Roughing it, deluxe (Ted Turner's Vermejo Park)

 For well over a century, travelers have been searching for rebirth in the American West with a type of increasingly pampered rusticity. It may have reached its apex at Ted Turner’s New Mexico ranch

...It’s Vermejo Park Ranch, at over 550,000 acres the largest single piece of privately owned
land in the United States: covering significantly more territory than Bryce, Zion and Canyonlands national parks put together. And it has been known for over a century as a place owned by illustrious public people who weren’t inviting you to visit: first a Chicago millionaire, then a group of Los Angeles millionaires, then Texas millionaires, and then Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. After the couple split in 2001, Turner started to slowly turn Vermejo into a wildlife park and very high-end hotel for 50 to 60 people a night. Today it is one of the most expensive places to stay overnight in the nation: The least costly room, during offseason, can run as high as $2,000 a night (for two people, meals included). The best rooms, in-season, are twice as much. It’s worth noting that Amangiri resort in southern Utah is actually twice as expensive.

We’re going not only because I’m curious to see the place. I also have an intense fascination with the phenomenon of “roughing it deluxe” and its role in the development of the American West — beginning with the generations after the Civil War, when the West became the “new America” that people from the North and the South could still romanticize in a way they had once viewed the original colonies. And once the trains began connecting the country, not only was new commerce and migration possible, but so was a different kind of leisure travel — including the taking of trains to rivers largely unfished, herds of trophy animals unculled and intense outdoor experiences that could be over in time for a lovely lunch or tea...MORE