Clarks donate 960 acres, historic cabin in Fossil Ridge Wilderness

Fossil Ridge in-holding being held by TPL while county waits for need

For the past three decades Butch Clark has been cultivating a dream about building resourceful and adaptable communities to withstand the boom and bust cycles in industrial towns across the west, and around the world. At a ceremony full of wistfulness and hope on Monday, October 18, that dream bore fruit in Gunnison County.

Clark put an alphorn to his lips and, after some practice, gave it a deep, bellowing blast. “Let the celebration begin,” he said.
Then, after some thanks and introduction, the longtime Gunnison resident took up a comically large pen and began signing over a valuable 960-acre in-holding in the Fossil Ridge Wilderness Area—complete with 2,500-square-foot historic log home and three-seat outhouse—to the Trust for Public Lands (TPL) and ultimately the working people of the county.
Over the past two years, Clark has been looking for ways to trade the treasured property, which he bought with his wife, Judy, in 1971, for federal land that would be more suitable to a working class community. By Clark’s estimation, it’s only a matter of time before the resource-rich county needs to accommodate a sudden spike in population, at least temporarily.
And he hopes donating the land, valued at more than $4 million, to leverage property more accessible than a remote in-holding will help Gunnison County prepare for the boom when it happens.
Clark already has plans for an easily assembled community that can exploit renewable resources and creative designs to be essentially self-contained.
The idea has a lot of advantages, but one of the most far reaching, Clark figures, is that if the added infrastructure needed to support the boom is contained, the inevitable bust that follows will be, too.
In Clark’s vision, Gunnison County won’t end up with roads, housing, hospitals and schools that it can’t fill or maintain in the absence of a major project like a mine or a major expansion at Crested Butte Mountain Resort that has moved through the community.
The land donation and the larger vision it is part of has its roots in a doctoral dissertation Clark completed while at the University of London in the early 1980s. His work then was focused on finding ways to make it easier for communities to adjust when industry moves on and the money stops flowing.
The most striking change to his plan today is the means Clark has to make his dream a reality.
While Clark’s solution waits for a problem, he has enlisted the help of the TPL’s Justin Spring as well as the newly formed non-profit Gunnison Valley Housing Foundation to help him flesh out the details of the land trade.
Foundation board director Jim Schmidt said, “Butch wanted to do something about housing in the county. This piece of land that Butch is donating is a great piece of land, but it’s not the appropriate place for housing. So the hope is that the TPL and the foundation together can work together with the [U.S.] Forest Service to trade for another parcel or several parcels that would be more appropriate for housing in the county.”
The qualities Clark is looking for in land for the trade are fairly specific but match the characteristics of a big part of the county: land off the grid, near exploitable natural resources and preferably on the southern aspect of a gently sloping hill where there is greater potential to use passive solar heating.
Referring to a theme in the 1987 movie Wall Street, “Greed is Good,” Schmidt said, “In this day and age where that seems to be the mantra with so many people, I think what Butch and Judy are doing is so much the opposite of that. This is such a generous, outstanding donation.”
Justin Spring mentioned projects to build playgrounds in inner-city New York or secure wilderness in-holdings in the west, but said, “Never had our board been faced with this idea of a project that linked land conservation to affordable housing. So in some ways, we’re hoping this could be a model.”
Not only are the TPL and foundation working with the Forest Service to find parcels suitable for the trade, they’re also looking for ways to preserve the cabin on the property as a historical structure, as local politician Ben Jorgensen built it in 1938 and played host to some notable figures of the time there.
“I think we can try to work with the Forest Service to try to preserve the cabin with some kind of historic designation and then also utilize that part of the property like the Friends Hut, which can be accessed by skiers in the wintertime,” Clark said.
And other than the potential value to the public and the personal value the property has to him, Clark thinks the land still has undiscovered value in the archeology and geology in the area.
“We’re hoping that there’s much more there than appears on the surface,” Clark said. “I was up there with a Forest Service archeologist a few years back and there was some indication that it may have the same kind of archeological value as W mountain, but it’s much harder to see because of the vegetation.
“It also has some very interesting geology,” he continued. “Because of some of the limestone kilns in the area, it helped create, quite literally, the foundations of the city of Gunnison over 100 years ago.”
Together, the history and future of the place make it special to Clark. But the possibilities it’s creating for the future of housing in areas prone to boom and bust cycles have provided motivation to take the plan this far. And Clark knows his vision still has a long way to go.
“I hope down that long road, whatever comes from this is something that other communities can also learn from, so there’s a chance of sharing this experience with other places faced with the same kinds of challenges,” Clark said.
After a meeting with the Forest Service after the signing ceremony, Clark said the effort to set guidelines for locating an exchanged piece of property so the search for land can start.