The Glamping of Art

Pure Montana sits down with the man who re-imagined Montana luxury

He literally invented glamping. In the late 1990s, Laurence Lipson left a creative directing career—where he worked on advertising with clients like Corona Beer and Southwest Airlines—to help his father, Dave, market his Angus cattle ranch 30 miles east of Missoula. In the early 2000s, the Lipsons developed Montana’s first luxury wilderness resort on the ranch, and Laurence coined the portmanteau “glamping” to describe the unique experience they offered. Over the past two decades, they have refined the Resort at Paws Up into a true western icon.

When did your family purchase the ranch?

Growing up, my dad had a ranch in Edwards, Colorado, as a second home, and a Texas Longhorn cattle ranch in Eagle, Colorado. I spent a lot of time on these ranches as a teenager and really fell in love with the Rocky Mountains. But development in the I-70 corridor was so intense that we felt like it wasn’t the same place we had bought into many decades ago. So, we started looking for a new property. We wanted it to be surrounded by state or federal land, and it had to have a significant body of water, either a lake or a river, for raising livestock. And as entrepreneurial businesspeople, it was important to be somewhat close to a town with an airport. We spent a couple of years looking for just the right property and in 1997, we found the ranch in Greenough that became Paws Up Ranch, and ultimately, the Resort at Paws Up.

How did the business grow?

The property is 37,000 acres and our first challenge was to fence it, which took about two years. When we were fenced in, we started Paws Up Angus Ranch, a registered seed stock operation, selling high-end genetics to commercial cattlemen looking for certain genetic characteristics, like more marbling or greater milking. Our business started small, maybe around 500 head. There was one thing to know about my dad: he was not a patient individual. He wanted to grow the business faster. He asked me if I would come on to run sales and marketing for the registered seed stock operation. We introduced a much more aggressive sales and marketing strategy, and we grew it to a couple thousand head in seven years. We did a lot of untraditional advertising and marketing in a very traditional industry. We were probably one of the first seed stock cattle ranches to go online, way back then. Cattlemen were using AOL to access our website to see our catalog of bulls that we were selling. We were also one of the first to do a satellite auction. We broadcast all across the country from Greenough and created a hub and spoke distribution system. It all worked pretty well—in fact, it worked so well that we outgrew the 37,000 acres with the number of cattle we were running.

What happened next?

We had to huddle as a family and figure out what the next steps were going to be. One of the options was to lease other land in Montana, continue to grow the herd, and continue to grow the business. But through those conversations, we talked more and more about the ranch itself, its beauty, and what other opportunities could exist. The one thing that came up, over and over again, was that anyone who came to the ranch just fell in love with the natural beauty of it. The next step was to say, well, “if we’re thinking maybe we should try to get more people to experience this, what would be the business that would do that?” We researched Montana and learned that there weren’t any luxury resorts. So, instead of thinking along the lines of a guest and dude ranch, we began thinking much more along the five-star luxury resort line. In 2003, we started building the Resort at Paws Up Ranch. We established a luxury “prism.” Anything we developed for the resort should go through this prism. If we’re thinking about service, activities, or accommodations, we should look through that prism and see that it stands up to the luxury criteria we’re going after. And one of the things we thought would make it much more upscale was to not have a lodge or a single building with rooms and suites, but, rather, to create homes for the guests, goodsized homes with privacy.

Did you have any experience in hospitality?

In the ‘90s, while we were building the Angus seed stock operation, we also started another business called Paws Up Outfitters. We led five-day fly-fishing trips on the South Fork of the Flathead River, big game hunting in the fall, and pack trips to the Chinese Wall, deep in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. To carry all the gear and equipment for the guests, we would have sometimes as many as 35 mules. For example, on the fly-fishing trip, we would set up the camp, and while the guests were fly-fishing all day long, the mule train would move downstream to set up camp. When the guests were done fishing, everything would be set up: wall tents with cots and lanterns, actual silverware, bottles of wine, steak. It was an upscale and complex operation.

Is this where the idea for luxury tents came from?

One day, we were doing a photoshoot on the ranch for the Paws Up Outfitter brochure, so we set up one of the wall tents right on the ranch, next to the Blackfoot River. The photographer and I were chatting about what a great spot it was for the tent, and we were wondering about the Lewis and

Clark history here. We had no idea what their tents were like. Were they really grimy and gnarly, or were they truly comfortable? We decided to make our own version, with a big bed, overstuffed leather chairs, and framed maps on the canvas walls. This luxurious tent sitting in the wilderness of Paws Up Ranch really became something I obsessed over. I came to our family with the idea, and the response was really funny. “You’re the guy with the luxury prism, and now you want to put people in tents?” They were really scratching their heads. But, I said, they wouldn’t be just any old tents. I pitched them on 1,000-squarefoot tents with butler service and private chefs cooking for guests in these camps. Let’s take it over the top. Soon I was thinking, we need a name for this. What will we call our three luxurious tents? I picked up a thesaurus, started mashing together words, and that’s how “glamorous” and “camping” became “glamping.” We coined that phrase back in 2004 and now it’s global. We did actually trademark the term, but we’ve never policed it because it never would have grown beyond Paws Up if we said no one else can use it. We left it wide open, and it’s been to the benefit of hospitality as a whole. Before we opened, we put out a release and the first publication that picked it up was the New York Times. They did a little, tiny, threesentence story, but those three sentences drove about 250 inquiries for our opening. That put us on the map.

What did the first camp look like?

In June 2005, we opened the Resort at Paws Up with 18 homes and three tents at the camp by the Blackfoot. We developed the tents in the area near the Blackfoot River where all of our fencers had resided. They had put all their pup tents, pickups, and trailers in a circle with the fire pit in the middle, and we did the same setup with our first three tents. It was a beautiful spot and we learned really quickly that putting the camps there was a huge win for guests. They just loved to open up the fly of their big, 1,000-square-foot tent and see the river rushing by.

Where did you go from here?

We’ve continued to develop the glamping product at Paws Up, with a new camp almost every other year just to keep up with demand. Now we operate six different camps, each with six tents, for a total of 36 tents. They range from 1-bedroom honeymoon tents to 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom tents, all under a single canvas roof. We have also continued to develop more homes at the resort, and now we have 28 homes.

Your newest addition is the Green O. What’s the story there?

As Paws Up grew, we discovered that while we were catering to families, we were beginning to alienate our couples. So, we decided that we needed a separate adults-only resort, still on the Paws Up Ranch, but secluded, near the southern edge. We wanted it to be architecturally forward and designforward. Over the years, I had really fallen in love with treehouses, and of course, we didn’t want to do a typical treehouse—we wanted to push it. We went for a modern, steel-and-glass house designed with organic and sustainable materials like reclaimed wood. We put these treehouses 23 feet up in the air and made them floor- to-ceiling glass. When you look out, you feel like you’re part of the forest canopy. And in Paws Upstyle, we wanted to do individual homes versus anything more lodge-like, because we always feel like these individual homes offer this level of privacy. It puts you at one with nature more than a lodge would.

Why did you name it Green O?

There are a few reasons. First, there’s a connection to Greenough, the town we sit in. Sheepherder

Paul Greenough, the founder of the town, was instrumental in bringing together the different parcels that now make up Paws Up Ranch. He had a good sense of humor, and to mark his sheep, he painted a big green “o” on them. Second, we set up the 12 homes in a perfect circle: an “o” with the Social House restaurant, in the middle. And it’s deep in the forest, so the setting is super green and lush with pine trees. Literally, it’s a very green “o.”

What kind of experience do you hope your guests go home with?

We say, “It’s amazing how 37,000 acres can actually bring your family closer together.” The contrast of that is great. Here’s this giant ranch that’s larger than Manhattan, yet, the mechanics of the whole resort experience are designed to bring you closer, to have those great meals together. The resort has this ability to really bring your family close. You’re doing activities together, many of which you’ve never done before, and that makes you bond. Can we rappel down a cliff? Shoot sporting clays? ATV? Fly-fish? Whatever it is, the families give each other the confidence to do things they’ve never done before. They’re making indelible memories, and they’re having these experiences as a family. When I see our guests have that type of experience together, it makes the whole thing really worthwhile. That is really, truly the goal.