Maybe at the post office you’ll see people, or if you go to buy groceries or takeout, but otherwise it’s just you.”īack in Sedona, Scott MacDonald, an investment manager who lives in Denver, had arrived earlier this month after loading up his Tesla Model X and making the 12-hour drive south with his wife and two children. “It’s frankly difficult to run into anybody. You can go Nordic skiing you can ride your bikes,” he said.
Ossorio, a 63-year-old real estate agent, said he regretted the health crisis and shutdowns, but added that residents were enjoying the slower pace of life with fewer visitors. Resort foundations have now raised more than $2 million to donate to the Bozeman medical system and community groups. Several were already on their properties, though, and have stayed there since. Hardy acknowledges that owners of second homes are entitled to stay in their properties, although she wishes that more of them would stop traveling back and forth between houses.Īt the exclusive 15,200-acre Yellowstone Club community, where empty, half-acre lots start in the millions and attract CEOs and business moguls, management emailed members in the middle of the March ski season, telling them to cancel plans. Lincoln County, where Hardy lives, and Clatsop County, where the Sjolanders stay in their second home, have only 11 confirmed coronavirus cases between them, and no deaths.īut coastal residents remain suspicious of outsiders, all too aware that other parts of Washington and Oregon have more than 15,000 confirmed cases of the virus and a death toll of 900. Much of Oregon’s shoreline, and Washington state’s coastal Pacific County to the north, remains off-limits to outsiders. Kate Brown, a Democrat, announced a statewide stay-at-home order. Cities and counties that thrive on tourism banned visitors, booting guests from hotels and shutting down short-term rentals a day before Oregon Gov. Leaders of Lincoln City and other coastal communities acted quickly in late March, when vacationers swarmed beaches, stripping store shelves and alarming managers of local hospitals, who feared their small facilities couldn’t handle a surge. By contrast, governors of many states have struggled to secure an adequate number of tests. A similar testing effort took place in the mountain resort town of Telluride, Colo.
On Fisher Island - a 216-acre luxury destination south of Miami Beach that’s home to one of the nation’s richest ZIP Codes - management paid more than $30,000 for 1,200 employees and residents to be tested for coronavirus antibodies. They’re arriving by personal travel buses, private planes and yachts. They’ve fled big cities and headed to second homes or $8,000-a-month rentals in places like Sedona and rural coastal stretches of the Pacific Northwest. “These are trying times for many people, but many people are also very blessed.”Īs the coronavirus continues its destructive path across the U.S., killing more than 53,000 and devastating the economy - drive-up food bank lines snake on for miles, and about 26 million have filed for unemployment in what could become the highest jobless rate since the Great Depression - some well-heeled Americans have activated pandemic escape plans. “There are people who love the food and are willing to spend,” Dahl said on a recent afternoon as she cradled Leonardo, her Maltese-poodle. But the virus has also exposed the stark divide between the rich and everyone else in a nation whose disparities are marked by spiraling joblessness and luxury cars racing through the desert air.ĭahl has adjusted to Sedona’s rearranged lifestyle, setting up a delivery service catering to those who have flocked to their second homes in this high-desert valley to ride out the stay-at-home restrictions. Such scenes have been relegated to nostalgia as a deadly pandemic has upset an enclave that was once kept sequestered only by money. As they savored bites of $48 veal chop, they talked about how next time they were in town, they’d have to try the flourless chocolate chile orange torte with vanilla bourbon gelato. They sipped stiff cocktails and snapped photos in front of a backdrop so picturesque it looked Photoshopped.
She thought about what life was like here, on this patio, before the coronavirus. The restaurateur stood in the afternoon silence, a rarity at Mariposa, billed as the best fine dining in a town about two hours from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Lisa Dahl scanned the horizon from the patio of one of her five restaurants, watching thick clouds cast shadows on red rock spires that formed outlines like desert skyscrapers.