Sidebar by Allen Best
Recreation – September 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
In the Telluride area, a landowner threatens to block use of his land that is commonly used to reach three fourteeners (Wilson Peak, Mt. Wilson, and El Diente) while he seeks a land trade with the U.S. Forest Service.
The owners, represented by Rusty Nichols, profess intent to renew mining operations on the 238-acre tract, which is located above timberline at the end of the Silver Pick Road. Mr. Nichols has even submitted applications to state authorities for permits for gold and silver mining operations. He has similarly inquired of San Miguel County about requirements necessary to receive permits.
How serious is he? Many people think it’s just a stratagem. Three times he has proposed land exchanges that would, in exchange for his tortured, above-timberline property, yield him 2,000 acres of developable aspen-covered land on nearby Wilson Mesa. The Forest Service has rejected all three proposals.
“Of course the Forest Service cannot show comparable value,” reports Steve Bonowski, a senior volunteer in the Colorado Mountain Club’s conservation department.
Telluride’s Steve Johnson, a lawyer and outdoor enthusiast, charges that Nichols is hewing to a now familiar strategy engineered by Tom Chapman, a Delta-based lawyer.
In the early 1990s, Mr. Chapman threatened to build a lodge on private land within the West Elk Wilderness between Paonia and Crested Butte. When the Forest Service did not respond with a land exchange that satisfied him, he made good on his threat – and the Forest Service succumbed, giving him property near the Telluride ski area that even then had escalated in value. In other words, say critics, Chapman got the better of the Forest Service.
More recently in 1999, Mr. Chapman announced the offering of various wilderness inholdings near Vail, Gunnison and elsewhere that, he said, could be developed into exclusive retreats. Some properties, such as the abandoned Treasure Vault Mill property inside the Holy Cross Wilderness Area, were so remote they would have required helicopter access. Nothing has ever come of those would-be sales.
Such threats are not isolated, nor are inholdings. “Montana? Idaho? What Western state does not have private land access issues?” asks Ralph Swain, the Lakewood-based manager of the regional wilderness program for the U.S. Forest Service.
The access to Wilson Peak remains in limbo. Various hiking and mountaineering groups are attempting to map out an alternative route up the peak and into the Silver Pick Basin that would detour around the private land. The Forest Service has declined to mark the trail. By federal law it is required to survey marked routes for impacts to Indian artifacts as well as animal and plant communities.
Other than the Mosquito Range, the only 14ers in Colorado with privately owned summits were private as a result of Mexican land grants that preceded American administration; of those two, Kit Carson and Culebra, only the latter remains in private hands. However, common access routes for Mt. Lindsey, also in the Sangre de Cristos, remains in private hands, although there has been no report of trouble.
