(The following may be used with permission from the author: mort@mortrosenblum.net)
By Mort Rosenblum
If you've never driven down past Lizard Head and hung that right at Society Turn toward Telluride, hurry up and do it. A modern morality play looks as if it might end badly. That would blight a little Colorado valley of such quiet beauty and historical heft that people around the world are scrambling to save it. Much more, it would tell us something few of us want to hear about what we have collectively become, we humans, in an imperiled world.
As life at warp speed turns hearts into hard drives, most of us keep tucked in our softer recesses memories of places that make believers out of us. For those who have seen it in autumn gold, winter white, and the greens of summer, Telluride's Valley Floor dominates that space.
One day in 1980, a Tucson pal wrote to tell me about a living relic of the old West set in a Rocky Mountain paradise. I was living in Paris, a reporter who had visited wonders across the world. But my friend doesn't exaggerate. I got on a plane and, a few days later, we hung that right at Society Turn.
A narrow black road followed a babbling creek past three miles of cottonwoods and willows, ancient elk trails and remnants of old miners who settled the place. A funky gas station fit right in, across from the red two-story Brown Homestead that sat in isolated glory among the shimmering aspens. On three sides, Telluride's snowy peaks loomed straight upward. I knew I was a lifer.
You can guess what happened since then. Bulldozers scraped away natural majesty to clear land for sprawling condos along a strip north of the road. Outside of the small kernel of historic Telluride, developers lusted after every square foot. The "Mountain Village," a gated enclave of homes ranging to the grotesque, arose high above town, reached, by gondola or a wide road. Still, against all comers, townsfolk defended 570 acres of the Valley Floor the way Asterix le Gaulois held off Roman legions.
In 2001, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed the Valley Floor on its list of "America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places." But it is also private property, owned by Neal Blue, a San Diego defense contractor, and his San Miguel Development Corporation. Blue's General Atomics makes aircraft for the Pentagon, including a drone that some find aptly named: the Predator.
During the 1980s, the development company bought a chunk of the Valley Floor with the apparent intention of building hotels, condos, and new ski lifts. In the 1990s, local papers quoted from a leaked memo; Blue proposed buying a newspaper to push his cause and finding a way to drain the wetlands for dubious agricultural purposes.
Today, an isolated backwoods struggle between local conservationists and a determined developer has grown into a national bellwether case over our society's values. It poses the troubling question: Is everything for sale, no matter what its intrinsic and indefinable worth, to whoever can plunk down the most money?
The counterargument runs that our free-enterprise system should not hinder "development." Fair enough, in broad context. But with climactic catastrophe helping self-obsessed humans despoil the last pristine places we have left, shouldn't we draw some lines?
Others ask why the outlying meadowland matters if Telluride is preserved. For just one example, look at what remains of Singapore's old emblem, the Raffles Hotel. In Singapore, where all is money and modernity, urban planners left the Raffles, but they widened a wide road right up its doorstep. Without its grand semicircular approach, and the fan-shaped travelers' palm set among flaming hibiscus, the old building itself might as well be an ersatz Las Vegas creation, devoid of charm and meaning.
"The Valley Floor has really defined the context of Telluride," Terry Tice told me by phone, with his typical understatement. "When you reach its limits, you know you are entering the community. It has long been Telluride's passion to protect this, and we are doing all we can."
Terry got to Telluride in 1972 back when protecting the place took cans of paint and nails to hold up falling-down buildings. In its mining heyday, it was fat and happy, with an opera house lit up by the first alternating current used in America. In the 1970s, the ghost town was restored to life by a colorful assortment of trust-funders, dirtbags, and solid citizens ready to dig in for good.
By the time I arrived, Terry's clothing store was a decade old. He had kids in school and a seat on the town council. Back then when the threat seemed distant, he was already an impassioned campaigner.
A San Miguel County court upheld the Town of Telluride's right to apply eminent domain, preserving the land in its natural state. But someone had to fix the price. Blue argued that a local jury might be biased, and his motion prevailed. The case went to Delta County, a conservative, blue-collar area down the road.
Although the town had valued those 570 acres at $26 million, and had $35 million set aside, a jury quickly accepted Blue's number: $50 million. Now Telluride residents and sympathizers around the world have only weeks to come up with the cash.
After the jury's decision, Nancy Lofholm, a Denver Post reporter, wrote, "The verdict shocked, angered and set the resolve of a town that has fought for a decade to protect the meadowlands from development. Fundraising has ranged from children's bake sales to seven-figure checks from wealthy second-home owners."
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Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a Telluride lifer who described the Valley as "magical," is among the defenders. So is Darryl Hannah, among Hollywood luminaries who have sunk roots in Telluride. Townsfolk pitch whatever they can afford into the old wishing well on Main Street.
Lofholm noted that the change in venue fed much of the town's anger, "especially since an alternate juror questioned the jury's fairness."
She concluded her piece in the Post: "Maxine Eisele, a Hotchkiss farmer who was able to deliberate but not vote as an alternate juror, said the verdict was unfair. 'These people were obviously anti-government,' she said. 'This is just nuts. They seemed to really want to punish the town (of Telluride).' She said jurors failed to even consult the voluminous appraisal materials as they made their decision in about three hours. Juror Sharon Wear, a Cedaredge retiree, said the jury would have valued the land at $65 million if that had been an option. 'I think we went in with an open mind. ... I love Telluride,' she said. 'The evidence we had showed it was worth every penny of that $50 million.'"
The dispute is more complex than a simple tug-of-war between good and evil. My old Paris colleague, Richard Bernstein of the New York Times, went to Telluride and wrote a long piece for his paper which the International Herald Tribune featured in its worldwide editions.
He recalled the background: Blue had fought an earlier condemnation order and a judge ordered mediation. The elected town council accepted a compromise. Blue could build luxury houses on 9 percent of the land, leaving 91 percent open. Blue would also build 15 units of affordable housing for workers and a donate land for a school and hospital. In a public vote, the compromise was defeated.
Bernstein quoted a letter to the Daily Planet: "A little development on the valley floor is like being a little bit pregnant." But, he reflects, too much purity can be a bad thing. If the town cannot find the money, Blue is presumably free to develop the whole 570 acres.
He concludes with the view of Seth Cagin, who edits The Telluride Watch:
"And so, we have become what we are: Beverly Hills in the mountains; Aspen south. We are now a community of very wealthy second homeowners, a few very wealthy families who can afford to live here full-time, a dwindling and aging population of others who got in before prices hit the stratosphere and a small, static population of workers in subsidized housing. What has passed for environmentalism in Telluride is not environmentalism at all. It is elitism, pure and simple."
Perhaps. Telluride is hardly the revived ghost town where a small community used to joke that each time a new dollar came to town you could trace its path all the way down Main Street. The uber rich pollute its air in private jets, and cops bristling with hardware treat parking violators as if they were mass murderers. And so on. But this is not about that.
The Valley Floor is an endangered piece of natural splendor that, so far, none of those rich people has been able to despoil. True enough, some glitzy Hollywood types want to protect it. So do local kids who pitch lunch money into the wishing well, like an 11-year-old who Bernstein quotes: "I am a child, and you are selling my future."
An elaborate Web site, www.valleyfloor.org, lays out the history and the issues of what is at stake. It is a plea from the Valley Floor Preservation Partners, a citizens' trust that states its case with photographs of stunning beauty.
"If we lose the Valley Floor," it declares, "we lose a rare thing to behold in our fragmented world - a vision of wholeness. We lose our life-sustaining ecology, our natural symmetry and sense of connection, and the main theme of Telluride's history - man surrounded by nature. Be a part of this story. Help write the final chapter and keep the Valley Floor Forever Wild!"
This, of course, is only one among plenty of worthy causes that command our attention these days. But small gifts are welcome. And if anyone out there is planning, say, a million-dollar bar mitzvah, maybe your kid would rather see you invest in the planet he must inhabit.
In any case, as they say in corporatespeak, time is of the essence.
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