Editor’s Note: The Cattle Creek Confluence Coalition — www.cattlecreekcc.com — is holding a public meeting on this topic on Thursday, Nov. 6, at 6:30pm in the Glenwood Springs Library community room.
Picture, if you can, environmentalists collaborating with developers on one of the last stretches of undeveloped valley floor, on pasture land between Carbondale and Glenwood Springs. Their first meeting took place early last winter, there on the property cut by Cattle Creek, alongside Highway 82. The players included three representatives from the Texas real estate development firm, Realty Capital, and three locals from Roaring Fork Audubon. The latter trio had been invited to advise the developers about their conservation community to be built around the Cattle Creek Confluence with the Roaring Fork River.
That sunny, December day of 2024, a scant mile upvalley from Habitat for Humanity, the group walked away from the highway gate, across the Rio Grande Trail and into the 283 acres owned by Realty Capital. Delia Malone, the vice chair of Roaring Fork Audubon, suggested that they stroll down the dirt road toward the river, but then she noticed the visitors’ footwear: unsuitable for a hike. So, after 100 feet, they stopped and chatted amiably.
“What they wanted from us was our endorsement,” said Malone a year later. “They wanted Roaring Fork Audubon to say that we think this is great and put our stamp of approval on it.”
As managing director of Realty Capital, the personable Richard Myers, a former resident of the Valley, had purchased the land in March 2024 for $31 million. He had eyed the acreage many times from the highway while engaged in his development projects at River Valley Ranch, the Tree Farm Lofts in Basalt and his Lofts in Glenwood Springs. Based in Dallas, Myers had founded Realty Capital 38 years ago and has completed over 150 mixed commercial and residential projects throughout Texas and Colorado.
Myers asked the Audubon trio for their suggestions on his “Harvest Roaring Fork” conservation community. Mary Harris, chair of Roaring Fork Audubon, proposed that Audubon could build a small nature center and lead hikes and educate the public about the importance of protecting the habitat and its resident wildlife. Myers expressed enthusiastic interest.
For more than a quarter century since Sanders Ranch sold the land, developers have pitched town-sized proposals to be shoehorned into the 283 acres. This included golf course communities, hundreds of homes, a school site and 70,000 square feet of commercial space that would have dwarfed any shopping center yet to be built in Carbondale, five miles upstream.
Among the would-be developers, one knocked down the ranch house and barn, then bulldozed off the topsoil and native plants — scaring off the winter herd of elk that takes refuge here — and plowed the earth up into unnatural berms that had been envisioned as golf course hills. A foreclosure followed.
Most of the proposals triggered angry local reactions, with concerns about more expensive homes, increased traffic and urban sprawl amid an increasingly congested valley. Such intense developments would destroy the Roaring Fork’s rural character, they said. One application that made it as far as a public meeting at the Garfield County Courthouse went on for 13 hours and was loudly shot down.
Amid the clamor, the only successful land action on the property didn’t involve any development. The quietly enacted Cattle Creek Conservation Easement of February 2000 protected 54 acres and split the 283 acres down its middle. Cattle Creek is also bisected by two other protected easements on the property: the popular Rio Grande Trail and the Glenwood Ditch. The Cattle Creek Conservation Easement — protected in perpetuity — is managed by the Roaring Fork Conservancy and was owned by Carbondale Investments, yet another Texas developer that had a go at the 283 acres. Although they didn’t actually build anything, they doubled their investment by selling to Realty Capital (now owners of the Easement). It is described by the Roaring Fork Conservancy as a “varied landscape of wetlands, upland hillsides, pastures and riparian vegetation [that] serves an equally diverse array of wildlife.”
Delia Malone made her first visit down into the Easement more than 20 years ago during a stream survey, and to a real estate developer, you couldn’t find a more qualified naturalist to rubber-stamp or help greenwash your operation. She taught conservation biology and ecology at CMC; she worked as an ecologist with the Colorado Natural Heritage Program at CSU. She knows as much about the plants, plains, wildlife and wetlands of the Roaring Fork biosphere as anyone alive and has worked throughout the Valley over 35 years for conservation nonprofits and government agencies. Unlike many New Age, digitized field biology specialists, Malone is an old-school ecologist, a scientist interested in the big picture of sustainable habitats, so she avoided specialization and became a Renaissance woman of natural Colorado ecosystems, adept at identifying birds, tracking furbearers and keying out plants.
One of her self-described “yee-haw” experiences as an ecologist took place down inside the Easement in 2005. Over the previous decade, she had diligently searched river banks throughout Western Colorado for a rare orchid. The Ute ladies’-tresses is listed on the federal register as threatened due to “habitat loss and modification due to water development and urbanization” in the West.
“When you’re looking for a flower,” Malone explained, “you look for the habitat. [The tresses] like a very specific environment, along streams and wetlands.” And during her August survey in 2005, treading gently on the sandy bank of the Roaring Fork River where it meets Cattle Creek in the Easement, she laid eyes on tiny white flowers, clustered on a stem, reminiscent of a woman’s braided hair. She described her discovery as a happy, joyful moment.
Still, she knew that the Easement wouldn’t necessarily protect the sensitive habitat from any intensive development proposals up above. If a town for instance were to be built on the land surrounding the creek, it would only be a matter of time before someone trampled the fragile flowers, let alone drove off the nesting great blue herons.
Carefully giving wide berth to the great blue heron rookery in the cottonwoods, she noted other birds, including swallows nesting in the steep banks above the creek, along with a kestrel, a dipper, sparrows and a northern harrier. Most of the wetland had been taken over by non-native, canary reed grass, planted by ranchers for cattle grazing decades earlier, unpalatable to elk and deer.
Nineteen years later, on the uplands with the Realty Capital folks, Richard Myers asked about the elk. Malone suggested that she would show protection zones and a migration corridor for the elk on a map that she would create. Myers said he’d look forward to seeing it. Harris and Malone also asked if they could come back to do a wildlife survey and a Christmas bird count. Myers happily consented. (They obtained permission from the Roaring Fork Conservancy, too.)
When she returned, Malone made another discovery down in the Easement. Beavers had recently entered the confluence wetlands and, as ecosystem engineers, beavers would increase the health of the habitat and expand wildlife diversity.
Up above, on non-Easement land once torn apart by bulldozers, she observed that the soil, undisturbed for two decades, had begun to revegetate with native sage and wheat grass — essential graze and winter habitat for the 120 elk that she watched, lolling on the plain, out of sight and sound from the traffic on Highway 82. “Without this essential winter habitat,” she said, “the elk would have nowhere else to go. This is the last place for the elk in the lower valley.”
After making a GIS map that showed a protected zone for the winter elk habitat, along with a migration corridor in and out of the 283 acres, Malone sent it to Realty Capital. In April, she and Harris met with Myers again on the property. Instead of discussing her map, he unveiled his own. He extolled the virtues of his development, just as Realty Capital does on its website, www.harvestrfv.com, with its promise to look after local workers and address the “housing crisis while prioritizing environmental stewardship and community well-being. Harvest will have a mix of affordable and attainable homes.”
The development plans would also land within the 573-page application on the Garfield County website. The map lays out eight subdivision neighborhoods and details 1,500 residential units, with a potential 450 additional Accessory Dwelling Units, 55,000 square feet of commercial space and a 120-room hotel — with no provision for any elk, as if the narrow Cattle Creek Conservation Easement with its invasive grasses would suffice. (While their website advertises a mile of homes on “the riverfront,” the riverfront is all Conservation Easement, closed to development and human access.)
Harris and Malone were speechless.
Instead of a conservation community, Realty Capital has envisioned a new town between Carbondale and Glenwood, bigger than any previous proposal. With nearly nine “dwelling units” per acre (nearby Aspen Glen holds one house per 1.43 acres), it would add thousands more people to the Valley, traffic jams and two new stop lights on Highway 82.
Malone was stunned. She felt duped. And Roaring Fork Audubon had no choice but to part ways with Harvest Roaring Fork.
Jon Waterman has made the Roaring Fork Valley his home for 37 years. He is the author of 17 books and lives on Cattle Creek Road.