Black Canyon vistas threatened by continued development

Uncertain future for 25,000-square-foot casa

When Tom Chapman looks out on the sage and piñon-covered rim of the Black Canyon, he sees incredible natural beauty and an undeniable business opportunity.

One of Colorado’s most well-known land brokers and developers, Chapman is back in business again in the place where it all started in 1984: the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.
Chapman, who grew up in the North Fork Valley, has made a name for himself, and probably a small fortune, as the guy who will go to the wilderness to buy property, then leverage it for more valuable land elsewhere or build a mansion where very few people would like to see one.
Along with Alabama-based TDX, Chapman has bought up in-holdings, neighboring or surrounded by federally protected land, all over Colorado from the proposed Spanish Peaks Wilderness in Southern Colorado to the Holy Cross Wilderness near Beaver Creek and Vail. He has even bought property in the West Elk Wilderness and Fossil Ridge Wilderness, both near Crested Butte.
And he is holding a 33-acre inholding in the Black Canyon. Until last week the parcel was 112 acres, but Chapman sold 79 acres of it Tuesday, April 27 to an out-of-state buyer for an undisclosed amount. Now there are two private landowners in the neighboring national park.
In all there are six legally subdivided lots on the 112-acre parcel, known as the Black Canyon National Park Private Reserve, according to the property website, blackcanyoncasa.com.
And Black Canyon superintendent Connie Rudd says there isn’t a whole lot she can do about it.
She told the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners that the Montrose county planners regulate the area and they have few rules in place to govern development on the inholding.
The lax regulation has already allowed the construction of a 4,750-square-foot house called Casa Barranca, which was finished in January, according to the house’s website, and overlooks the Black Canyon. While Chapman says the property’s sale price is still being settled, it has already been advertised online that the house will go to the buyer with its very own helicopter and chef, Chef Ron.
Casa Barranca was planned as, and might still be, the smaller of two residences built on the property, but the remaining five lots were purchased before the proposed 25,000-square-foot Casa Barranca II could be built atop Signal Hill, the highest point in the park.
And Chapman told the New York Times, “They eventually intend to build [Casa Barranca II], as I understand it.”
For the last decade Chapman has been searching out inholding owners and offering amounts of money that are far beyond what the feds are willing to offer… at least initially.
Deb and Rudy Rudibaugh were offered $100 an acre by the U.S. Forest Service for their 40 acres that sat next to the Fossil Ridge Wilderness Area. Instead they took the $150,000 offered by Chapman in 1998.
Chapman had something no one else had and a self-proclaimed die-hard capitalist’s dream came true. A similar deal was struck in the West Elk Wilderness, where Chapman eventually started building a trophy log home by making supply trips by helicopter.
Construction was well under way on the house before the Forest Service agreed to trade Chapman 105 acres near Telluride for the 240-acre parcel in the West Elk Wilderness, which the federal government valued at $640,000. A few years later, Chapman sold the Telluride parcel for $4.2 million.
Those kinds of tactics have had Chapman’s critics calling foul for years, and his critics have been many, and in some cases powerful. Former Colorado Senator Wayne Allard was reported to have said in Montrose, “I don’t like him. I don’t like what he’s doing.”
Another former Colorado Senator accused him of “taxpayer terrorism,” and that his dealings were “unethical” and “criminal.”
But while no one seems to be able to stop him, Chapman says there have been two golden opportunities that federal authorities have passed up to get the island of land into the hands of the public. And he aptly points out that TDX bought the 112-acre Private Preserve in 1998—for $240,000—just before the national park was established in October 1999.
“The Park Service came along and surrounded the place in 2000, with the supreme arrogance it takes to do so and not even ask the landowner if they might like to be included in a national park,” Chapman told the Crested Butte News this week.
Chapman went on to say, “In 2005, I sent letters, copies of which I have in my file, to the director of the National Park Service, to every member of the Colorado congressional delegation, to a number of state legislators and to about twenty state and national conservation organizations. The letter was cordial and simply asked for any input they might have in finding non-development solutions for the Black Canyon private lands.”
His first offer was to trade the land for property in the Southern Nevada Public Lands Act, in Clark County, outside Las Vegas. When the Bureau of Land Management turned down that offer, Chapman turned to a possible land swap for a parcel in the gas-rich Piceance Basin near Rifle and was again denied.
“The response,” Chapman says, “was a large, ominous, silence… So there you have it—no one cares one iota about this magnificent canyon. The last contact I had with the Park Service was five years ago.”
So he started building Casa Barranca and over five years it went up as Park Service employees drove by almost every day. Now those same employees can tell you that if a house is built on Signal Hill, it will be visible from many of the park’s overlooks, changing the seemingly endless horizon forever.