Chad R. Pike, a wealthy top executive with the Blackstone Group LP in London, has loved the great outdoors since he was a kid growing up in Ohio. Now he’s helping other like-minded 1 percenters do the same, at some of the most ruggedly beautiful spots on earth.
Pike’s the founder of 3-year-old Eleven Experience, an “experiential” travel company that specializes in pairing outdoor adventure with renovated, high-end lodging. Think beach cottages in the Bahamas. A chalet in the French Alps. An estate in Scotland. And a refurbished, 1880s miners saloon called Scarp Ridge Lodge in Crested Butte in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains (elevation 8,885 feet).
That’s where I found myself this past September, ensconsed in one of the lodge’s seven spacious suites and engulfed in luxury (huge bed, big-screen TV, wood-beam ceilings) at every turn. Each Scarp Ridge guest gets a personal concierge, and the five-star digs were so thoughtfully upscale, there was even a special oxygen delivery system for tenderfeet prone to altitude sickness.
I was at the property for four days of fly fishing on the nearby Taylor and Gunnison rivers, despite my inability to tell a nipper from a tippet. Texas residents like me have long found refuge in Colorado, of course, and I saw connections to the Lone State State most everywhere I looked.
Flying into Gunnison (the nearest airport) from Denver on a little United Express flight, for example, one of our fellow passengers was Dallas businessman George Seay III, who has a ranch in the area. Floating down “the Gunny” a few days later, we passed through land owned by the Moncriefs of Fort Worth. (Said a sign there over the river: “Private Property. No Stopping. Enjoy the Fishing.”) Our bathroom at Scarp Ridge was stocked with skincare products from Carrollton-based Jack Black. And many of the property’s furnishings came from the Dallas Design District.
At the same time, few will confuse Dallas with Crested Butte. Located not far from Aspen, it’s a charming little hippie town filled with organic bakeries and yoga studios, houses painted purple and green behind rows of sunflowers, and the most laid-back dogs in the world. (The dogs’ demeanor couldn’t be due to Colorado’s legal marijuana, could it? Naah. But, the topic is in the air. One Crested Butte shop owner told me about three mink-coated Dallas women he sent to the nearby “Acme Healing Center” to purchase their first taste of weed. When they returned to his shop later to buy a water pipe, he recalled, they asked him how to use it.) Crested Butte is also fiercely anti-corporate, frowning on national chain stores.
But, such subjects are likely to be far from your mind out on the area’s swift-flowing, gin-clear rivers. There, catching trout—browns and rainbows, mostly—with a fly rod is the chief preoccupation. I had a great introduction to the sport thanks to burly, bearded Moose Hofer, our expert Eleven Experience guide. Though I was a so-called “Never-ever” (someone totally new to fishing), I landed a few and had some get away, all under Moose’s watchful eye. He spoke what sounded to me like a foreign language—who knew a “two-bit hooker” was a type of fishing fly?—but his persistent encouragement was infectious. “Nice job!” Moose would say, watching me flick my line out into the bubbling river.
After we fished all day, there were wonderful, chef-prepared meals back at the lodge: cream of asparagus soup, Colorado elk, molten chocolate cake. We also had a sumptuously extravagant dinner out one night at The Sunflower, a nearby farm-to-table restaurant where everybody seemed to know—and appreciate—everyone else.
Which shouldn’t be a surprise, I came to realize after some time in the freewheeling, outdoorsy nirvana called Crested Butte. Chad Pike must feel the same. Besides opening Scarp Ridge Lodge, he has based his Eleven Experience company in a renovated building a few blocks away.
