For most of the club's history, one lodge did the socializing for everyone. Ski Yellowstone Club on any given morning, no matter which chair you started on, and you'd typically end the day back at Warren Miller Lodge, ordering off the Buffalo Bar & Grill menu or slipping down to the Boot Room for a drink before heading home. That pattern held for close to two decades. It doesn't hold the same way anymore.
The shift didn't happen because Warren Miller Lodge got smaller or less relevant. It happened because the club built a second base on the far side of the mountain that's now substantial enough to keep a member fed, seated, and social without ever routing back through the original village. For anyone deciding where inside Yellowstone Club to put down roots, that's a real variable now, not a footnote.
One Lodge Carried the Club for Years
Warren Miller Lodge has anchored Yellowstone Club's base area since the beginning, and its interior spaces reflect that: the Buffalo Bar & Grill, the underground Boot Room bar, the members' locker rooms, and the club spa all sit inside or beside it. When the club later added BāBā, its Asian-inspired restaurant helmed by chef and five-time cookbook author Ming Tsai, the addition landed in the same village footprint, a short walk from the Lodge. BraytonHughes Design Studios, the firm behind BāBā's barn-inspired dining room of Douglas-fir timbers and Montana stone, had already designed the Buffalo Bar & Grill, the Boot Room, the sales center, and the spa before starting on BāBā. One design team, one cluster of buildings, one village.
That concentration made sense at the time. For years, the club's ski terrain revolved around Pioneer Mountain, and Pioneer's lifts all funneled back toward the same base. If you wanted a sit-down lunch or an après drink, the Lodge was the only real answer.
What the Gondola Actually Changed
The calculus shifted when Yellowstone Club built its first gondola and opened Eglise Mountain to members. The project added roughly 500 acres of new terrain on a mountain reaching 9,573 feet at Eglise Rock, moving the club's total skiable acreage from about 2,200 to about 2,700. Four lifts, an eight-passenger Doppelmayr gondola, a fixed-grip triple, a detachable quad, and a covered conveyor for beginners, opened 17 groomed runs across the new terrain.
Five hundred acres and 17 runs is enough terrain to occupy a full ski day on its own. That's the part that matters more than the acreage figure itself. A member who starts on Eglise in the morning no longer has much reason to cross back to Pioneer just to eat lunch, because Eglise now has somewhere to eat.
Eglise Lodge Is a Restaurant, Not a Warming Hut
Eglise Lodge sits at the top of the gondola, mid-mountain, and CCY Architects designed it as a genuine restaurant rather than a quick-service stop between runs. The layout separates a main dining room with booths along the north wall from a more intimate lounge facing the ski hill to the south, plus a private dining room angled toward the distant mountain range. The firm describes the goal as an environment "responding to its rugged Montana setting" while still delivering serious fine dining at altitude.
That's a different proposition than a mid-mountain grab-and-go counter. It's a full lodge built to hold a member through an entire meal, which is what turns a ski run into a self-contained base rather than a stop on the way somewhere else.
The Neighborhood Around It Backs That Up
The Eglise side isn't only a lift and a restaurant. The Eglise Chalets, a complex of 22 units across 11 buildings at the base of the mountain, form their own cluster of ski-in/ski-out duplexes, and residents there have access to the Eglise Community Pool and Grill for casual meals and gatherings without leaving the neighborhood. It's still a short walk, drive, or gondola ride from the Village and Warren Miller Lodge, but short is the operative word: proximity, not necessity.
Put the pieces together and Eglise reads less like an expansion bolted onto the original club and more like a second, smaller version of it, complete with its own lift network, its own restaurant, its own casual grill, and its own residences.
| Warren Miller Lodge side | Eglise side | |
|---|---|---|
| Sit-down dining | Buffalo Bar & Grill, BāBā | Eglise Lodge |
| Casual gathering spot | The Boot Room | Eglise Community Pool and Grill |
| Residential cluster | Original Village Core | Eglise Chalets (22 units, 11 buildings) |
| Mountain access | Base area, parking structures | Club's first gondola |
The Original Village Is Still Building, Too
None of this means the club is quietly retiring the Warren Miller Lodge side in favor of Eglise. The Village Core, a 550,000-square-foot project that added 48 ultra-luxury residences along with a new spa, pool, fitness area, restaurants, and parking structures, finished its first phase in 2019, and every one of those 48 units sold that same year. Construction on Phase 2 started in late 2022 and is scheduled to wrap up in 2026, adding more residential and retail capacity to the same original base.
That timing matters. If the club were simply outgrowing an aging original village and shifting weight toward the newer side, you'd expect construction dollars to follow Eglise exclusively. Instead, both bases are being built out at the same time, which reads less like a transition and more like a decision to run two.
What This Means for Anyone Choosing a Side
A homesite or residence near Warren Miller Lodge still puts you closest to the deepest bench of dining options, the club spa, and the longest-running social scene at Yellowstone Club. A property near Eglise now comes with its own working restaurant, its own casual grill, and its own lift out the door, without daily dependence on driving or gondola-ing over to the original village for a meal.
Neither location is the fallback option anymore. The question for anyone weighing a homesite isn't which side has amenities, since both do now. It's which rhythm of a ski day, and which base's dining room, actually fits how you want to spend an afternoon at the club.
If you're weighing a homesite near Warren Miller Lodge against one on the Eglise side, Shawna Winter has walked members through both parts of Yellowstone Club for years and can help you think through which daily rhythm actually fits how you'd use the club. Schedule a private consultation to talk it through before you decide where to build.
