By Jim Hughes
Denver Post Staff Writer - Nov. 24
The ski company accused of gobbling land near Vail has announced a limit to its appetite.
When officials with Vail Resorts this week took their option to own half of the 6,000-acre piece of Eagle County
known as the Gilman property, it may have looked like the latest development in a recent history dense with acquisitions.
After all, the publicly-held company has bought two other Colorado ski areas and a Wyoming lodging company in the
past two years.
But the ski company's newly released plan for the Gilman property, considered one of the most valuable chunks of
unused land remaining in fast-growing Eagle County, seems to be a divergence from that expansionist temperament.
It focuses on open-space conservation and won't include any ski lifts.
"Our goal is to see if we can get all of it or as much of it as possible into a conservation solution,'' said
Porter Wharton III, senior vice president of public affairs for Vail Resorts Inc. Though how that might happen
is unknown, ski-company officials are reaching out to area land trusts, federal and state agencies and anyone else
interested in preserving open space, he said. The ski company has had tangles with environmentalists, most recently
over the Vail ski area's Category III expansion project.
That fight boiled over a little more than a year ago when arsonists set several fires on the ski mountain. A radical
environmentalist group claimed responsibility, but the fires still are under investigation.
Given environmentalists' casting of Vail Resorts as an Eco-Villain No. 1, Wharton said he expected some public
skepticism of his company's plan.
"People might roll their eyes, but a sensitivity to and a respect for the environment is one of the core values
of our company,'' he said. "We basically sell experiences in the natural environment. That's our business.
And so preserving it and being a good caretaker of it is critically important to our company.''
Since January 1992, Vail Resorts has had an option to buy half of the land consolidated by a group of Denver mining
lawyers incorporated as Turkey Creek, LLC. That option would have expired in January had Vail not exercised it.
Wharton refused to divulge how much the purchase option cost Vail Resorts, saying only that the company has "a
significant amount of money invested in the project.''
He said Vail Resorts officials have discussed their plan with Turkey Creek principals but declined to say whether
or not that company was on board with the conservation plan.
Attorney Michael Page of Turkey Creek LLC could not be reached by phone Wednesday afternoon.
In the Colorado environmental community, word of Vail's green vision for the Gilman property was received cautiously
Wednesday, said Ted Zukoski of the Land and Water Fund in Boulder. The nonprofit law firm represented environmentalists
in their failed efforts to stop the Category III project.
"We're going to be watching this very closely to make sure this isn't just a green-washing effort to make
people feel warm and fuzzy about a big development,'' he said. "It's potentially a step in the right direction,
but we're going to have to wait and see how far it goes.
"Our bottom line is that the Gilman tract shouldn't be developed. There can't be a link between Gilman and
the Category III ski area, period.''
Speculation as to what might happen with the Gilman tract exploded over that very possibility last April, when
Vail officials admitted they had surveyed the area for ski development, going so far as sketching in the sites
of potential chairlifts. The local reaction to that possibility also influenced Vail Resorts' decision to emphasize
conservation on the parcel, Wharton said. He said the newly announced Gilman plan represents an attempt by Vail
Resorts to answer to the needs of the community in which it does business.
"Because we're the largest employer and a very large part of this community, we want to have a very good partnership
with the community,'' he said. "This is all part of having a good relationship with the community.''
He cautioned, though, that the open-space plan was still just that: A plan.
"There's no assurance we're going to be able to get this done,'' he said. "I want to emphasize that.
We're very early in the process.''
In Minturn, north of the Gilman tract, Town Manager Alan Lanning said town officials would closely follow the ski
company's progress.
"We're just going to wait and see what happens,'' he said. "We're not going to overreact to anything
and say we don't want any growth. If it works, it works. I just have to at this point trust them at their word
that they're going to do what they say they're going to do.''