Silver Creek, Bureau of Land Management Trade-Off Nets Conservation Easement for Resort

WINTER PARK, CO-Silver Creek Holdings Inc. has completed a complicated land swap with the Bureau of Land Management. The holding company owns the Silver Creek Golf and Ski Ranch, situated between Winter Park and the Rocky Mountain National Forest. The deal has Silver Creek purchasing 2,809 acres of private land for $4.5 million to $5 million and trading it for 1,064 acres of bureau land that lies within the resort’s boundaries, two miles south of Granby.

In an immediate turn-around, Silver Creek has allocated 500 acres of the property acquired from the bureau for a conservation easement with the Colorado Division of Wildlife. The easement guarantees the acreage will remain undeveloped.

A good deal of the remaining acres is too steep for building, says Bill Murphy, Silver Creek’s executive vice president. “Our motivation was primarily to keep somebody else from ever getting hold of this land,” Murphy tells GlobeSt.com. “If somebody else had bought it, we might not have ended up with 500 acres that will always be open space and designated as an elk habitat.”