The concept of the members-only ski area has been invigorated in recent years because of the huge real estate sales success of The Yellowstone Club in Montana. But Yellowstone Club developer Tim Blixeth has lately become em­broiled in highly publicized, acrimonious litigation with former Tour de France champion Greg LeMond, who claims that Blixeth has grossly undervalued the bicycle racer's early original investment in the Club. The feud has done nothing to lessen the suspicion that the private ski club created by for-profit entrepreneurs isn't necessarily composed of kindred souls gathering primarily for the pleasure of one anothers' company.

Meanwhile, marketers of a gated ski resort, called the Mt. Holly Club-sited at the defunct Elk Meadows ski area in southern Utah-have left a rather distinctive blot on the sales practices used to entice prospective members. Mt. Holly put out misleading information about a golf course that doesn't exist, and claimed the opening of members-only, high-altitude skiing involving national forest land that it has no permit to operate on. At a breathtaking 10,000 feet above the ocean's surface, the Mount Holly Club member would be required to pay a breathtaking minimum of a quarter of a million dollars for the privilege of playing oxygen-deprived golf and skiing on slopes with less vertical than Mt. Sunapee, N.H.

Mt. Holly has company. A ballyhooed five-year $450 million club project next door to Vermont's Mt. Snow seems to have fizzled. The Haystack Club suspended operations after announcing last year that it would open in 2007-08 with new snowmaking and a high-speed gondola. It hasn't happened.

Not that there aren't prospects. A proposed private recreation community next door to Vail on the road between Minturn and Red Cliff has an unusual twist. The Ginn Company aims to construct lifts on Battle Mountain, build a golf course and sell 1,700 upscale homes and condos on 5,300 acres that include 150 acres of soil contaminated with toxic levels of arsenic, lead and cadmium from abandoned zinc mining. The charming notion of extracting money from second-home buying billionaires in order to clean up the environment would undoubtedly surprise that other well known Marx, Karl.

Almost ten years after purchasing the defunct Round Top ski area near Plymouth, Vt., investors David Yurkerwich and John Neal, having cleared the overgrown brush from 56 acres of trails, have just got their private residential Bear Creek Mountain Club in order. There's one chairlift and an abundance of lots for sale. How promising can the prospects be? The outlook for the second-home real estate market isn't especially encouraging at the moment.

A HISTORY OF PRIVATE SKIING

Ski area ownership by affluent, agreeably submissive skiers is an idea dear to the heart of operators seeking stability in a world of fickle weather and a fickle public. But there's no indication it has proven any more economically successful than the traditional area owned by an individual or a public company.

"There've always been a few private ski areas around," comments NSAA president Michael Berry. "They've been fraught with difficulties."

Actually, there is a proven recipe for membership-based private ski areas, but it isn't especially based on selling real estate. It's based on a scarcity of skiing.

Southern Ontario, including the fast growing Toronto metropolitan area, is as flat as a parking lot except for the Niagara escarpment. In the middle of the last century-1949, to be precise-a group of affluent Toronto metropolitan skiers woke up to an awareness of how little Ontario offered in the way of day and weekend ski terrain. Forming the Osler Bluff Ski Club, they raised the money to build a ski area on the escarpment at Collingwood, Ont.

At 57 years of age, Osler Bluff most likely is North America's oldest club-owned ski area in continuous operation. Since it started, Ontario ski clubs, with a passion for youth racing, have launched or taken over five more areas on the escarpment, including Georgian Peaks and Craigleith. The giant exception is the public Blue Mountain ski area with 750 feet of vertical and hordes of skiers exceeding anything at its sister Intrawest resort, Tremblant.

The Ontario situation is probably unique in North America. So urgent is demand for skiing and so great the shortage of terrain that private membership skiing spills over into neighboring upstate western New York State. Near Ellicottville, Canadians account for almost half of the membership of semi-private Holimont, where families pay a one-time $14,000 initiation fee and $1,700 a year to ski on weekends and holidays, free of crowds.

Is it enough to have a large metropolitan market to justify creating private ski areas? Probably not. It arguably must be coupled with a scarcity of terrain. Windham in New York's Catskills is a case in point. It opened as a public ski area in 1960, but not long afterward it sought to give metropolitan New Yorkers the pleasures of uncrowded skiing by limiting the slopes to Windham club members. Among them were writer Peter Benchley, Ethel Kennedy's star-crossed Skakel family, and prominent Manhattan attorney Tom Sheridan. Matters proceeded satisfactorily for this lace-curtain crowd until the late 1970s, when members proved unwilling to charge themselves enough to maintain quality facilities. Why should they? New York's Catskills contain an abundance of ski terrain. You don't have to belong to a club to access it. Windham was sold for $2.1 million to Irv Naylor, who re-opened it to the public. Naylor was amused to discover an odd quirk of club ownership: a club committee decided when and where to make snow.

Today, select Windham skiers can still enjoy access to uncrowded slopes making first tracks on pristine groomers and fresh snow. No private club necessary. All you have to do is to be a season pass holder or pay a $12 premium over the regular lift ticket price and be one of 30 skiers successfully making a reservation to ride up the lift an hour before it opens to the public. Dozens of resorts today offer similar first tracks programs. For one hour in the morning, a guy can feel like a Yellowstone Club member without having to prove assets of a gajillion dollars.

It's no revelation that commercially-created private clubs are clustering around the base of ski areas, offering not only first tracks, but also parking slots close to the lifts, ski valet service and exclusive luncheon areas for members and guests. Initiation fees run from $30,000 to $200,000 and more; parking slots go for fifty grand. The trend is unsurprising in a society marked by a widening gulf between poor and affluent, although in skiing, actually, the gulf is between affluent and super-affluent. In the past, the sport has rarely had such distinctions. It was a single community of people united by a love of skiing.

Present wisdom is that ski terrain expansion is no longer economically viable without the certainty of selling contiguous real estate. Onto that disheartening trend has been overlaid the idea of creating ski areas akin to gated golf communities. There's little to admire in this lugubrious confluence of commercialized land and social separation, so out of step with skiing's past.

Groucho, though, would have been amused.