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Volume 17, Number 38 | November 6-12, 2025
Harvest or desecration?
Looking across a light traffic moment to the proposed 283-acre Harvest Roaring Fork development, which would include 1,500 residential units, 450 accessory dwelling units, 55,000 square feet of commercial space and a 120-room hotel. According to CDOT, two new traffic lights would need to be added on the already congested Highway 82, while exits from Cattle Creek Road and the two new subdivision roads would only permit right turns, with U-turns made at the lights. © Jon Waterman
Harvest Roaring Fork proposes to develop new subdivisions over winter elk habitat JON WATERMAN Sopris Sun Contributor
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
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