The long-dormant Village at Wolf Creek development staggered back to life recently, with a favorable court ruling obtained by the Forest Service to approve a road access permit across the Rio Grande National Forest.
As a quick refresher, the Village at Wolf Creek is an audacious development proposed atop Wolf Creek Pass to house up to 8,000 people. It envisions 1,700 housing units and 220,000 square feet of commercial development on a 288-acre parcel of private land adjacent to the Wolf Creek Ski Area. The development is distinct and unrelated to the ski area.
Fantastical might be a more apt description to essentially construct a city entirely from scratch at an elevation of 10,500-feet in a location that annually receives over 400 inches of snow, occasionally twice that much. Almost a third of the property consists of wetlands and fens. The Village at Wolf Creek would be the highest elevation city in North America in the heart of one of the snowiest locations in the Rocky Mountains.
What does it take to build a city from scratch? There's the need for treating raw water supplies in a water treatment plant for 8,000 customers, and a similarly sized sewage treatment plant to handle the outflow. Energy infrastructure is lacking, hence the project has proposed an on-site liquified natural gas fired power plant. The developers would need a new interchange on Highway 160 at a location downhill from the existing ski area intersection, but just uphill from the snowshed.
Every bit of these expenses would be borne by the developer, and quickly run into the tens of millions of dollars before a single lot was ever sold.
Just consider the highway intersection. The immediate need would be to significantly widen the roadway on a steep hillside near the snowshed to accommodate new turn lanes. If the development were to proceed to full build-out, CDOT previously suggested the need for a grade-separate interchange, like a flyover bridge. Think of the Bridge to Nowhere plopped down on top of Wolf Creek Pass, 100% at the developer's expense.
The project's proponent, Leavell-McCombs Joint Venture, obtained the land in an exchange with the Forest Service back in 1986, when it was pitched as a lodge associated with the ski area, perhaps like what one sees on Monarch Pass near that ski area. But once the public land was conveyed into private ownership, the development scheme ballooned enormously to contemplate thousands of housing units.
The Village at Wolf Creek's major stumbling block has been the need to obtain access across an intervening section of national forest to accommodate the ambitious development scheme. While an existing Forest Service gravel road affords summer access similar to that enjoyed by cabin owners all across the Rockies, the developers wanted more. Over the last 20 years, there has been a contentious legal back and forth where conservation and community groups fought the Forest Service and the developers over the legality and adequacy of environmental reviews.
Federal district courts in 2017 and 2022 threw out the Forest Service's environmental reviews and approvals of various schemes to grant the developers their desired access. Rather than accept that conclusion, the Forest Service appealed the 2022 court decision to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, and gained a decision that overturned the previous denials, and allows the Forest Service to issue a road access permit to advance the project's potential development.
Project opponents are requesting a rehearing by the court, but also gearing up to engage in the innumerable additional permitting hurdles yet to come.
Mark Pearson is Executive Director at San Juan Citizens Alliance. Reach him at mark@sanjuancitizens.org.
