What progress really costs in Montana’s last wild valleys
By Benjamin Alva Polley EBS COLUMNIST
Everyone wants their slice of heaven—a piece of paradise to call their own. For those with the means, Big Sky, Montana, and the Yellowstone Club promise exactly that: sweeping peaks, deep snow and the feeling of living on the edge of true wilderness.
The dream is simple: a winter or summer home high in the mountains, in a country where grizzlies, wolves and elk still occasionally roam. But the transformation that follows—trees felled, ground torn up, driveways and foundations poured, houses and lodges rising—quietly reshapes who and what can live here. Over time, the wild visitors that helped sell the dream often stop coming through.
Big Sky and the Yellowstone Club sit inside the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the largest relatively intact temperate ecosystems left on the planet. They also lie along the path of the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative, a conservation effort designed to maintain connected habitat from Wyoming to the Yukon for wide-ranging species like grizzlies, lynx, wolverines and wolves. What happens here doesn’t just affect a single town; it influences a continental wildlife corridor.
The scale of Big Sky depends on what you measure. The skiable terrain covers roughly 5,850 acres—about 9.14 square miles. The core development area, including Town Center and Meadow Village, occupies around 165 acres. Look at the broader geographic district and the service area tied to it, and Big Sky’s influence stretches to an estimated 228.1 square miles, or about 76,800 acres. That’s a significant footprint for communities that remain unincorporated, with no mayor and limited formal local government.
This raises a straightforward but essential question: What is the true cost—to land, wildlife and water—of turning a high mountain valley of our public lands into a global destination?
Places like Big Sky are among the last wild-adjacent landscapes in the Lower 48 that people can still buy into. They are also emblematic of a global pattern: wild rural ground steadily converted into human habitat. Lance Richardson, in his comprehensive 2025 book True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, discusses how he and one of his wives, Deborah, separately expressed sentiments in 1961 that captured the tension surrounding their home place, Sagaponack, New York, which could easily be applicable today as Big Sky.
“I am heartbroken. This place is among the last remaining places and is representative of what the world is becoming that humans feel they must occupy,” his recorded his wife Deborah stating. “It is being emptied inexorably and stuffed with stale inert matter and all the lovely potential of being human crowded into small pockets of lessening possibility.”
“It is not a question of standing in the way of ‘progress’; it is a question of understanding what true progress is,” Matthiessen himself remarked in an issue of the The East Hampton Star. “What progress is not is condemning one (1-1.5) million acres of American land per year to asphalt; every year we have more highways (and more people) and every year we have fewer places left to go. ‘Progress’ is the last refuge of the speculator and the spoiler…”
One million acres a year—an area roughly the size of a Glacier National Park—disappears annually beneath pavement and development in the U.S. Big Sky’s share of that number is small on a national scale, but its location in the GYE gives its choices outsized ecological weight.
This isn’t a simple story of villains and victims. Big Sky generates jobs, income and philanthropic support. It has helped fund schools, health care and nonprofits in a region where such services can be fragile. Construction workers, lift operators, teachers, nurses, guides, servers and small business owners all depend on the local economy, whether in Big Sky or the neighboring counties of Gallatin, Madison, or Broadwater Counties.
At the same time every new subdivision, driveway and widened road narrows the options for wildlife and strains local resources. Fencing and traffic affect how elk, deer and carnivores move. Nighttime light and noise reach once-dark valleys. Demand for water—for snowmaking, landscaping and homes—adds pressure to rivers and aquifers that native fish and wildlife rely on.
The point is not that people should leave or stop coming. That debate is already over. The real question is what kind of community will emerge here, and how much wildness it will still hold.
Answering that question requires rethinking what we mean by progress, as Matthiessen did. If progress is measured only in square footage, lane miles and skier visits, the trajectory is familiar: expansion outward, incremental loss of habitat, and a gradual thinning of the wild. But progress can also mean restraint and creativity—clustered development instead of sprawl, building vertically instead of horizontally, dark-sky policies, wildlife-friendly fencing and firm protection of key migration corridors and riparian areas.
Because of where it sits, Big Sky is a test case. Can a high-end resort community in the heart of a world-class ecosystem chart a path that allows people and wildlife to persist together? Can it design growth around the needs of grizzlies and elk as intentionally as it designs lift networks and luxury homes? Can it treat water, open space and dark nights as assets as valuable as real estate?
Those choices will not be made in a single sweeping decision, but in a series of small ones: zoning hearings, road plans, building approvals, conservation easements, water treatment plants. Each one nudges the balance between development and wildness.
This op-ed is not a call to lock the gate or freeze Big Sky in time. It is an invitation to look closely—to acknowledge that we are shaping one of the last great temperate ecosystems every time we build, pave or protect. Progress here does not have to mean repeating the mistakes that turned other mountain valleys into congested, overbuilt corridors.
For now, Big Sky remains a place where you can still see stars unbroken by city glow, hear elk bugling in the fall and, on the right morning, find bear tracks along a muddy trail. Those experiences are not guaranteed. They depend on what we choose to value.
The wild in Big Sky is no longer a backdrop; it is a partner in negotiation. How we conduct that negotiation—how we define progress in this corner of Montana—will say as much about us as it does about the mountains themselves.
Benjamin Alva Polley is a place-based storyteller. His words have been published in Rolling Stone, Esquire, Field & Stream, The Guardian, Men’s Journal, Outside, Popular Science, Sierra, and WWF, among other notable publications, which can be viewed on his website.
