Despite setbacks, Lajitas is thriving

Lajitas golf course during flooding in September. Photo special to the Avalanche

An all-new Ambush Golf Course at Lajitas Resort, mostly washed out by severe flooding this past fall, is expected to be ready for play by the fall of 2009, resort officials recently announced.

The new Ambush will be designed by Lanny Wadkins Design Group and built by Fezler Golf. Construction was scheduled to begin in December.

That original course was designed by Randy Russell and Roy Bechtol, a ribbon of green through the Chihuahuan Desert. It included a 19th hole (actually, hole 11A) with a tee shot across the Rio Grande, into Mexico (no, you didn’t get to cross over to finish out the hole).

The new course will also have an international hole. Lajitas Resort and Spa is a 25,000-acre resort nestled between Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park. A mixed-use development, the property includes a 103-room resort, public golf club and real estate division.

Lajitas Resort was purchased by Dallas businessman Kelcy Warren in December 2007. Warren, co-founder of Energy Transfer Partners, a natural gas and propane distributor, got the property for $13.5 million in a bankruptcy auction.

The resort has 25,000 acres, a golf course, restaurants and a luxury hotel. It went into bankruptcy under the stewardship of Stephen R. Smith, one of the founders of Excel Communications, who bought it for $4.25 million in 2000 in what was described as a “gripping bidding war” between himself and San Francisco hotelier Manou Mobedshahi. Smith put $100 million into the resort but never got it off the ground.

The property now is owned by Lajitas Capital Partners, a privately owned firm from Dallas headed by Warren. The resort is operated by Bridlie-Leg Lajitas Inc., of which Edwin W. Leslie is the president and chief executive officer.

Owners say the golf course will feature 100 new lots ranging in size from ? to 2 acres. Lajitas will begin taking lot reservations this month (January). For additional information, contact Leslie at 432-424-5000 or eleslie@bridlie.com.

This past year “was a great year for us in many ways,” Leslie told the Avalanche on Monday. “Occupancy levels were 12 percent higher than last year, and the resort continues to book more and more events and groups.”

The loss of the golf course was a setback for the resort in some respects, he said, but it has not had a major impact on business. “Currently we have 12 golf tournaments that were booked for the early part of 2009; all have moved to later dates in 2009 in anticipation of the new golf course opening.”

Those events include the Coors Light Invitational and the Texas Collegiate Golf Tournament.

Leslie indicated there’s more than just golf on the agenda.

“In 2008 we finalized transformation of the old trading post into the Longhorn Museum now housing the largest privately owned collection of longhorn mounts in the U.S. This collection spans over 2,000 items and is traced back to the original herd of longhorns in Texas.”

He added that group bookings have continued to increase and “we expect Lajitas Resort to hit 50 percent occupancy in 2009, which will be a first for Lajitas.”

Leslie said the Lajitas sales staff now includes sales managers based in every major city in Texas including Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Houston as well as the Midland-Odessa market. “We are adding a new sales associate starting in 2009 that will focus primarily on the Mexican tourism market and be based in Chihuahua.”

“We just completed a tour and travel show in Las Vegas with over 10,000 travel agents and have shows scheduled in Berlin, Toronto, Acapulco, Dallas, Austin and Houston for the first 120 days of 2009,” Leslie added. “Our focus is not just on selling people on what Lajitas has to offer but telling the public what there is to do and see in Big Bend.”

In addition to the golf course, Leslie said, the owners are focused on the development of Lajitas as not only a major tourist area but a place for people to live and retire. “We intend to finalize opening of the new subdivisions at Lajitas and working to improve the infrastructure and amenities. Starting in June, we will begin the first Lajitas Summer Camp program for kids ages 12 to 16. This will be a 2-week summer program and funfilled event for kids to see what the Big Bend area has to offer.”

Leslie said he intends to work with real estate agents in the Big Bend in determining pricing and options for marketing the golf course lots.

Following on the heels of the Shelby Mustang Bullrun extravaganza (kind of a chili cookoff for car enthisiasts without all the sweat and dirt), Lajitas Resort is working on at least 12 major events for 2009 that will be as good if not larger than the Shelby event, Leslie said.

“We have been focusing on larger groups that benefit the area as a whole, and have looked at the number of rooms available throughout the Big Bend area as we cannot accommodate everyone for some of these groups,” he said. “Currently our sales team is working on sell-out events that would use not only every room at Lajitas but most rooms in the area.

“We also anticipate the Shelby event becoming an annual event and growing in size as more people want to participate,” he added. “Approximately 100 Shelby owners that wanted to attend were unable to participate because of a lack of rooms at the resort.”

The MTV broadcast of “Runs House” brought attention to Lajitas in 2008 with over 1 million viewers, he said. “Since the airing of that show, we have had a great deal of interest from groups as far away as Germany and the U.K. to have events as Lajitas. In May we will host 50 of the top executives from Mercedes Benz in Germany, and they will be doing a complete tour of the Big Bend area, which includes jeep tours of the park, visits to Marfa and much more.”