In the three years since he paid $8 million for his ranch in Texas Hill Country, Mark Fertitta has built 60 miles of road on its 2,768 acres, created three large lakes and put up 14 miles of fence to contain his $300,000 herd of pen-raised whitetail deer. He dug 200 yards of ditches for underground power lines, drilled new wells, installed three septic systems, and built a new 10,000-square-foot barn and caretaker’s house. Now all he needs is a place to stay. “As far as the dollars and cents we have spent, we’re up to $3 million and we haven’t even built the damn house yet,” said Mr. Fertitta, who is designing a 7,500-square-foot lodge that will overlook one of his new lakes. For now, when he and his wife, Carolyn, fly into Lago Verde ranch on their Cessna 210, they bunk in a Prowler travel trailer. “Eight million dollars, that just brings you to the party,” said Mr. Fertitta, 58, who owns a real-estate and property-management company in Beaumont, Texas. “It costs money to stay.”
MORE: Modern Mansions in Rustic Environments He plans to start a small commercial-hunting business on his ranch, nicknamed the Flying F, to offset some of its running costs. The call of the wild is luring the most adventuresome land buyers off the grid—to ranches, mountain ranges and secluded lakes that lack the basic infrastructure most people take for granted. But building a backwoods retreat with the amenities of a luxury home can become a multimillion-dollar exercise. An inaccessible building site means a live-in construction crew. Helicopters or barges may be required to deliver bulldozers, cement and Viking stoves to wilderness locales. Despite the myriad challenges, those with pockets deep enough to buy a big chunk of land often like it on the raw side. “No one wants to buy a ranch with someone else’s 12,000-square-foot house on it,” said Greg Fay, of Fay Ranches, who cautions owners against an overabundance of improvements if they plan on selling in 20 years. Drawn by the elk that roam its pine forests and meadows, Bill Nutt, the founder and former chairman of Affiliated Managers Group, an asset-management company, bought a 1,275-acre ranch bordering the Helena National Forest in western Montana in 2010, for a price he didn’t disclose. (Comparable Montana properties are priced between $4 million and $8 million, according to Mr. Fay, who handled the sale.)
The property already had a house, but Mr. Nutt, 71, who likes to bow hunt and fly-fish, wanted something more rustic for his CloverCrest Ranch. He found a 1912 homesteader cabin in White Sulphur Springs and paid $7,000 to have it dismantled and transported to a hillside on his ranch, where it became the basis for a 780-square-foot log home with 60-mile vistas of the Tobacco Root and Highland mountain ranges. CloverCrest Ranch is a three-hour drive from Bozeman, where the construction team was based, so workers lived at the ranch in trailers for four or five days at a time. They had to use small, rough-terrain forklifts to ferry loads of stone and reclaimed old timber to the cabin site, which was too steep for trucks. Trenches were dug for underground water conduits and power lines. The cabin, built with old-world joinery techniques using antique tools, is just big enough for Mr. Nutt and his wife, Dedie. It has a porch, one bedroom, one bath and a central living area anchored by a fireplace of local Harlowton moss rock. “It’s odd to have a homesteader cabin that has marble countertops, but it does,” said Mr. Nutt, estimating costs at about $313,000. Family and friends stay in the original ranch home, which the Nutts remodeled as a 3,200-square-foot guesthouse for about $180,000. The remodel was part of a major makeover that included a new $27,900 road, a two-story barn with a playroom for the grandkids, a workshop and a locker room for hunting gear. Mr. Nutt spent an additional $90,000 to create a pond. “It isn’t an aesthetic, it’s fundamental,” said Mr. Nutt, whose ranch is 40 minutes from the nearest fire department.
MORE: The World’s Hottest Luxury Housing Market Is Auckland Natural disasters come with the territory. Jordy Hendrikx, director of the Snow and Avalanche Laboratory at Montana State University, also works as a private consultant. One client discovered that the driveway to his Wyoming retreat—an old logging road—was in an avalanche path. Mr. Hendrikx’s suggestions for safer access included rerouting the road, or building a barrier at the avalanche start zone, potentially a multimillion-dollar project. After a $15,000 assessment, the client chose Mr. Hendrikx’s third option: “Don’t go up that road when you’ve had a foot of snow overnight,” he said. There are no roads to Pistol Creek Ranch, a 220-acre former homestead deep in Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. The ranch, jointly owned by multiple families, is one of a handful of private holdings within the 2.3 million-acre protected wilderness. Twenty-two cabin sites—all privately owned by members who pay $13,500 in annual dues—dot 1½ miles of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, a premier whitewater-rafting and fly-fishing destination. You have to fly in on a helicopter or small plane, landing on a gravel and grass airstrip. After a 2000 forest-fire devastated Pistol Creek Ranch, burning 18 cabins and many ranch buildings, that airstrip became the setting for an epic five-year reconstruction project. The ranch team first had to fly in a minidozer, a compact excavator and a skidsteer with a Chinook helicopter. A lumber mill and a snowplow followed. Heavy bags of ready-mix concrete, 12 bags at a time, were delivered by a Cessna 206 over the course of about 130 flights.
MORE: In Cape Cod, You Can Still Get a Deal on a Mansion The building crew—plumbers, electricians, carpenters and masons—stayed in platform hunting tents, using portable toilets and showers airlifted to the site. A live-in cook prepared meals for more than 30 people a day. “We were starting from scratch,” said Blake Swanson, whose family has owned a cabin at Pistol Creek since 1979. Though Mr. Swanson, 57, had no background in construction—he works in investments—he oversaw the entire project, flying between the ranch and his home in Ketchum in his Cessna 206, and working closely with the Forest Service and other government agencies. Mr. Swanson helped design a new hydroelectric system on the creek, and supervised the construction of a water-filtration plant. Workers laid 8 miles of PVC piping to deliver water, and installed up-to-code septic systems. They cut down burned ponderosa pine trees and milled them on site for the new barns, fences and corrals for the 30 horses. Workers also created two ponds as a water source in the event of another fire. The ranch owners rebuilt their own homes. “It cost twice as much to fly everything in; my single cabin cost over $800,000 to rebuild in 2004,” said Rusty Brace, a civil litigator based in Santa Barbara, Calif., who heads Pistol Creek’s homeowners association. Helicopters delivered almost every element of his 2,000-square-foot, three-bedroom cabin, from the Viking stove to the rough-hewn logs.
MORE: These Are the Most Expensive Homes for Sale on Mansion Global Work at Pistol Creek continues. Late last month, a military-style helicopter hovered over the ranch, dropping off doors and windows for a new 2,000-square-foot cabin. Three Pistol Creek cabins are for sale, from $295,000 to $470,000. Potential buyers might want to consult their physician. “We’re all first-aid-trained, but if you really have trouble, and the weather is bad, you’re going to die,” said ranch manager Dave Dewey. On the bright side, Amazon delivers. Pistol Creek Ranch, which has satellite Internet, is a stop on one of the nation’s last aerial wilderness postal routes. It takes a boat to get to Serge Bervy’s weekend home on the far side of Tupper Lake in Upstate New York. The 2-acre waterfront property, which he bought for about $125,000 in 1999, is surrounded by Adirondack state forest. Mr. Bervy, 55, the owner of an excavation company in Austerlitz, N.Y., began building a three-story wood and stone house there in 2000. The first winter, he drove a log-skidder 5 miles across the frozen lake to clear trees from the site. That summer he rented a barge to transport an 80,000-pound excavator, a cement truck and a cement mixer to build the foundation. By the following year, he had bought a $25,000 barge of his own. “When I started construction I expected it would be maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars. Over the years, I’ve probably spent three or four times that,” said Mr. Bervy. He hired an outside contractor but did some work himself with friends and a few employees, camping on the site on summer weekends and snowmobiling back and forth during frozen winters. The house, largely completed in 2003, has cathedral ceilings, a fieldstone fireplace and a dining room overlooking the lake. Power is delivered via 25,000 feet of submarine electrical cable, which runs from one side of the lake, around an island, then over to his shoreline. Mr. Bervy, who has owned a series of cabins on the lake, installed it in 1989, teaming up with seven landowners. “We ran it off the back of a barge and dropped it in the lake,” he said. “It was $50,000 or $60,000 for the whole thing.” Today, he added, the costs could be four times that amount. Mr. Bervy’s family of four uses the house year-round. They buy groceries in town, park at their private landing, and boat 1½ miles across the lake. “If we get there and find out we forgot something, it’s almost a fistfight to see who’s going back to town,” he said. This article originally appeared on The Wall Street Journal.
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