Word: gunnison
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...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...
...cowboy ever began having this conversation. The Old West of ranchers, miners and loggers has been so alienated from the New West of environmentalists, recreationists and urban refugees that bridges between the camps usually get washed out. A culture clash still divides the rock-ribbed citizens of Gunnison, a sleepy city of 5,000 on Highway 50, and the flamboyant ex-hippies and ski bums of Crested Butte, the pastel Victorian resort town 26 miles to the north...
Ranchers, who value hard work and fortitude above all else, take the measure of their neighbors slowly, winter by winter. Trampe didn't fully accept Lohr until she joined him on the Upper Gunnison Water Conservancy Board, which is fighting a decade-long court battle to prevent the Denver suburbs from taking Gunnison's water. It wasn't Lohr's eloquence on the subject that broke Trampe's reserve. It was the way Lohr got to the water-board meetings. Since the only road to Lohr's cabin in Gothic was closed from October to June...