BY TREY GARRISON
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GUSTAV SCHMIEGE
PUBLISHED SUMMER 2009

But Creede is no backcountry village. A tiny little Whoville of sorts, Creede boasts a slew of incredible little restaurants, art galleries, and the Creede Repertory Theatre, which has won acclaim from high-minded New York drama critics. The hunting is so rewarding that people wait years to get a permit to stalk elk, moose, and other trophy critters. The fly-fishing on the Rio Grande and its tributaries attracts anglers from around the world. And just four percent of the land in Mineral County is privately owned. The rest is controlled by the U.S. Forest Service.

Enter Al Biernat, a self-made success who worked his way up from bussing tables at the Palm Restaurant in Los Angeles to running the Palm’s Dallas locale as its GM. When a lease came up on a prime piece of Dallas real estate, he signed on the dotted line and created the dining establishment that now bears his name.

Creede was a dream come true—a place of solace, relaxation, and recreation to share with his family and friends—so he and his wife, Jeannie, bought a 30-acre plot in a delicate Alpine zone at 10,600 feet. The land is regulated by the Mineral County Alpine Zoning Commission, and Biernat has a thick stack of regulations to prove it. Everything from the size of structures to the materials he could use is spelled out. Surrounded on three sides by Forest Service land, he believed his cherished investment would be protected from the over development that has plagued other Colorado towns.

Since 2005, Biernat has put a substantial amount of his hard-earned cash into his cabin and the surrounding property. “It seemed the perfect little secret place,” Biernat says. “I had no idea what could be coming.”

But he should have.

Until the mid-1980s, Creede was a mining town, site of Colorado’s last big silver strike. Since then, however, the only miners have been tourists, picking up bits of quartz and the occasional fleck of pyrite (better known as fool’s gold). Biernat was positive this peaceful oasis was immutable.

He was so sure of it that he believed mining could never come back. That’s why he signed his deed, despite a standard print disclaimer and warning right above the signature line stating that he was not buying the patented mineral rights to his land. And yet, from 2007 through the end of 2008, mining returned—exploratory mining for untapped veins of nickel, silver, lead, and gold.

The prospect sent Biernat and a good number of local landowners into a tailspin of worry and doubt. They weren’t just concerned about the light and noise pollution from drilling operations or the heavy truck traffic on narrow, winding passes. Biernat was in a bind because while he owned the surface rights to his property, someone else owned the patented mineral rights. And the implications are enormous.

Different parties often own the surface and the subsurface rights. These interests may have been created through the reservation of the minerals by the government or may result from a decision by a landowner to sell their mineral interests.

Mining claims are initially unpatented claims, which give the right only for those activities necessary to explore and mine. Much as farmers could obtain title under the Homestead Act, miners can obtain a patent (a deed from the government). The owner of a patented claim can put it to any legal use. Bottom line? If extractable ore were found beneath his property, the subsurface rights owner can force landowners such as Biernat to sell.

Beyond that, full-scale mining would shatter the sanctity of the Continental Divide. Biernat’s 1,000-square-foot, loft-style cabin is something out of a Ralph Lauren catalog. It’s cozy, rustic, gorgeously decorated, and at night you get a better view of the stars than the Hubble telescope.

Biernat had planned to build a larger cabin and turn his existing one into a guest house. He had already added a barn-style garage for his truck, his ATVs, and the snowmobiles that are the only way to and from the cabin in winter. Needless to say, the return of mining put an end to Biernat’s construction plans. But to many longtime locals, another possibility loomed:

Was their dream of mining going to come true?

After the closure of the last active mine in 1985, Creede recreated itself as a tourism hub. But tourism is a fickle trade, which even opponents of mining admit. Ed Vita, an ex-techie who moved to Creede to get away from the rat race, owns two businesses in Creede. In the winters he runs San Juan Snowcat, and he owns the popular Old Miners Inn, where you can enjoy a mean pizza and the requisite adult beverage.

We sat outside on the inn’s upstairs deck, and Vita admitted he tentatively supports the return of mining. “It’s all exploratory. Until I see the numbers and the contracts, I’m not counting on anything. I know there will be some impact on the tourist industry, but it can be hard surviving here in the winter months when it’s just the 400 locals circulating the same dollars,” Vita says.

But businessmen like Avery Auger, president of Creede America Group, love the idea of mining coming back to Creede. Creede America is developing custom homes that start in the $300,000 range. Auger is not concerned about mining. In fact, he expects to draw potential buyers from the mining operations, at least from among those in management and high-tech positions that command six-figure salaries. His development overlooks Creede and is protected by an earthen berm that blocks sight and dampens noise. “This town needs this kind of business to grow,” Auger says. “This is only going to increase property values and bring money this town needs.”

Brian Egolf agrees. Egolf first came to Creede with his grandfather when he was only two years old. As years passed, Egolf thought someday he would relocate to Creede permanently. After finding his way he watched the mines close. He swore one day he would reopen them.

Over the last decade, Egolf gathered patented mineral rights for large swaths of land around Creede. A savvy businessman, he knew that the depressed price of minerals wouldn’t last forever and approached Idaho-based Hecla Mining. Egolf wanted Hecla to come to Creede, test the mines, and, if profitable, oversee production.

“I’m really hoping that we can revitalize Creede, so that people can stay and earn a good living and that their children won’t leave as soon as they graduate high school, because there will be opportunities here,” Egolf says.

Hecla’s exploratory plans called for three years of exploratory mining in a 36-square-mile area, an investment of more than $12 million. But when mineral prices declined, Hecla suspended operations. Although it promises to resume exploration in the near future, many in Creede are doubtful it will return anytime soon.

That’s no relief to Biernat, who is still considering a new house, a new well, and solar power. If commodity prices rebound, mining could come back. “Do I put the money in and risk losing my investment?” Biernat asks. “I don’t know.”

Active mining operations around a recreational retreat could drive down property values long before Hecla might acquire Biernat’s cabin. Although it’s appraised at $550,000 right now, it would be worth much less if mining resumed.

When Biernat first saw his land, everything convinced him his investment would be protected. Set in an Alpine zone, it is surrounded by Forest Service land. Brokers emphasized how mining was dead and that the town had been reinvented as a cultural and recreation hub. But unless an area is declared a wilderness, the U.S. Forest Service allows activities on federal land like mining, timber harvesting, and grazing.

To be fair, the fact that Biernat would not own the patented mineral rights wasn’t exactly in fine print. Biernat is a smart businessman and took a risk. And, he admits, despite all his anxieties, he doesn’t think he’d do anything different.

“I knew I was taking a little bit of a gamble,” Biernat admits. “I should have read things more closely. But I’ll be honest. If I could go back and do it again, I would, no matter what the stress and worry has been. Just the memories I built with my children and my wife make it worth it. I just wish I could be sure our investment would be safe over the long haul.”

While some of the specifics of his case are unique to Colorado law, the issue of patented mineral rights is a federal one. From coast to coast and everywhere in between, the potential for profit from subsurface minerals means that if a landowner hasn’t secured those rights, it could place their investment at risk.

Caveat emptor should be every landbuyer’s watchwords, even if they have competent lawyers and erstwhile brokers on their side. Should you find that dream spot, it just may not be possible to acquire the mineral rights to go with the surface estate. At that point, you have to measure the risk, and decide if it’s worth it.

For Biernat, it most definitely has been. But it’s not something he takes lightly. Every time he talks about the issue, you can see the concern etched on his face and the troublesome pall on his otherwise optimistic visage.

“I love that town, I love the fact that it’s an artists’ community, and I love the people,” he says. “It’s taken me so long to really start to fit into the town, and I’d hate to have to leave it. But I’m blessed. I have that option. What about the guy who doesn’t have that choice?”

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With Sen. Barack Obama talking about raising long-term capital gains tax from the current rate of 15 percent, it should come as no surprise that some sellers might be a bit more motivated to unload property in the near future. “That’s the big problem—uncertainty from government and economy,” Charlie Israel of Outdoor Investment in Birmingham says.

Kerry Mormann is seeing a similar dearth of lower-end buyers in California. Not that he has a lot of lower-end properties. Mormann specializes in ranches, vineyards, and other land in and around Santa Barbara County. In 2007, he sold over $200 million in property, but he doesn’t expect his 2008 numbers to be near that total. Still, he has no shortage of high-end buyers.

“The beginning of the 2008—January and February—we saw very good activity in the upper-end and unique properties,” Mormann says. “It’s all about location. There’s a limited supply, and there’s active demand. But there’s no question there’s been a slowing in last few months. There’s just no sense of urgency like there was.” Adding to the problem is the predominance of bad economic news. “There’s just a lot of uncertainty—the election, world affairs, the economy—too many what-ifs,” he says.

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“Good quality timberland is selling all day long,” says Mike Patten of National Farm & Forestry. Patten has been buying and selling land and timber since the 1970s and knows the territory. According to him, individual buyers ebb and flow according to market conditions, but investors of all stripes—institutional, public, and private—continue to look for deals on timberland.

“There’s strong competition for the tracts ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 acres among the TIMOs (timber investment management organizations), REITs (real estate investment trusts), investors—everyone is all over it. Any large tract gets snapped up real quickly if it’s not cut over. But it has to be realistically priced. There’s going to be some distressed properties or bargains. There are some super buys out there from time to time. But timberland hasn’t been affected by falling prices in other sectors. It’s a great long-term investment no matter what’s happening,” Patten says.

Eroding confidence in other types of real estate is another factor driving the increased wave of investment in timberland. So says Jonathan Burt at LandVest. “There’s an awful lot of money chasing more traditional timberland deals,” Burt says. “They’re shying away from retail and strategies where they sell to Baby Boomers. With all of the perceived risks in real estate, there are still a number of bright spots for land investors to pursue.”

According to Burt, these places include undiscovered and/or emerging markets, places like northern Alabama and eastern Oklahoma. “Right now the real play is timberland. Things that are attractive now are things that can generate cash. Buyers realize that liquidity is something that can come and go. Two years ago they could buy property with the expectation there would be a motivated buyer not too far down the road. Now you have to look at holding things longer, so they want the income opportunity. That’s why timberland is getting sexy again,” Burt says.

Corrections & Amplifications
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Jonathan Burt was a forester and project manager for the Institutional Timberland Group. Mr. Burt is a forester and project manager for LandVest. The Institutional Timberland Group is a division of LandVest. The above article has been corrected.

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After the blaze, Louden told the Trinidad newspaper: “I was covered by insurance, but I also cancelled much of that insurance two weeks ago. All of our company records were stored in there. If the IRS ever asks us about our records, we’ll have nothing to show them.”

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Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) led the effort to allow the Army to circumvent the spending ban. Lamborn is the Colorado representative who attached language to the House version of the 2009 Defense Authorization Act that allows the solicitation of “willing sellers.” But Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO) and Rep. John Salazar (D-CO), who back ranchers and other expansion opponents, say Lamborn’s attachment conflicts with the expansion moratorium.

Last year, the House and Senate sided with the Pinon Canyon opponents, so how that will be worked out remains to be seen. But John Salazar said the continuing moratorium would prevent the Army from acquiring land even if officials go ahead in soliciting landowners. “I am proud to report that this bill continues the funding ban to prevent the Army from expanding Pinon Canyon,” Salazar said in a statement to the press after the House version was passed.

Lon Robertson, a rancher and the leader of the Pinon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition, says he’s furious about Lamborn’s maneuvering. “(Salazar and Musgrave) authored legislation banning all funding for any expansion of the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site; a majority of the U.S. House and Senate approved the bill; and President Bush, the commander in chief, signed it into law. Is Army Assistant Secretary Keith Eastin that unfamiliar with the chain of command that he believes he can go ahead and spend taxpayer dollars anyway? The Army cannot explain why they need this land and why they can’t train on the 25 million acres already owned by the military,” Robertson says.

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Salazar made the following statement condemning eminent domain just weeks after the Democratic National Convention.

“I continue to strongly oppose the use of eminent domain to expand Pinon Canyon in southeastern Colorado,” Salazar said. “The Army has said it would not use that power if the expansion were approved, but I support any measure that would put this promise into law.” He added that the Army must follow due process with all the attendant studies and impact statements, something ranchers say hasn’t been the case thus far.

“Before any acquisition occurs with taxpayer dollars, we must honor the process we put in place last year to get answers from the Army on whether they even need the land or, if they acquired the land, what effect it would have on southeastern Colorado,” Salazar says.

According to the ranchers caught in the middle of all this, Salazar’s opposition is good but not good enough. They say a checkerboard land grab would make the acquisition of other ranchers’ land a certainty because it would devalue adacent parcels as well as those in the immediate vicinity.

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More than a century ago, his type settled the Great Plains. In the decades since, they have gone off to war and then returned home to run family-owned ranches. Now Louden and many other Coloradoans are engaged in another protracted struggle as they oppose the U.S. Army’s planned 420,000-acre land grab in southeast Colorado.

“The people are losing the government,” he says. “The Pentagon is going ahead with their plans despite all the studies they’re supposed to be doing. It affects everyone in this region, and they’re not even following their own rules.”

Louden’s face and hands show the wear and leathering of a lifetime of ranch work. He walks with his head high, and he looks you square in the eye when he talks to you. A man with more years behind than ahead, he still has the fierceness of spirit of men half his age. So this is a man who doesn’t give up once he sets his mind to a task, and yet on an August afternoon, he’s finishing out the scutwork of closing his feed store in Trinidad about an hour away from his 30,000-acre ranch. He couldn’t run the store, look after his herds of Red Angus, and continue his battle against the Army’s eminent domain plans. The fight alone takes 50 hours a week. Something had to give, and the feed store went first.

“When it comes down to it, this is what’s important,” he says, sitting upstairs in the feed store. The bulk of the inventory downstairs has already been cleared. He spits a little Copenhagen into a cup as if to put an underline on it. “It’s driving my wife crazy how much of my time this has taken, but no matter what it costs me I’d fight it again if I had the chance.”

But Louden is not alone. In recent years, the movement opposing the Army’s planned expansion of the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site (PCMS) has grown stronger. It’s a broad coalition of ranchers, archaeologists, paleontologists, tribal leaders, and business owners who oppose the expansion, but the ranchers are far and away the backbone of this domestic insurgency. (The current PCMS is 245,000 acres along and around the Purgatoire River. It was taken or purchased – after eminent domain proceedings – in September 1983 at a cost of about $26 million plus $2 million for relocating some ranchers and their  families.)

While the opposition is strong, political support in Denver and Washington is actually weak. Initially, Colorado’s two U.S. Senators – Republican Wayne Allard and Democrat Ken Salazar – gave lip service to the ranchers. Now both have backed off, offering lukewarm support at best. Only U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colorado) has been a staunch ally.

Louden and the rest of the ranchers are using every avenue they can. They’ve even employed the government’s own environmental and preservation laws to stymie the Defense Department’s plans. And opponents are also looking into what they say are suspicious connections between military contractors, Pentagon brass, Colorado senators, and some powerful interests in the state’s capitol.

Louden has already proven he’s willing to make this, his last fight, one he carries to the end. “We’ve already pledged it – not one more acre,” he says.

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For more than a year The Land Report has been tracking the largest proposed seizure of private property by the federal government in modern history: the Battle for Pinon Canyon. It pits ranchers in southeast Colorado against an opponent that’s not used to losing ground wars: the U.S. Army. 

The stakes are high. The U.S. Army’s Fort Carson, which is based more than 100 miles away in Colorado Springs, wants more than 420,000 acres – that’s more than 600 square miles of land currently in private hands – to expand an existing training ground known as the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site (PCMS). The U.S. Army already has 20 million acres of training grounds, but it says it has to have the land in Pinon Canyon.

Local ranchers, meanwhile, are refusing to give in, and they say they won’t just lose the land the Army wants but their entire way of life. The military’s land grab will disrupt their way of life, disturb neighboring ranches, cut some ranches off entirely, and decimate the economy of nearby ranching communities such as Trinidad.

Over the next several weeks, The Land Report will examine events unfolding in this epic, sometimes tragic struggle that pits some of the most traditional, red-state landowners against one of the few institutions of government they have an undying respect for but which they have vowed to fight to the bitter end.

Make no mistake: what happens in Pinon Canyon is something that affects landowners everywhere. The Land Report will be tracking this story every step of the way.

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BY TREY GARRISON
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2007

Since 1639, Gardiner’s Island and its 3,300 acres have belonged to Lion Gardiner and his descendants. The six-foot scion of this American dynasty bought his domain not from the Crown or some colonizers but from Native Americans. More than 350 years later, his island is valued at $125 million (almost $40,000 per acre). Or at least that’s what it was when it was last formally appraised in 1989. On the island itself, the family manor stands as it has since 1774, nestled among chestnut trees, cherry trees, and willows, overlooking the bay. Behind the manor, a wide commons sprawls out to the edge of a white oak forest, interspersed with orchards and grain fields. Down near the shore, the famous Gardiner’s Island windmill can be found. The sense of legacy is palpable—from the Indian artifacts and the manor house and barns to the carpenter’s shed, the oldest wooden structure still standing in New York, built in 1639.

Not surprisingly, the island has been witness to an enormous sweep of American history; warring Indian tribes, infamous pirates, and British forces during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 all sought refuge there. In 1869, it was a rally point for an American expeditionary force bound for Cuba.

For more than a dozen generations, this Old World estate has remained in the hands of the Gardiner family, beginning with Lion Gardiner in 1639 and continuing to Alexandra Goelet today. Although the island and its properties are not cheap to maintain—property taxes and upkeep reportedly cost nearly $2 million a year—Goelet seems content to continue this tradition.

This indomitable legacy begins with Lion Gardiner. Popular history has it that his ownership was derived from a land grant from King Charles I. This simple, clean, and very formal pedigree is in fact a fiction, one perpetuated by the Gardiners themselves. The reality of how Lion came to own the island is much more interesting.

“Most of what you read about the early days of Gardiner’s Island comes from the Gardiner family themselves, so of course it sounds better and more prestigious to say it was part of a royal grant,” says Richard Barons, executive director of East Hampton Historical Society.

Lion was a decorated military engineer in the English army who served in the Netherlands with great distinction during the war of liberation against Spain. According to Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography, Lion was persuaded by Hugh Peters and other Englishmen to enter the service of a company of lords and gentlemen colonizing an American settlement for the Puritans. In 1635, he arrived in the New World and took command of 300 soldiers and workers, drawing up and executing plans for towns and forts. After Saybrook Fort was completed, the Pequots declared war on their new Connecticut neighbors.

During the two-year war with the Pequot, Lion commanded Saybrook. At the same time, on the eastern half of Long Island, Wyandanch led the Montaukett tribe. According to Barons, Wyandanch watched the war between the English and the Pequot with great interest. Both Lion and Wyandanch were men who could think beyond their own perspectives, Barons says, and this was critical to the relationship that formed between the two. Wyandanch soon recognized the superior firepower of the English. He repudiated his Pequot kin and formed an alliance with the English commander. According to Faren Siminoff’s Crossing the Sound: The Rise of Atlantic American Communities in Seventeenth-Century Eastern Long Island, such a repudiation was fully within the bounds of traditional native culture. Wyandanch made sure to negotiate the terms of the alliance according to Indian standards, and he insisted on a client-patron relationship rather than complete subordination.

In turn, Wyandanch enfolded Lion in traditional Indian forms by offering him land, specifically, the island that now bears his name. The Montauketts called it Manchonake, which loosely translates to “the place where many have died.” The island had been the site of an epidemic. Lion reportedly bought it for a large black dog, some powder and shot, and a few Dutch blankets. Conflicting reports say the purchase price was 10 coats of trading cloth.

“Wyandanch could see that Gardiner had a great deal of empathy for the Native Americans that other [settlers] did not have, and that was critical in this relationship,” Barons says. “Gardiner’s son learned to speak Algonquin. So the first real estate deal on Long Island wasn’t a royal land grant but a purchase between the [English] and the Montaukett.”

In 1639, Lion bought the island for a second time—this time from the Earl of Stirling, who had been granted the property by King Charles I. Later, a manorship was granted that gave Gardiner ownership of the island under English law, Barons says. The holding was originally called the Isle of Wight. Although the Gardiners never declared themselves lords or any such thing, they exercised the privileges of the title. How the island came to be called a manor and then a lordship also had little to do with royal ambitions on Lion Gardiner’s part, Barons says. It had more to do with something each and every landowner can identify with: cutting taxes.

“As the taxes on the property increased, Lion Gardiner finally sought to have the island declared a manor under English law,” Barons says. “You didn’t have to pay as much in taxes on a manor.” Lion, who died in 1663 in East Hampton, was always referred to as the Proprietor of the Isle of Wight as were his descendants until at least the 1790s. He was remembered as a steward of the island, a soldier hero, and a man with great vision.

No descendant ever lived larger than Lion Gardiner, but the centuries that followed have proved eventful. Lion’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth, was born on the island in 1641, the first English child born in New York. Though she died in her teens, she played a key role in colonial witch hunts as the accuser in one of the earliest witch trials, according to Curtiss Gardiner, who wrote a history of the family in 1890. In the 1680s, East Hampton attempted to annex the island into the township. Gardiner heirs convinced the powers that be to affirm the island’s special status, which remained in place until after the American Revolution. The largely symbolic designation “Lordship and Manor of Gardiner’s Island” was bestowed by Governor Dongan in 1686.

In 1699, Captain William Kidd entreated Lion’s grandson, John Gardiner, to allow the privateer to bury a treasure of gold, silver, candlesticks, and gems on the island before he sailed to Boston to answer charges of piracy. For their help, Kidd reportedly gave the Gardiners a piece of gold cloth captured from a Moorish ship off Madagascar, as well as a bag of sugar. Upon his departure, Kidd warned that if the treasure was not there when he returned, he would kill the Gardiners. John Gardiner later cooperated with authorities and turned the treasure over, reportedly keeping a diamond, which he gave his daughter.

During the American Revolution, the Gardiners renounced their loyalty to the Crown and declared their support for the fledgling revolution. Throughout this strife-torn era and then some 40 years later during the War of 1812, the British Navy used the island for supplying and staging. All the while, the manor house, which had been built in 1774, was left untouched.

According to the Encyclopedia of New York State, the family produced a number of important heirs through the years, from local representatives to U.S. senators. Julia Gardiner, born on the island in 1820, became the First Lady of the United States, marrying President John Tyler in 1844.

The great Walt Whitman took note of Gardiner’s Island in the latter part of the 19th century, writing: “Imagination loves to trace (mine does, any how,) the settlement and patriarchal happiness of this fine old English gentleman on his island there all by himself, with his large farm-house, his servants and family, his crops on a great scale, his sheep, horses, and cows. His wife was a Dutch woman—for thus it is written by his own hand in the old family Bible, which the Gardiners yet possess.”

By the 1920s, however, portions of the island were leased for hunting. Debt and taxes mounted, and in 1937, the island was slated to be sold at auction. A Gardiner cousin, Sarah Diodati Gardiner, stepped in at the last minute and bought it, keeping Gardiner’s Island in the family.

Title to the island was hotly disputed between two Gardiner descendants for decades. A regional writer named Mary Cummings summarized as follows: “In one corner was Robert David Lion Gardiner, who invariably referred to himself as ‘the 16th Lord of the Manor.’ An undisputed and indefatigable expert on Gardiner ancestral lore, he could hold forth on his ‘noble’ ancestry for hours at a time and rarely passed up an occasion to do so. In the other corner was … Alexandra Gardiner Creel Goelet … who battled under the green environmentalists’ banner.”

The battle raged in the courts for years. It was finally settled when Robert David Lion Gardiner died in 2004, leaving Goelet as the sole owner of Gardiner’s Island. Survival, it seems, may be the dominant family trait. Robert David Lion Gardiner himself said as much during a rare interview: “We have always married into wealth. We’ve covered all our bets. We were on both sides of the Revolution and both sides of the Civil War. The Gardiner family always came out on top.”

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The Nature Conservancy purchased 161,000 acres of Finch Paper Holdings forestlands in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The $110 million deal, which works out to approximately $683 per acre, was announced on June 18 and includes a 20-year working forest agreement that will ensure the continued harvesting of timber on a large portion of the land and preserve approximately 850 jobs at the Glen Falls mill on the Upper Hudson River.

According to Boston attorney Stephen Small, The Nature Conservancy’s acquisition represents the ongoing rise in acceptance of conservation easements as a tool to ensure both open spaces and continued private use.

“Any deal over 100,000 acres is huge,” says Small, a conservation easement expert who has represented both landowners and conservation groups in benchmark easement projects. “We’re seeing more transactions breaching this size, and I believe it’s a great sign when conservation groups, private interests, and governments are pursuing these kinds of deals. You didn’t see this kind of thing very often just a few years ago.”

The Nature Conservancy says it wants to ensure the land’s biological diversity while maintaining both recreational uses and working forestland uses for the area’s timber-dependent economy. In addition to the working forest agreement, the conservancy will also renew year-to-year recreational leases this fall. Under the deal, The Nature Conservancy will also take responsibility for local taxes. It funded part of the acquisition through loans from the Open Space Conservancy and the John Hancock Life Insurance Co., and it will initiate a major fundraising campaign to offset the purchase price.

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