Dovetail Software and Tim Beres Professional and Personal

About

The Infinite Fairplay (aka ooF) is the name for my getaway/vacation/2nd/project home somewhere near Fairplay, CO. I have toiled for many days and cold nights to bring this project to completion. No, it is not complete, and it is doubtful that victory can ever be declared. But I do wish to share the fun with friends! Better yet, I wish to share this great outdoor, cowboy country, mountain paradise with you!

Jamboree Information

June 18-20, 2004

The Boulder FAC crowd (and selected others) are invited up to Fairplay Friday through Sunday. Please RSVP so we can coordinate meals, etc. There's enough inside sleeping for a dozen or so; there is nice flat ground for tent camping, trailer camping, etc.

There's been some interest expressed in rafting. Suggested that this happens on Friday as the weekend gets crowded. Lots of other activities for Sat/Sun.

Meals: I'll handle dinner on Saturday. We'll coordinate the other meals. We have a regular nice kitchen and will bring up a BBQ grill.

Bugs, Critters and Large Hairy Mammals

• There are a wide variety of bugs: Small flies, bees, moths, no-seeums, ants, etc. Bring bug spray, wear long-sleeved shirts and pants and a hat.
• Critters include ground squirrels, badgers, porcupines and pack rats (haven't seen this one yet, but heard some good stories)
• Large mammals include: Antelope (uh, Sam says pronghorn), bears, mountain lions, elk, cow, deer, horses and other large furry creatures

Weapons to fight these beasts include, but are not limited to: Guns (bring firepower if you can be trusted with same); citronella flames; staying inside and mocking them.

What to Bring

Clothes

1. Long sleeved shirts
2. Bandanas
3. Long sleeved pants
4. Shorts if you're brave
5. Hiking/work boots
6. Hats
7. Long underwear (you can risk not bringing this in August)
8. Sweatshirts and warm clothes

Misc

1. Bug spray and Sunscreen (both are very important)
2. Bed roll/mattress for inside the house (or for tent)
3. Tent, if you'd rather not sleep inside
4. 12 pack minimum of bottled water for drinking and brushing teeth
5. Multiple flashlights (no electricity when generator is off)
6. Canteens and water bottles
7. Daypacks for hiking
8. Carmex for the lips

Food

1. Power snacks
2. Beer, but remember at 10,000' you get twice as liquored up so bring twice as much in order to really feel good
3. Coffee is usually handled by us, but bring a coffee percolator if you've got one
4. Ice chest. Best to freeze a plastic container or two as cube ice tends to melt fairly quickly.

Toys

1. Transportation, e.g. bikes, motorized go-karts, burleys, heavy duty strollers
2. Golf clubs (not the expensive good ones)
3. Archery/riflery supplies -- no shooting of living creatures is permitted on orders of the Big D, however
4. Hiking supplies
5. Fishing supplies; we have access to Twelve Mile creek about 3 miles down the road. This is the headwaters of the Platte and gold medal fishing.

Tools, for those Inclined

1. Work gloves
2. Chainsaw if you have one
3. Toolbelt

What to Do

There are many things to do in the Park:

• Hiking and exploring (there's a BLM mountaintop across the way)
• Biking
• Sitting inside and admiring the view
• Multiple National Forest access points are a short car ride away
• Twelve Mile Creek fishing
• 4-wheeling -- there are multiple old jeep trails nearby

History

Acquiring the Land

In the beginning, Pops Beres was somehow conned into buying worthless scrub land near Albuquerqe, NM. He saw a brochure that promised roads, utilities and wide open beauty. He ended up buying, for $11,000 in 1968 dollars, 5 acres of "worthless" land scam. The scam went like this:

• Land scam company (I believe it is Amrep) buys 3-55,000ac. parcels: One they use to develop, one in reserve and one is sold off platted lot by platted lot to unsuspecting investors. Note when I went to lookup Rio Rancho on the net, I saw a plat that indicated that the land outside of the plat was known as the badlands. Hmmm.
• Make a nice brochure, with water, roads and services all shown. Don't actually provide any of this.
• Sell to investors all over the country using hard sell tactics and the brochure.

Since thousands of different investors across the U.S. bought these puppies, there was no central way to actually get roads or utilities put in. Eventually Amrep was sued and I heard had to build a park within their 55,000ac. tract. Investors in the other tract got screwed.

Fast forward to sometime in the late 1980's: Pops and JoAnn (my mom) decided to deed the land to me. I wasn't a very nice child, I guess. Fast forward again to 1995: Out of the blue, a land speculator calls me up and offers $6,000 for the land. I am stunned and amazed at this generous amount. I wake pops up and drag his butt down to visit the badlands. There is next to 0 development in our parcel, but the adjacent 55,000 ac. tract is filled with uglier than Rock Creek seas of beige-ness. The perimeter road, though, is only a hop and skip from our proud parcel. Our land sits on top of an arroyo (large mound of dirt), with quite commanding views of the neighboring nothingness.

Something happened in the 80's, to activate housing demand in Rio Rancho, NM. Intel has been good to the community, building around 10 large fabs that make something called a Pentium chip. The work force was there because of Albuquerque and environs, an enormous amount of space was to be had cheap across the Rio Grande and growth happened. Someone must want our near-to-the-road arroyo hilltop. It is close to services... I list it immediately with a realtor, for $27,000. Two months later, a buyer at $22,000. The buy some adjacent properties and make happy plans of building a castle of their own.

One problem with this is that the government wants all the money. I was given the land, and who knows what next-to-zero basis I have in the property. So what the big D and me decide is that we will transfer the proceeds into a mountain land investment in Colorado, using what the IRS calls a 1031 land exchange. With this bit of a legal tax dodge, and 45 days to find, then180 days to close on a property, we search:

• Winter Park - too noisy and busy
• Steamboat Springs -- too far and expensive
• South Park -- ahh, just right, because we are wind people. We had spent time camping, hiking and visiting the area before; the recent viewing was predictably windy, but that did not deter us, for South Park is truly a different world than what we become accustomed to. It is high mountain infinity. Where infinity can mean many aspects, seasons and experiences you can get by being in a place. I've learned this.

We end up with our own little 35ac ranch. Wooded with Aspen and some pine and a bunch of grazing land for our large mammal friends. Wide open, but remote, and close to the Friendship Inn. Taxes are low, at least until the assessor rezones us from Ag to Vacant Land 4 months later. With the loss of our Ag classification, we realize we need to build. We want a cabin. We can afford a cabin. What we look likely to end up with is part cabin, homestead, ranchette, house, shelter, beauty, space (for stuff!), adventure, respite, nature, work and often cold-assed-terror-without-oxygen thrill fest.

Well, after the whole assessor battle as well as realizing we didn't want to park it all in the stock market, we made an actual decision to go insane and build a cabin. We bought hordes of magazines with many fine pictures of log homes, decorated with taste by people who have far better judgement than we possess. One teeny problem, though. Building in South Park, at 10,000', year round is not trivial. And not at all like the descriptions of building we read.

Problems with building near Fairplay could be summed up with:

1. Weather

   The Park is a huge valley that sits between two major mountain ranges: The Mosquito range to the West with the Buffalo Peaks abutting the immediate South; and the Pikes Peak front range to the East. Neither is the continental divide, but the Park is big, and weather gets sucked through pretty quickly. So wind is our major enemy, here. Followed by the wind blowing the fairly moderate snow amounts into 8' drifts on our access road. And in December-February it is pretty much arctic cold, especially at night. We ended up losing 5 months to battling snow. Next year, though, I have a better plan!

2. Distance

   Two hours and fifteen minutes from Boulder

3. The Immense Fun of Dealing with the Building Trades
4. Homestead Bootstrap Hell
5. Machinery is a Two Edged Sword

to be continued...
Tony F
Generator fun
Stone Mill and Phil, Scott, David and the draftsman
List of seasons
Foundation and Lyle
Building the deck
Plumber
Elect.
Framing
Snow, wind and certain doom
Roof
 

Links

Fairplay Chamber of Commerce - More links, event dates, history, business info

Amenities: Very basic, these include water (untested as of yet, but not reeeeealllly black); sunlight (unless it's windy); electricity (whoo hoo); possibly a toilet (Camper provided, with the house to be hooked up "soon"); shelter (the house); comfie shelter (the camper); heat (not really).

Friendship Inn: Bar. With pool tables and TV's. Good place to bum smokes, watch sports games, get into tussles and talk to unconvicted (as yet) mountain folk.

Assessor: We fight up to Colorado Court of Appeals. They somehow find against us and the 2 other (lawyers both) parties. They are algae drinking pond scum. The assessor and appeals court, not our fellow combatant lawyers, who I thought argued a pretty good case that the assessor was not a qualified botanist and really couldn't say when a soil conservation district could be terminated for the purposes of simply levying additional taxes.

Ranch: Black Mountain Ranch was for the last 100 years a giant 3500ac. cattle operation. Historically it is migratory and grazing land for elk, deer, antelope and more. The area was subdivided in the 70's because the pasture had been overgrazed and didn't really support cattle as well as nearby sub-irrigated meadow land.

Soil Conservation District and Migratory Use: Subsequent to subdivision the owners applied for and we're given Soil Conservation District status, which confers tax benefits in exchange for having a conservation plan written and implemented. Most of the 3500ac. were thus fenced so that the land could regenerate. Only 8 years after the initiation of the district, the assessor has made the decision, backed up by the courts, that the district must end. We will now see lots of different uses of the land, without much comprehensive management performed. I'd like to see if our nearby owners would consider implementing a different conservation easement, so that traditional migratory uses continue. The problem with the 35ac. Colorado by right laws is that to grant such an easement we would have to revert to our ag classification (which we don't have anymore). So we're looking at the usual disorganized approach to growth, unless we can come up with something creative.

Water:  To build a castle, you need water. Both Intel, the towns and our buyer and us through well permits do have to worry about adequate water supplies. In NM, they have some serious issues, as does South Park. Aurora has bought Park County water rights, hoping to pump water underground and store it in the vast South Park aquifers. In low water years they intend to suck the water back out of the aquifers. This is called conjunctive use and may have all kinds of consequences. This might be litigated for another 20 years before implementation could occur.