Loaning to Western ski resorts cost the bank hundreds of millions.

Not too many years ago, $1 million might have bought you a midrange house on the side of a slope of a midrange Western ski hill.

Today, you could buy an entire ski resort for that price, as long as you have a few bucks left over for operating costs and some good lawyers to duke it out with investment bank Credit Suisse.

Of all the bad loans made in 2002-06, Credit Suisse's Western resort loans have to be among the worst. Packaged up as "collateralized loan obligations" and sold off to institutional investors, Credit Suisse made the deals, took the fees, and laid off the risk on someone else. Except, as it turned out, the legal risk.

Tamarack Resort, in Idaho, took $250 million from Credit Suisse in 2006 for a brand new ski hill and golf course and base village and all the rest. It's now defunct, awaiting foreclosure, and with luck someone will pick it up for nothing (literally) and bring it back to life. The payback on the $250 million loan? In all likelihood, zero.

At Promontory Club, outside Park City, Utah, Credit Suisse lent $350 million in 2005, most of which was immediately taken (by agreement) by the developer, Pivotal Group of Arizona. When lot sales stalled in 2007, bankruptcy followed, and an auction of the property drew virtually no interest. End result? Pivotal Group got the property back for about $30 million. The payoff on the $310 million or so remaining on the loan balance? Zero.

At the Yellowstone Club in Montana, the most elite of the bunch, a $375 million loan in 2005 also led to bankruptcy just three years later. This time, Credit Suisse was sure the property had to be worth real money and fought tooth and nail in bankruptcy court to gain control of the club so that it might mothball the property and sell it down the road—or else force the wealthy members to pay up.