Engineering the Wild

Your attendees didn't come to Big Sky just for the conference. They came to be in Greater Yellowstone — and most of them will never have the chance to see it through the lens of their own profession.

Yellowstone was created in 1872, before anyone had figured out how to actually get people into it. What followed is a 150-year infrastructure project unlike any other in the country: roads built to reveal scenery rather than connect points efficiently, a $8.5-billion portfolio of buildings, water systems, and wastewater plants operating a small city's worth of utilities inside a wilderness, and a constant, evolving answer to one question — how do you accommodate people without the infrastructure built to accommodate them destroying the reason they came?

That's not a tourism talking point. That's a construction problem, solved in real time, in one of the most geologically unstable and environmentally sensitive places in North America.

This is why we built this experience specifically for HCA attendees. It's a full day in Yellowstone's Lower Loop — Grand Prismatic, Old Faithful, Yellowstone Lake, Hayden Valley, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone — but guided with an eye toward the engineering underneath: the bridges, the boardwalks, the century-old road system still in daily use, the wastewater plant tucked behind Canyon Village, and the ongoing work of protecting a fragile resource from the very people who came to see it.

It's a private, small-group experience — never more than 28 guests, two vehicles, no large-group shuffle — so there's room for real conversation along the way. We think it's exactly the kind of day your attendees will be talking about long after the conference wraps.