizzly bear habitat near Yellowstone National Park for less environmentally sensitive federal land in the Bear River Range. Should that happen, he’d lease the state land for his ski lifts.

“It’s pretty dramatic, the economic impact we’re going to have on the county,” Barrett predicts, adding he’s bought land quietly, to avoid sparking real-estate speculation. Lots on the golf course will start at $325,000, he said. “We’re selling predominantly to baby boomers who want to have legacy property for the kids and grandkids, but who are not independently wealthy.”

Still, not everybody at Bear Lake is thrilled with the idea.

Rick Thomas’ family arrived three generations ago, farming hay and raising cattle in 125-soul Bloomington just across the fence line from Black Bear. At local meetings, he’s raised concerns that Barrett and Auger will run short of cash, leaving their project half-finished. After all, the first owner of Tamarack filed for bankruptcy in 1995, before the project north of Idaho’s capital city was rescued by a deep-pocketed Mexican investor.

Thomas also blames golf course construction, as well as temporary warming huts set up for potential investors, for scaring off wintering deer.

“That’s one of the main reasons people live here, is for the fishing and hunting and back-to-nature type of stuff,” he said. “If that turns into the thing that they want it to, I’m not so sure I’m not going to pack my things and go somewhere else.”

He concedes the project has divided his closest relatives. They are now debating a plan to give Barrett and Auger better access to Black Bear through the family’s 1,100 acres.

Teri Eynon, a real-estate agent who moved away from Montpelier to Phoenix before returning in 1989, believes the arrival of second-home owners at Black Bear Resort will be accompanied by service and construction workers who over the next decade could revive Bear Lake County’s flagging agricultural economy, where the median household annual income trails Idaho’s average by $8,000.

Since 2000, the county’s population has fallen by more than 200 people, according to the U.S. Census.

“We are in desperate need of jobs and in desperate need of economic development,” Eynon said. “You just can’t make a living anymore. Our children are growing up and having to leave.”