The old Nethercott place sits on the Jackson Hole valley's version of skid row, just off Wyoming 22 and Village Road in the rustic outpost of Wilson. From the back deck, you could throw a wet November snowball into Dick Cheney's yard. Across the lane, thousand-dollar pickups and ten-thousand-dollar snowmobiles sit outside million-dollar double-wides. Until 2005, this 6,000-square-foot, 11-bedroom rambler was a church camp, the three-quarter-acre lot filled with so many Winnebagos and laundry lines that you couldn't swing a tetherball. Now it takes a sledgehammer to find evidence that the Sunday-schoolers were here at all. Inside, there's cussing and yelling and spitting and blowing dust boogers out of nostrils farmer style as a pack of ratty skiers tears the house apart.

"Other buyers were scared away from the place," says its owner, freeskier, Dartmouth graduate, and junior real estate mogul Charlotte Moats. "That's how I got it so cheap." By "cheap" she means about $600,000—"basically the price of a vacant lot." Of course, the neighborhood still has a ways to go—is that a couch the folks are burning next door?—but Charlotte fully expects the property's value to triple by the time she gets ready to sell in the spring of 2008. If she can bring herself to sell, that is. "The place has good bones."

Charlotte pries open a trapdoor in the laundry room, part of the original 1916 house, to reveal seven layers of old linoleum. Lowering myself clumsily down after her like a skier falling into a tree well, I find her spidering around behind the shiny new plumbing. When she bought the place, it had six old-school septic tanks; the house's potable water tasted vile enough that they suspected it came from the same "aquifer." This blows Charlotte's mind. "Eighty church campers took showers here," she says. "I was like, My God, do you know what that does to the septic tanks?"

If she can get the house back on its feet, it represents a respectable, if financially hairball, business model for staying in Jackson Hole. Charlotte is only 27. But seven years after making a name as the youngest skier to win the 24 Hours of Aspen endurance race, she's practically retirement age in a sport that values the freshest kids doing the sickest tricks. Even with 11 first descents in Alaska's Chugach Range and appearances in a host of ski films, Charlotte still makes less than the guy installing the plumbing. So what's a dean's-list Ivy League geography major to do in a sport where you might spend an entire winter setting up a six-minute film segment that your sponsors had to pay to get you into? Ask Charlotte and she'll tell you: a really big flip.

Screw the "brothel law," a valley ordinance designed to prevent too many skids from shacking up in too few square feet. Until Charlotte can renovate the camp back into sellable single-family splendor, she's paying the mortgage with roommates—11 of them (not counting the floor surfers), mostly overeducated, undersponsored ski bums shelling out between $300 and $600 a month. After a particularly epic bender, the housemates tagged this place the SKI House—Sigma Kappa Iota. But you can't pretend you're in college forever, and that's why Charlotte is trying to turn what feels like a season of The Real World: Jackson Hole into Flip This Old House.

Deep in the crawlspace, we've made it over to what Charlotte pulled me down here to see. "Check this out!" she says. The center of the house is held up by 16-inch-diameter stumps—two of them, cut from local lodgepole pine, the bark still on. The SKI House is a tree house! Charlotte is grinning: "This won't pass code."