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Bart Berger
Interview by Bob Holt August 8, 2002 Tape One, Side One This is Bob Holt and today is Thursday, August 8th. 2002 and I’m here with Bart Berger at his property, the Esterbrook Park Ranch, which is located roughly four miles, four and a half miles south of Bailey. We’re going to talk a little bit about his recollections and his experiences here on this property. Let’s just start out a little bit with when you were born. I was born June 27th of 1949. And that was in Denver. That was in Denver, Colorado. And so, this property here…we’re actually on the front porch on a spectacular summer morning with hummingbirds everywhere, which you’re probably going to be hearing in the background. You’ve come up here as a child and as an adult for many, many years, enjoying it, because it was designed and built as a family recreation location. That’s right. It was a place to get out of Denver on hot summer days. Okay. Give me a little history of the property itself. The ranch itself owes its origins to my great-grandfather, who had the good fortune to marry a woman by the name of Margaret Kountz whose brothers were involved in the banking business in Denver and in Omaha known as the Kountz Brothers. They had decided…they come from Ozenberg (sp) Ohio as the sons of a reasonably wealthy merchant and had discovered that they could loan money in Omaha after the crash of ’57 at twenty-one percent per year, which was pretty good. You know, you don’t have to work very hard to make money at twenty-one percent. When they decided that they could do that, then they could do something similar in Denver. They moved to Denver and started the Kountz Brothers Bank in Denver in ’62, I think it was. My great-grandfather married their sister and went to work for the Kountz Brothers as the cashier for what became the Colorado National Bank. Charles Kountz, who was the youngest brother of all the Kountz Brothers, was the president and chief mucky muck of the CNB and became involved in organizing, along with Mr. Evans and a number of other guys, the Denver South Park and Pacific Railroad. And, in 1874, as they looked to build the railroad (which as a narrow gauge and they sincerely thought it was going to go to the Pacific but there was no way in the world it was ever going to get there) and map out the route, they discovered that there was some pretty nice property. A big bunch of railroading money in those days was made in getting the real estate more than it was in running the railroad. It was building the railroad that made the money and it was owning the real estate along the railroad before anybody else got to it that made the money for these guys. As such, when they came up here they discovered this piece of property, and in those days the original purchase was about 640 acres that was a combination of parcels that had been homesteaded by various “shills” (I suspect)—people who never actually, probably, ever got on the property but they filed homesteads and then were purchased by one guy by the name of George Schweir (sp). This was not uncommon in those days. George Schweir then sold to my great-grandfather, a gentleman by the name of William Lewis (sp) Bart Berger and Charles Brewer Kountz, his brother-in-law, sold them the original property in April of 1874. There was a 160-acre parcel which was down on the Platte which was run by a guy named Joseph Estabrook who had a livery stable in Denver and used to have his horses. He would summer or winter his horses up here and it was through his property that the railroad actually came and as such the stationhouse, when it placed, was called the Esterbrook Station. Of course, cleverly, of course, everybody subdivided their property and filed plats and Esterbrook became Esterbrook Park. Down in Fairplay you can see the plat map with wonderful wide boulevards running straight up the side of the hill! So, it became known as Esterbrook Park and such became the Esterbrook Park Historic District. So, that kind of was the way it was. They decided then, Kountz and Berger decided to purchase the property for basically a summer place because it was the first place that the railroad opened up after it came through the canyon, not from Pine…. Did the railroad actually acquire the right of way from the owners that were up here? I don’t have, as I went through the records in Fairplay I never saw any rights of way filed…ah Interesting. (unclear exchange) Probably, checking on value increase to those around it, nobody really objected much. I don’t think anybody had any problem. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So, since it was far enough away and but yet close enough, they took this spot and I think by ’78 when the railroad actually came through, then they had authority to bring people and equipment and material up sufficient so that by the time that I can recreate from photographic materials that I’ve discovered, I think that they probably got this house on whose porch we’re sitting, probably completed in its first form by about 1880. Various additions were put on in ’85 and ’90 and 1905 but virtually by about 1915 there was no more work done on this house, and so we’re now sitting here in what I call the “castle of deferred maintenance.” (chuckle) We’re simply keeping up with it. That’s all right. I’m not sure you’d wanta do much to it at this point in time. So it was built in what they called the “Adirondack” style with the wood slabs on it and the porch rails made out of lodge pole done in various design and it owed its origin to a school of architecture which came out of what they call the “naturalist” style, or the “back to nature” school of architecture which was very popular in those days. Was it actually built by your family, or did they have contractor build it. Who physically built the place? Well, I’d like to say that my great-grandfather was out here with, you know, nails in his mouth…you know…and a hammer… But he was a banker. But, he was a banker and was reasonably well off and so I’m sure that they had people…I’m hesitating because there are hummingbirds who are trying to fly through a screen porch because they don’t realize the screens are there and they bumping into the screens…quite amusing. (chuckle) But, ah, they had people who came up and locals that built the place. It’s a combination of ponderosa pine and some cedar posts and lodge pole and various materials that are all indigenous to this property. It’s around 120 years old so it seems to be holding up exceptionally well. Yeah. We, you know, paint here and replace wood there…we keep up with it. (chuckle) So your family’s had this property then, and there’s several buildings on the property. There are several buildings here on the property. There are, ah…the original building was probably the caretaker’s house which sits somewhat to the south of us here. And, the caretaker that we had was here year ‘round. Then there was a blacksmith shop (which deteriorated, we’ve just recreated it), there’s a barn, a nice (one, two, three...) four stall barn (which is a gorgeous thing, made out of huge ponderosa pine and it probably pretty much predated all of these houses), and then this house (which was built in ’80), the house between the caretaker’s house and here (which was built in about 1902 as a result of my Great-Aunt Margaret getting married to Shammo (sp) Brown and my Grandmother saying, “You know, this house ain’t big enough for us all” and so she had that other house built for them as a place for my great-aunt and her ‘Texas’ husband). “Texas husband.” So you have a Texan in your history. We have a number of “Texans” in our history, all stemming from Shammo (sp) Brown, who was a wealthy guy who raised quarter horses and ultimately his family got into the oil business. So there’s Texans in our history (Dallas). Okay. Then, there is another house which is to the north of us here, which is the house that was built by and for Charles Kountz and it is a reasonably large house and is now owned by his descendants, two women and their “almost” husbands. They don’t have any children and they have a four-acre parcel up there that they own by themselves. The Esterbrook Ranch itself now is an accumulation of properties which are comprised of just about 1980 acres and is owned by a company called the Berger Land Company, of which I am the president. There are various members of the family; approximately thirty shareholders who own varying numbers of shares in the company. So, actually the property here has increased in size over the years. My great-grandmother, upon my great-grandfather’s death in 1890 devoted a lot of her efforts to acquiring land around here in order to insure her and her family’s peace and tranquility, and she purchased all the property as far as she could upstream on Craig Creek, which flows in front of us, in order that she didn’t have anybody upstream of her, and down the Platte River as far as she could so that she was able to—well, she put together as much as she could by 1920 when she died. Humph. Now, the purpose, again, was strictly a summer type of recreational place. Strictly a place for the family to congregate and escape the heat of Denver, Colorado, which could be—if you look back in the records of 1874—was a banner year for heat in Denver. It broke all sorts of—you know, I mean, it held the record for being the hottest summer ever until, probably, recently. So, as such, there was a great motivation on the part of my great-grandmother to get out of the heat and probably, also, to get from behind so many horses. You know, it was probably pretty smelly in Denver in the heat. Romantic, to think about Denver, but it was probably pretty dirty with the amount of coal, the amount of industry, the amount of dust and the amount of—ah—horses. You mentioned earlier that your grandmother was not really big on horses and wasn’t much interested in having them up here. Ah, it was a necessary evil. One of the reasons why she created the house for (tape skipped) at all and I think that when she realized that she wasn’t gonna—she didn’t really hang around with her son-in-law that she built that house for. Humph. Now, they had to come up here on horseback or in a wagon in the 1800s. Well…they woulda come up from the railroad station on horseback, certainly. There was a path that brought ‘em up here and they had a buggy. How far was it from the Esterbrook Station? Oh, I don’t think we’re more than about a quarter of mile from the Estabrook Station. It’s right on the road here, really. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, now. Do you recall anything from your grandparents or parents talking about having family gatherings up here? Well, there are all sorts of—there are articles in the newspaper around the turn of the century in which, at that point, my grandfather and his brothers and sisters were all getting to the point where they had graduated from Yale and various other places and it was a pretty fancy place to come up and have—they had pretty fancy house parties up here and they were part of the social set and they were pretty popular. But, as they moved on and they got into the realities of the Depression, they didn’t spend a lot of time doin’ parties up here. But, for some period of time, from 1900 to about the end of the ‘20s, it was a pretty popular little spot for them to entertain (in). The Depression kinda made it a little tough and it was tough in the bank and at that point we started losing members of my grandfather’s generation. My grandfather died in ’39 and his brother William had died in ’36—well, I can’t go through all of ‘em but they were—by the time the mid ‘30s happened, we were then into my father’s generation. The interest had scattered out pretty far so it wasn’t that much activity up here, at least not on the scale that it had been in my grandfather’s generation. Sure. So, the Depression had a pretty significant effect on your family’s usage of this property. Well, given the fact that they were in the banking business, the answer would be “Yes.” The fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt closed the banks and took us off the gold standard was something that stuck in my father’s craw to the day he died. He was hard pressed to carry a Roosevelt dime in his pocket. Seems to be a break in the tape. My father used to tell me one story about when (I don’t know if there’s any truth to it) but he did say that there’s a tree down here which is old and dead and has a hollow down in the bottom of it. He said that my great-grandmother was afraid of the Utes that used to walk back and forth up this—what is now County Road 68—on the way up to what is now Wellington Lake. Because they had up at Wellington Lake before they built it apparently that was where the Utes would get together and they would swap and trade and they would do, they had sort of a, kind of a, that was kinda where they would all get together and you know… Umhum. Powwow. …have a powwow situation. But my great-grandmother, of course, was desperately afraid of all the Indians and so used to hide my grandfather, George Berger, in the hollow of the tree, afraid that they might come and capture her. Ha! So, actually, when your great-grandparents first came up here, there were Indians still in the area. Oh, certainly. And, remember, it was not that long after the Sand Creek incident in which my Great-Aunt Gertrude Bart Berger had married a gentleman by the name of Hal Sayer (sp), excuse me, Robert Sayer, and Robert Sayer’s father was a guy by the name of Hal Sayer, who had ridden with Chivington to Sand Creek back in the ‘60s when they had that unpleasantness. Hal Sayer’s secretary, who worked for him at the corner of 8thand Logan in the house they called The Alhambra, which is a Moorish style house cattycornered from what is now the Governor’s House. When he died, his personal secretary took off of the wall something that had been bothering her for any number of years which consisted of the scalp and testicles of an Indian that he had acquired in Sand Creek. Before any of the estate was handled, she took them to Fairmont and had them given a Christian burial to get rid of it. So, there was, in those days, some fear of all of the Indians, the Utes as well. Remember, also, the Utes had had—it wasn’t that long after the massacre as well. So, yeah, there was a pretty good apprehension, so when she saw ‘em she stayed out of their way. Do you recall any stories about actually encountering Indians up here? No. I don’t. Other than that one story of my great-grandmother hiding my grandfather in the tree. In fact, I have talked to several people who lived in the area who have found evidence of what they called “medicine trees” where the bark had been stripped in a certain way, and in some cases those trees are still alive. Well, that’s true. Harold Warren also talks of those. Umhum. Exactly. Got pictures of ‘em, in fact. So, that’s hard to imagine it’s only a couple generations away that all existed. Oh yeah. You know, I suspect that the age of the forest, as you walk through you can see that the forest has sustained, you know, has come back after a pretty significant fire which was a couple hundred years ago, and I think that that may have been caused maybe not by natural causes. The Utes were known for creating forest fires and it was their way to send a message to the white man to stay out. You know, they were tryin’ to make it inhabitable. Well, they were nomadic, right? The Utes were funny. They were somewhat nomadic. They weren’t as organized as the other tribes. And so they talk about Chief Ouray, he really wasn’t “that” chief, he was “a” chief. He was one of a number of sorta chief mucky mucks. The white man called him “chief” because they couldn’t figure out what else to call him but he wasn’t a specific Ute chief. Just “Member of the Board.” He was a member, he was kinda “Head of the Board of Directors.” There you go. Interesting. But I used to come up here when I was very young, when I became (word unclear) one of my early memories of the area is of the guy who had purchased the property down on the river which is now called “River Cliff” property. He had purchased it in mid ‘40s for purposes of starting a dude ranch. His name was Pete Smyth. I had known Pete Smyth because I had listened to him on the radio as the Mayor of Tincup, East Tincup. He was a person of some fame in my small little universe and I tickled to discover that Pete Smyth and my father got along famously and enjoyed the occasional taste of bourbon over here on the side of house and sit out on a summer’s evening and enjoy that mutual interest. And, I was taken by Pete Smyth and Pete Smyth was one heck of a nice guy. He was here quite a bit with his wife, Peggy, who probably enjoyed the taste of juniper berries’ product more than she enjoyed the other. I think she was probably here kinda because of Pete but it probably wasn’t her first priority because she was more of a city girl, I suspect. You know, as a kid we had a caretaker by the name of Frank Possin (sp) who had been mentioned in Pete Smyth’s book, “Big City Dropout,” as being one of the sorta local characters and had helped Pete build some additions onto the house down there. And, ultimately when my father—we had a caretaker by the name of Joe Blankenship (who I don’t have a memory of (but) we have photographs of Joe). When Joe Blankenship went away for whatever reasons Joe went away, my father replaced him with Frank Possin, who was here with his wife, Sammie, and they had a son named Rickie and two daughters. I’m gonna have to really dig to remember their names. They lived in the caretaker home? They lived in the old one room cabin which ultimately Frank had built on an addition onto it which put another bedroom and a bathroom and a pretty Spartan kitchen. He and Sammie lived there for, they were up here for probably ten years. I can tell you, you get cold up here. Oh--! I can imagine. I have pictures of Sammie—she looks like she strayed out of some place in Kentucky. I mean—it was pretty “Appalachian” up here. It was remarkable. chuckle. Frank was a heck of a guy. Ultimately became a justice of the peace and was a judge in Fairplay. What time frame was this? In the ‘50s. Okay. Did the dude ranch ever get built across the street? Yeah. Pete ran it as the River Cliff Ranch, as a dude ranch—advertised it and ran it for a number of years. It was hard work and lot of his recollections of it are pretty well documented in the book, “Big City Dropout.” I think there are a lot of wonderful stories in that book about the conflict between nature and Pete. A lot of which have to do with how do you get water from Craig Creek over in there and how do you get power and how do you do it all with ration coupons. This was durin’ the war, then. At the end of the war during ’43 and ‘44 he was tryin’ to build a dude ranch with ration coupons and it was not easy. Well, people had a very difficult time getting up here because of the ration of gasoline. That’s correct. I was told that even Glenn Isle was pretty quiet during the World War II, that people couldn’t get up here. It took off like crazy right after the war. Well, it would have been easier if they still had the railroad, but they shut the railroad down in ’36. They had been tryin’ to shut the railroad down for thirty years but they couldn’t get the darned thing shut down because the Interstate Commerce Commission wouldn’t allow ‘em to do it because it delivered the mail. As such, it was deemed to be a necessary, you know, deal. And that’s why Esterbrook is still on the map. Because, although it is not really a legitimate town, it’s on the map because it was, you know, there was a post office. There actually was a post office—the area was never incorporated. It was never incorporated. But there was a post office! There was a post office and that’s why it shows up on the map. It was at the train station? It was right next to the train station. Interesting. It was never incorporated as a town. Well, and that’s why when you look at the train stops on your map that you showed you’ll see a stop at Innsmont, but Innsmont doesn’t show up on the map. There was a stop at Bailey’s but there was a post office so it shows up. Glenn Isle was a stop but doesn’t show up because it wasn’t a post office. That’s why maps show seemingly odd little places. Humph! Now, you mentioned there was a fire two hundred years ago. That’s my guess. I haven’t done any (word unclear) chronology to really discover it but that’s my best guess based on the age of the oldest ponderosa that I can find here. It could’ve been a younger fire or a fire more recently because ponderosas, especially bigger ones, tend to survive fires so long as they don’t torch at the treetop. Ponderosas are very resistant to fires, so in some places, the area where I live for instance, there are older ponderosas that predate more recent fires. Other things, like spruce get toasted and ponderosas survive. Has this area ever been logged? To the southern part, yeah, there was a lot of logging activity. There was a guy apparently up—we have a section of the ranch to the south of us here which is along Craig Creek. Craig Creek branches off, there’s another tributary that goes up, it’s called Willow Brook. Up Willow Brook, in between it and Craig Creek, there is an area that was either owned or occupied by a guy whose name was Churchill. In fact, that was his last name. I never met him, but “Churchill” was how he was referred to. Churchill had a little logging operation that he ran up there, and the story was that he would sew himself into his BVDs in October and then occupy and do whatever he had to do and then come out in the spring, you know. There still are remnants of that sawmill up there, which runs right up into the forest. The Lost Creek Wilderness area comes down to what we refer to as Endless Gulch and follows back up the Craig Creek drainage, and there are remnants of logging operations, various ones, that were done in there. A lot of that logging was done to provide for the building of the railroad. Umhum. Railroad ties. Yeah. There was a guy by the name of Cecil Dean who was a surveyor for the railroad but he also had a contract to provide ties. Cecil Dean had provided a lot of wood for the ties for the building of the railroad. Because the railroad
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Side A (Start of Side B unclear)…1890 and it was the tunnel that went underneath—it was on its way to Gunnison. All the way to Gunnison? Yeah. The railroad did not go over Monarch Pass, it went north of Monarch Pass and it went back up—there’s a hell of a tunnel that they built and it’s over near Cottonwood Pass near the Taylor Reservoir, up in there. It came through there, actually, oddly, where West Tincup is. It was quite an engineering feat. There’s a fill, a railroad fill, that is—it’s breathtaking in its engineering. It’s like a hundred feet high, I mean, it’s huge. It came on down, and the railroad got to Gunnison by virtue of doing the Alpine Tunnel and then coming down between Gunnison and Crested Butte. That was about the end of the building. I think the silver crash of ’93 may have spelled the end of the building of the railroad because that was its stated purpose, was to bring the silver ore which was artificially high… Right. When they repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, the price of silver went into the toilet and they just couldn’t survive. That was the case where the government had agreed to buy the silver at a predetermined price regardless of whatever the market was. That’s correct. That’s correct. And in 1893 that was repealed and that took care of a lot of mining operations in Colorado, in fact. Well, it spelled the end of Horace Tabor, certainly. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, it was tough. And, then that made it really tough for guys like David Moffat (unclrear). My father, I think, grew up in the shadow of the silver crash of ’93 and he never—my father died in 1975 and I think that my father sorta thought that Denver would always just be just a sleepy little berg. He never thought that anything was gonna become of Denver, that it would just chunk along and just continue to do it. You know, we owned a piece of property in Denver that my father sold in the ‘20s pretty much for the real estate taxes. He just didn’t see that there was any purpose in holding the 160-acre parcel that was bounded by University Boulevard on its western boundary, Exposition on its northern boundary, Steele Street on its eastern boundary, Ha! …and Alameda on its northern boundary. Nah. It had no value. It really didn’t have much value. It was the old Berger farm. They had owned it since 1874 and my father looked, after fifty years of owning it, said, “Ehh, what the hell” and sold it. This was your father, not your grandfather? My father was in charge of what was known as the Berger Realities and Securities Company which was the family holding company which was formed at the death of my great-grandmother, who was the Executrix for William Berger. Upon her death they took all of her interests and put them into the Berger Realities and Securities. It spun off into the Berger Land Company which owns this property. Right. Gosh. So, you know—you know, they say about real estate, that it’s location, location, location. Well, it’s somewhat inaccurate. It really has more to do with timing, timing, and timing. Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. You mentioned that there was a sawmill just up the road here at one time. I remember as a kid that it was the final days of a sawmill right around the curve of 68 between the 3-mile post and the 4-mile post as it comes close to the Platte River. There was a wide spot right there where there was a guy named Baldwin who operated a sawmill there. It was a pretty good spot, really, because you could get material right there and he could process it and send it on its way. Was he cutting on private land or was it Forest Service land? I suspect that he was probably cutting anyplace that he chose. You know, things were a little looser in those days. This was in the ‘40s? This was probably in the ‘30s and ‘40s, what I recall. Right near that—his end was right about my beginning, so, you know, I didn’t “hang out” with Mr. Baldwin. There were a number of parcels around here which were owned by various people and it was kind of interesting. Up the Craig Creek there was a 80-acre parcel which was developed by a guy named Scott. Mr. Scott took that 80 acres and built in the 1890s, late ‘90s, built a hunting lodge—a series of lodges and a large central one and had a commercial operation. He hired a guy by the name Kirkendaugh (sp) to go and build these things for $1.25 a day. Day—chuckle. In return of which he gave him some 12.12 acres up there. Beautiful part of the world where Thomas Hornsby Farrell (who is the Poet Laureate of Colorado) (unclear word) purportedly caught his first fish at Scott’s. My great-grandmother purchased it in about 1912-1911 because she didn’t wanta have, as I said, anybody upstream. So she purchased it and tore down all the cabins. She didn’t want to have anybody livin’ up there even if they didn’t own it. So, she had one of ‘em deconstructed and had it brought down here and reconstructed. So, we had another cabin on the property that we referred to as the “bunkhouse” but it is really one of the old Scott cabins. It was a two-room affair with a porch on it—kind of a fun little deal. And then, there was another parcel down on the river which was owned by a guy named William Ganger. William Ganger had his 40 little acres and I think he actually did homestead it. He had a little operation there where he boarded horses (mostly because my great-grandmother sort of banished ‘em to Ganger’s) and housed and fed some of the workmen who, in 1902 and 1903 built the Charles Kountz house up north of here just a hundred yards—which he built. My brother captured all of the construction chits and expense receipts and things like that. I don’t know how he came across ‘em but we each added the things up and realized that it had cost him almost (unclear--$15,000?) to build that house up there. But, Ganger fed and housed most of the workers who built that between ‘02 and ’03 for—I think he charged them somethin’ like fifty cents a day to feed ‘em and a dollar a day, I think, to house ‘em. Wow, amazing. What a difference. Do you have any idea what your grandparents paid for this property originally? (Pause). Yeah. Ah, yeah, actually I have the deed. (Chuckle.) Okay. Being a good real estate agent… I’m tryin’ to recall without havin’ to go out here and actually do the research. Just a ballpark… Ballpark is $1500. For 700 and some odd acres.. For 640, roughly. Okay. Pretty good deal. Now, if I go in there and find out that that’s a lie, I’ll call ya and correct it. It seems to be about right. Amazing. And you’ve had subsequent additions to the property over the years. Yeah. The last property acquisition was I think about 1915, just before my grandmother died in 1920. Charles Kountz died in 1910. His property was actually owned by a thing called United Real Estate Company. My great-grandmother became the Executrix for his estate. At that point United Real Estate Company also owned the property down along the river which was the River Club property, which contained three barns, two of which still exist—one of which has been converted into a domicile—the other of which is just storage, I think, as a garage kind of a situation. At that point, in the late teens, my great-uncle, Walter Frederick Bart Berger, was able to finagle my great-grandmother into selling him that 160 acres, which accounts for the reason that Park County Road 68 didn’t continue to follow. It changed direction because Uncle Fred, as he was known—you’ll notice that as you come in from Bailey the road goes and follows along for a while and then it takes a sort of a straight angle across, and it basically was rerouted by Uncle Fred so that he could have more because the road used to go down in front of those barns that follow along topographically. But he rerouted it onto that straight area so that he could take more of that area for his garden and various matters that he wanted to do. He finagled that property out of my great-grandmother’s stuff and ultimately ended up—because he was a mining engineer and speculator and kind of a wastrel. He was on a perpetual dole from my grandfather, George Bart Berger, because the records that I come up with indicate that he sorta got a monthly stipend—my grandfather was constantly writing him checks every month—big checks, like a hundred bucks or something. At any rate, he was on the dole and he was losin’ money and ultimately had to sell that property and that’s where Pete Smyth came in. The property then became owned by Smyth, Smyth then sold it to a guy named Clarence Button, Clarence Button sold it to an association of people who started a thing called the River Cliff Associates. They divided the property up into five developable parcels. My recollection, although it may be inaccurate—the numbers may be inaccurate—is that there are five developable parcels. There are four structures on there—one of the parcels hasn’t been built on. They have property of about four acres around each one of the structures and then the rest of it is owned and divided interest by the particular owners of River Cliff. They all own it in common and it keeps it safe. Right. Exactly. That’s really what this is all about, keeping this area protected. Well, we’re very passionate about it. I am rabid on the subject. Don’t want a Wal-Mart down here, huh? No, thank you. I also don’t want Farmers Union to go ahead and sell and become a golf course. Was that proposal in here? Heh. I’m not suggesting that it be done but there have been people, of course, who have thought about it. You know, keeping this area from being developed is hugely important to me. Rachel Howell, who is one of the original River Club Associates people, actually did a lot of work and got this little valley on the National Register of Historic Places as the Esterbrook Park Historic District, which has been very helpful to us based on the architectural styles and the history and the geography. We sit right up against a big bunch of forest and the Lost Creek Wilderness Area which overlaps our property and we’ll straighten that out some day. It’s kinda fun to have a wilderness area overlapping your property, you know. Yeah, exactly. But, I have asked the family how many generations they want it to be before we develop this. I was met with that question with some incongruity. I asked, “Well, gee whiz, you know, it’s right for development. Someday somebody’s gonna be in a circumstance where they’re gonna say ‘We need the money’ – so, let’s just decide whether it’s going to be one generation or two or whatever it is so we can kinda plan on when we’re gonna cut it up into, you know, two and a half acre, you know, home sites.’’ I think you shoulda had a pacemaker, you know, paddles, in the room because I have some 80 year old cousins who are on the Board of Directors who I thought we were gonna have to revive. And, they said “No, we want to keep it like this in perpetuity.” So, it is my intention to try and go ahead and, you know, to do that. We were talking about conservation easements on the property and trying to do that kind of thing—there’s a parcel to the south and east of us that was just recently sold by the Forest Service by a couple guys and they are putting conservation easements on that. The Echo Valley Ranch is involved in the same kind of thing. They are researching the way that we can do it economically feasible. So it is our passion to keep it undisturbed for as long as we possibly can. Well, the conservation easement, from what I understand, would give you ability to insure you that it would remain undeveloped and it would also give you the cash that could be a trust that could give you a continuing source of income. Well, that source of cash by virtue of fact that you get to donate it and take the value of the donation off of your taxable income over a period of time. We don’t have any particular tax situation because I run this thing on a shoestring and we don’t have any money to hide, so it’s kind of a zero sum kind of an operation. At any rate, we’ll figure that out. You know, as I look across and see Park County 68, I remember my father telling me if you ever see a car going up that road at night, you know it’s because there’s somebody in trouble. It’s now thirty feet wide and magnesium chlorided and stuff like that. It is my fervent hope that Park County always stays poor so that they don’t pave that darned thing. I don’t think you have to worry much, in the short term at least, the way things are going in the County, so… Well, my hopes are gonna, you know, be rewarded. You’re gonna be okay. Tape evidently skipped Well, the only fire that I ever actually ever knew about was one that was across over here on this hill, ah—across over here. That hill actually doesn’t have a name that I recall. We’ve named everything else and I’ll mention this on this tape, but you’ll see that on the left side of that as it overlooks, as it comes down from that large rock outcropping toward the river, you’ll see that there’s a reasonably bald area right there. That fire was, I know, done in about 1918. That’s the only fire that I ever really knew of specifically, and it was really never any kind of an issue. From the adults’ point of view it probably was but for me, it never really was on my radar screen. Okay. I would think that if there was fire up here threatening this property that you would be much aware of that as a child. Sure. Nor were there huge infestations of beetles that I recall, but in the ‘70s there became the mountain pine beetle infestation that was famous up here and we logged this property till hell wouldn’t have it. My caretaker at the time, a guy by the name of Harley Jeppers (sp) (who could collect more worthless vehicles than any other human being (unclear and skip) outside of some places I’ve seen in Sheridan, Colorado)—Harley went out there and cut down, one year he cut down 50 beetle trees. The next year he and his sons cut down 500 beetle trees. The next year we hired up a guy named Ken Binsley (sp) and his partner, Dennis Everspock and we took a oat field that was up off of (unclear) overlooking the Platte and we gave them that place for them to put a sawmill and we contracted with them. Dennis ran the sawmill and Binsley had a group of people who were cutters and they went through and cut the beetle trees. We gave them the trees if they would cut ‘em and take ‘em down. The next year they cut over 10,000 trees off of the property. What years was this? This was about 1976. Oh, okay. And over the next ten years that just continued. That just continued. Just the beetle kill, that was all you were takin’ out? Beetle kill and then ultimately we had spruce budworm and we had fir bark beetle and we had… How about tussock moth? Ah…tussock moth to some extent but mostly those other three. And so, we pulled a lotta trees out….and, put in a lotta roads in the back so you get access…lotta scooter trails but they’ve ecologized by now. But some of the roads are still up there—we use ‘em for access. Access unknown to me as a kid. The only way you could get around the property was by horseback and now I can drive my 1960 Jeep. I used to drive my brother around in the Jeep and it was marvelous for him because he weighed, at times, up to 400 pounds. Oh my gosh! Which was a challenge because I couldn’t get the seatbelt around him, so I had to try to figure out ways that I could drive around and keep him on the uphill side. Absolutely. (Laugh) Ah…we had, my brother and I had marvelous times drivin’ around on those back roads and goin’ places that he hadn’t seen since he was a kid on horseback. We really did have some marvelous times. You know, he was an investment type of guy and had started mutual funds, The Berger 100 and The Berger 101 Fund which became The Berger Associates and The Berger Group (unclear). And, he was really a workaholic so comin’ up here was very therapeutic for him and goin’ up in the Jeep with me was something that was very good for him. He was twenty-five years my senior and I always thought, as a kid, that he was kind of insufferable. You had something of a generation gap there, I guess. Well, yeah. At one point we stopped up at a place up here called Eagle Rock and we kind of overlooked the property, and I looked at him and said, “You know, I used to think you were kind of a jerk.” He looked at me (we’d become quite fond of each other) and he looked at me and he said, “Well you’ve improved somewhat yourself.” (Laugh) But, that was, that was fun stuff. Sure sounds like it. We had a pretty good time. I miss him. I’m sorry that he’s not up here. Now I’m the, now I’m the “patriarch.” Yeah. A little young to be “patriarch” – but, what the heck. Well…take it when you can. The Forest Service has talked about the fact that the forest we have today is almost unnatural because we have today is so much thicker than what we had in the past, and it’s got different varieties—like the spruce, for instance. It’s a different variety that grows thicker, it grows down to the ground and actually causes these fires to be more intense. Do you have any pictures, or do you have photographs of this property back around the turn of the century that shows the condition of the forest? Was it thicker or as thick as it is now, or was it thinner? I would say that it’s thicker. The photographs that I have would probably not show anywhere near as much near-the-ground vegetation such as all these willows along the creek. The spruce trees that surround this house were planted by my brother in the ‘30s, so those are clearly new. But, as far as the rest of the forest is concerned, there is much more spruce than there was. And I have photographs—but, you know, it hasn’t been thinned, it hasn’t been—the C.C.C. went through between our property and the county road on the way toward Wellington Lake. And, they went through in the ‘30s and did a pretty good bunch of thinning. All of that has ceased and so the undergrowth has come up. I think that there’s… You know, I have a painting by Charles Partrich (sp) Adams of this property in 1892 (which I’ll show you) which shows Windy Peak in such a way that you would think it that it was virtually treeless. Interesting. Huh! You know, that could be an artistic thing as opposed to reality—but, if you look at turn of the century photographs around Georgetown, for example, it’s treeless. Well, I know that I’ve been over to Glenn Isle and there are pictures taken of Glenn Isle probably in the early 1900s and there are nowhere near the trees in that photograph as there are today. You know, logging was a big deal. And they used wood for everything. I mean, everything from the floorboards of your car to boxes that stuff came in, it was wood everyplace. Well, fire was a natural occurrence up here and periodically would thin the woods automatically—and would take out the scrub trees and allow the bigger ponderosas to continue to survive and spawn new ponderosas. We didn’t have the technology of fire prevention, we didn’t have the technology of fire extinguishing that you have now. So, you know, we’re kinda creating our own problem. That’s exactly what the Forest Service is concerned about is that now we have an unnatural fuel load up here and when we have a fire, the fire is much more intense and destructive. Well, but—you know, that’s the whole thing about it, so who’s tellin’ you that story but the very guy who touted Smokey the Bear. (Laugh) That’s right. You know—I mean, from the time, you know, that I was aware, Smokey the Bear was around for me to, you know, to be careful of the forest. “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.” Exactly—for fifty years. In fact, Smokey the Bear is still on the sign on highway 285 announcing that the fire conditions this year are “Extreme.” That’s right. Well, that’s a very big case of (unclear word). We do talk about the realities of what we’ve done and we talk about the wisdom of nature to provide fires to do that but, nobody wants to have one. I don’t want to have one around here’ cause, shucks, you know, I only get to live on the planet for, you know, three score and ten and I don’t really wanta have that—although I recognize the legitimacy of it, of the enterprise, I don’t want it on my watch. Somethin’ like, “Not in my back yard, not in my lifetime.” You know, we’re talkin’ timing again. Yeah. Exactly. That’s fine, so long as it’s a hundred years ago or maybe perhaps fifty years from now. (laugh) Yeah! And I’m not goin’ that fifty years—I’m sorry. Okay! Yeah—well … You know, one of the biggest problems we had that I remember as a kid was a porcupine. My father had a hatred of porcupines that resembled only that of our Labrador retriever, Tut (sp). Tut’s hatred of porcupines came from his having gotten quills in his mouth after my brother and I and my sister (garbled account of relationship) and the three of us children with my mother and my father driving an old 1927 Buick (which we still have). We had stripped the top and the back and the body off of it—it was basically just the front with a series of boards that we sat on, and my father had a box of tools in the back. We would bounce….he actually had put a second transmission in this thing so that he had one behind the other, and he could…the rational for that was that he could put both transmissions in reverse and they would cancel each other out and create a low range forward gear so that he could gear the thing and get it to go slow enough so that he could get out, open a fence (okay?) and have it drive itself through and then he could close the gate and get back in. I swear to God! We’re in this 1927 Buick. We would bounce around through the various fields with a 10,000 (which at the time was outstanding--now you can get ‘em 100,000) but a 10,000 candlepower light plugged into the cigarette lighter (remember the cigarette lighter?) Deer stalkers. Yeah. We would also see deer out here. We would scan the trees for porcupines. Upon finding a porcupine, my brother and I (both armed with our 22 caliber rifle) would let go and Tut….. END OF TAPE SIDE B |
