TELLURIDE — It’s being framed as a battle of David and Goliath. But in the ongoing saga of Bear Creek Basin just outside the Telluride Ski Resort boundary ropes, no one is quite sure which one is the little guy.
Land developer Tom Chapman would like to think it’s him, little Davey standing up to big government and an arrogant ski resort linked by a double standard of preferential property rights and arbitrary zoning rules unfairly applied to the modest mining claims purchased within the basin last year by his Gold Hill Development Corporation.
But Chapman has a bit of a reputation to contend with, and because of it he has been fingered for the role of Goliath by those he has chosen to pick his fight with, or perhaps the Big Bad Wolf hiding in the pious sheepskin of property rights.
For those unfamiliar with the most contentious issue in ski country this season, Chapman, from Paonia, is the guy credited for the closure of three very popular backcountry access gates from the ski area to U.S. Forest Service land in the Upper Bear Creek Basin. He is a 20 percent shareholder in GHDC, with the majority of the company controlled by Ron Curry, an insurance consultant who doubles as the chef for a property among the most responsible for Chapman’s reputation — the Casa Barranca, built on a private inholding within the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.
The GHDC partners recently purchased a few more strategic inholdings — mining claims set aside in Bear Creek as remnants of the General Mining Act of 1872 — and posted the property off-limits to skiers, hikers and anyone else passing through.
It all seems reasonable enough at face value, which is the way Chapman would have you view it. Curry claims he would actually like to take up mining, just like his granddaddy did.
Credibility gap
The catch is that no one in Telluride believes him. They still remember the 1993 land- exchange coup that earned Chapman about $4 million just down the road, and the Casa Barranca, a called bluff by the National Park Service that resulted in the only luxury private residential estate within a U.S. national park.
They are also quite familiar with the Bear Creek area, considered sacred land to Telluride locals, complete with a nature preserve, the magnificent Wasatch hiking trail and some of the best backcountry skiing in the state. And they know GHDC’s mining claims are strategically placed to undermine all of it.
Direct access to much of the surrounding Uncompahgre National Forest also has been curtailed after several years of lobbying to open it.
“Some of the main landowners up there — Chapman, really — are trying to make this into a private property issue,” said Tor Anderson, president of the Telluride Mountain Club. “I don’t think it is. It’s not us trying to take away his private property rights; it’s him trying to take away our public rights.”
Much of the community — and arguably even Chapman himself — views the situation similarly. You see, by most accounts, hikers have been passing through the basin for about a century, skiers for close to 40 years, all without threats of trespassing tickets or any attempts to sue private landholders after falling off an inconveniently located cliff and breaking a leg.
Upward of 200 skiers per day have passed through those backcountry gates, and the Telluride Ski and Golf Company gained approval last spring to conduct guided ski tours in the area.
Chapman knows good and well that he has pinched a major artery, using the tools he has at his disposal, which mostly amounts to lengthy diatribes about “subsequent transfer of liability onto the landowners for accidental injury and death” in scary places with names like “Deep and Dangerous” and “The Graveyard,” where people have in fact been killed.
But as Telluride CEO Dave Riley puts it, “It’s a bit of puffery.”
“It’s kind of like hostage value, creating a lot of angst and tension,” Riley added. “That’s obviously what he’s done over and over again.”
Ransom or reasonable?
To some degree, I believe the GHDC crew is truly convinced they’re on a grand crusade to “level the playing field of property rights” in Bear Creek, as Chapman told me via e-mail. But his methods essentially amount to holding the local outdoors community hostage while ransoming a chunk of the fragile tourism economy.
The property is not for sale, currently. But it’s impossible to believe it won’t be soon, say, right after Riley submits an updated master plan for the ski area that includes expansion into the area. In fact, Chapman has the new lifts plotted out on a Google Earth map he’s circulating on the Internet. He’d like to see the resort succeed like anyone.
Still open country
My favorite part of the story, though, is that in the end, no one really cares.
Sure, the gates are closed and the threats of trespassing fines waft through the air along with talk of plowing through ski runs to open long- closed mining roads and building new lodges on the valley floor. But the consensus is current zoning laws and prescriptive rights to access of the area trump all that. Beyond a new topic of conversation, it’s business as usual in Telluride.
Ski patrol isn’t chasing poachers down the basin, the sheriff’s department can’t deal with the added stress of patrolling the backcountry and skiers are skiing the area just as they always have, whether or not there was a gate to get there.
“It’s just like it was before it was open,” Anderson said. “Closing the gates has stopped the number of skiers in there maybe by half, if that. It’s just so easy to go back there; people do what they want to do. We don’t advocate breaking any closed boundaries, but no, we’re not revoking any club memberships.”
This story has been corrected in this online archive to indicate Telluride being within the Uncompahgre National Forest, not the San Isabel National Forest.
