Word: gunnison
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Donna Phelps loves a good chat, so when the retired schoolteacher answers the phone one morning at the Gunnison County, Colo., ranch where her husband Duane has been raising cattle since 1958, she is happy to find a former student on the line. But the caller isn't interested in idle talk. Like so many people in the area--a remote sage-and-wildflower valley--the student is in real estate now. She tells Donna that a client from Texas wants to spend $105,000 on a 35-acre "ranchette" of undeveloped land. Would the Phelpses be interested in selling...
...Phelpses are trying to hang on, but many of the 75 other families still ranching in the county are just waiting for the right deal. In the lush valley bottomland along the Gunnison, Slate and East rivers, FOR SALE signs are almost as common as cottonwoods. Countywide, 13,000 acres of ranchland have been sold for development in the past two years; of the 75,000 prime acres that remain, 17,500 are for sale. Development's pace is fastest at the northern head of the valley, where the funky ski town of Crested Butte is a money magnet. Opulent...
...Gunnison still has a chance, thanks to an unlikely coalition of conservative ranchers and left-leaning environmentalists who have put aside their cultural differences and teamed up to launch a grass-roots campaign to save ranches from the bulldozers. The Gunnison Legacy Project, as the effort is known, is the brainchild of Susan Lohr, a soft-spoken ornithologist from California, and Bill Trampe, a lean, crusty rancher whose family has been in the valley for three generations. The bird watcher and the cowboy, as Lohr and Trampe are sometimes called, hope to save 3,000 acres of ranchland...
...selling development rights instead of the property, ranchers raise capital while saving open space and hanging on to their land. And because the property can never be developed, it loses half its market value. Thus ranchers can suddenly afford to pay taxes and keep the land in the family. Gunnison isn't the first community to launch a land-trust program: 1,200 of them have sprung up so far in the U.S. But unlike most, the Gunnison Legacy is a true grass-roots effort with no involvement from national conservation groups or wealthy landowners seeking tax breaks...
...been the talk of lunchrooms across America. "Some people follow it," says Everett White, 55, of Pueblo, Colo. "You see it in the papers, but it's not like that other one, with...what's his name?" As for McVeigh's guilt, says Mark Collins, city manager of Gunnison, Colo.: "Jeez, you think there's a question there...