Most of Black Forest has lived under one rule for sixty years: a house for every five acres. The county spread it across the forest in 1965, residents wrote a plan around it in 1974, and for years, by its own account, the county followed the plan. The plan is gone now. The rule is still in the county’s draft code.
In the spring of 1960, a few weeks after it began publishing, the Black Forest News asked its readers a question under the headline “What’s Black Forest’s Destination?” The paper listed the reasons people moved to the forest: good schools, “freedom from urban restrictions,” and the trees. Then it listed the reasons people left or never came. Poor roads were third. Fourth was “Unstable zoning.”
A month later the paper’s editorial page set out the problem that would occupy the community for the next six decades. “Zoning is not popular among many of our property owners,” it said, “but there is a definite need for controlled building in the Forest.” It hoped a civic organization representing every part of the forest might make “control without zoning” possible.
That hope did not survive the decade. What replaced it was a single number, five acres, and a long argument about who gets to decide what it means.
Before the rules
Parts of Black Forest were subdivided before El Paso County had any rules for subdividing land. The first subdivision of any size was apparently the Brentwood Country Club and Cabin Sites, created in 1926: 584 lots on 160 acres, most of them 10,000 square feet, laid out for summer cabins that were mostly never built. The county’s own 1987 account of the forest notes that it was created “before the County adopted subdivision regulations.” Park Forest Estates was laid out with lots of about two and a half acres.
Year-round subdivisions boomed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The county counted at least 3,483 lots legally created by subdivision in the forest between 1958 and 1985, about half of them in the sixteen years before the first preservation plan existed.
An attempt to zone the area in 1962 failed. That spring the county assessor, W. Field Phelps, had filed a single blanket petition to zone large parts of the county, including an A-2 farming zone for Black Forest, Falcon and Peyton. On September 27, 1962, the county commissioners turned it down. A handful of Black Forest residents, backed by a petition signed by more than 240 neighbors, had convinced them, the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph reported, “that a request for zoning should come from the people and not from an elected county official.” “If we want zoning out there, we’ll ask for it,” one resident, Mrs. Henry Armijo, told the board. “Such a proposal should not come from a government official, it must come from the people.” Commissioner Hugh Ross called the assessor’s petition “really out of order,” and the vote to deny it was unanimous. Several Black Forest landowners had spoken in favor, calling zoning “a democratic way to upgrade an area.”
1965: five acres
Three years later zoning came back, this time through the county’s Planning Commission. On July 14, 1965, the commission approved a petition to zone about 198.5 square miles of county land A-4 Agricultural, “including a previously unzoned portion of the Black Forest.” Only one person spoke against it. Clarence Danford, a Swan Road resident, asked for a public meeting on the question. Told that the commission’s meeting was public, he answered, “Most people work this time of day,” and added, “I don’t know what the zoning is for.” Another resident said she was neither for nor against it but asked what “the five-acre stipulation” in the petition meant.
The county commissioners took up the petition on September 2. Nearly 70 residents came, and the Gazette Telegraph ran the story under the headline “Battle Erupts Over Black Forest Zoning Proposals.” The petition would zone 205 square miles, including the unzoned part of the forest, A-4 Agricultural. Robert T. James, a lawyer representing some residents, asked for a year’s delay and brought a petition signed by 383 people. Fifty-five of them, he said, opposed zoning of any kind; the rest opposed the blanket A-4 district, which he said “will not begin to serve the entire area.” A community planning board, formed out of the forest’s Civic Association, was already working on a plan of its own. “Let’s give them a chance to come up with a reasonable plan for zoning in Black Forest,” L. O. Ford told the board.
Some wanted no zoning at all. “I don’t believe in zoning period,” James G. Hawkins said. “We own it and pay taxes on it.” Alvin Brown, who owned Brown’s store, said: “If we’re zoned, we’re hooked.” Others wanted it. Robert McCollom had been hearing for ten years that zoning was coming and wanted it now. “If we don’t beat 383 names,” he said, “then I guess I’ll eat my hat.” The county planning director, Bud Isham, said the purpose of zoning was not to place unbearable conditions on residents but to promote orderly development. “We’re still old fashioned enough to think we’re a government of the people, by the people and for the people,” he said.
A week later the commissioners voted unanimously to approve it. The 205 square miles, the paper reported on September 9, included “a 27-square mile area in Black Forest,” and all the unzoned land in it would now be A-4. The board agreed that zoning would foster orderly growth. “I think it is good, long range thinking,” Commissioner Charles Bickley said. James’s request for a year’s delay, so that residents could finish a plan of their own, got a short answer from the board’s chairman, Keith McBurney: “In another year it won’t be any different than it is now.”
The opponents organized. The following Tuesday about 160 residents met at the community center, the Gazette Telegraph reported, “to plan a battle to repeal” the zoning. Gordon Case, a Black Forest real estate man who chaired the meeting, said the forest could “get down on their knees to the powerful county government” or stand up and fight. He proposed an injunction, a referendum and “the electoral defeat of the three county commissioners.” The group elected a committee, chose Harold Hobbs as chairman and divided the forest into nine sectors, each to raise money for lawyers. Case said he had no connection with the planning group that had been working on a zoning plan for the forest since earlier that year. “It does not represent the feelings of the people,” he said, “and it has been a little bit secretive about its operations.” He then demanded to know why the paper’s reporter was there, and said he wanted nothing printed about the meetings.
The petition was the county’s own: the Gazette Telegraph described the Planning Commission as “attempting to zone the area A-4 Agricultural.” The course of the repeal campaign is not in the records read for this story. Nine months later the zoning was still in place. What the decision produced is clearer. “Most of the planning area was zoned for five acre minimum lot sizes in 1965,” the county wrote in 1987. Part of the forest had the rule already: land west of Holmes Road, the Gazette Telegraph reported in 1966, had been zoned for five acres “since before the building of the Air Force Academy.” A county staff report on a Milam Road parcel dates that first zoning to January 3, 1955, by Board Resolution No. 94669. The district was A-4, an agricultural zone with a five-acre minimum. County staff reports give the formal act as Board Resolution No. 434870 of September 21, 1965, when, as one puts it, “the County initiated zoning of this area from unzoned to A-4.” The same report says the district was renamed RR-3 in 1991 and RR-5, its present name, in 2007. In November 1978 the Black Forest News was still calling it “Black Forest’s ‘blanket’ A-4 zoning, established in 1965.”
The blanket covered ground that had already been cut into smaller pieces. Owners in Brentwood and Park Forest found themselves holding lots the new zoning did not allow, and needing a variance for work as small as an extra room. By 1978, the News reported, a Park Forest landowner “with less than five acres is faced with a dilemma of red tape, approximately 30 days wait and two hearings if he wishes to add on an extra room to his home.” More than 200 residents of Park Forest’s 152 families turned out in a blizzard that December to discuss rezoning the subdivision to allow two-and-a-half-acre lots.
The residents’ planning board delivered its plan the next summer. In June 1966 the Black Forest Master Development Plan went to a straw vote of residents and passed, 134 to 19. The Gazette Telegraph attributed the light turnout to the fact that “the basic issue of zoning or no zoning was settled last year.” The plan kept the five-acre zoning. It asked that every lot under five acres already on record be treated as conforming, and given a building permit if it could be served by water and sanitation, and it recommended commercial zoning along Black Forest Road between Shoup and Burgess roads. “It does not establish zoning as we already had that,” the board’s chairmen said. “It does not work against these home owners who have less than five acres.”
Two weeks later the county Planning Commission approved it as a “recommended guide.” Isham called it a “criteria for future zoning of entire communities.” A history that Judith von Ahlefeldt compiled from the Black Forest News archive in 2019 gives the plan’s first goal as “To be free on control and the individual master of his own land.” Its second was “To live and let live.”
1971: the road grid
What turned a zoning map into a plan was a road.
In 1971, von Ahlefeldt’s history records, the regional transportation plan prepared through the Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments drew a one-mile grid of arterial roads across the forest. The county was plain about the cause when it looked back in 1987: “The decision to initiate the 1974 Plan was primarily a response to plans for a major freeway corridor along the alignment of Vollmer Road.” The freeway was later moved east to Meridian Road, which the county called “a compromise since the original Committee wanted the alignment shifted totally out of the trees.”
The committee was the Committee to Preserve the Black Forest. Fifteen residents formed it on November 16, 1971, after a crowded public meeting in the basement of the Black Forest Community Church at which, by von Ahlefeldt’s account of the Black Forest News report, tempers flared. The paper’s photograph two days later shows its first steering committee: Bruce Hansen, Ken Rickard, Betty Griffin and Pat Stoll.
By the following fall the county had asked for their help in writing a plan. The Black Forest News of October 5, 1972 reported that the county planning department had requested the committee’s help in preparing a plan for the forest, and quoted Stoll, its chairman:
“Rather than having a plan by outsiders forced on us, we agreed to take on the whole job. We Foresters, who have taken on the task, want to make the plan with the assistance of the County Planners. That way a plan made in the Forest by Foresters will eventually be submitted to the County Government for approval. We now have a chance to be revising our own plan to protect the Forest, rather than be always fighting bureaucracy to save the trees.”
The committee’s first questionnaire was printed in that story. Its second question asked whether “the present 5 acres per dwelling unit” was about right, too small or too big. Its fifth asked what shopping residents wanted: convenience shopping only, shopping centers within the forest, or shopping centers at its edges.
1974: the plan
The Black Forest Preservation Plan was adopted in 1974. The county later described it as “the first of what has evolved into a series of County Small Area Comprehensive Plans”. Nine more followed, and the county used such plans until 2021. Von Ahlefeldt, who chaired the Land Use Committee from 1974 to 1985 and wrote the natural-history chapter of the plan’s 1973 inventory, wrote in 1981 that it “was the first citizen-based land use plan of its type in Colorado.”
According to her 2019 history, the plan tested five futures for the study area and chose one. Every alternative kept the timbered core at five acres. The preferred alternative placed urban growth at Woodmoor, Gleneagle and Falcon and separated those nodes with five-acre tracts. It also contained a warning that reads differently now: full urban development of the area, it said on page 30, “will undoubtedly be dependent on the importation of water.”
By the county’s own account, the plan held. In 1987, reviewing thirteen years of decisions, county staff found that of sixteen filings with lots well under five acres, ten predated the plan and the rest sat in areas the plan had designated for higher density or had been approved alongside it. “It would therefore appear that no new residential subdivisions have been approved which are wholly inconsistent with the 1974 plan,” the county wrote. The average lot created by subdivision in the forest was 5.27 acres.
Growth continued inside that frame. The planning area’s population rose from about 3,500 in 1970 to an estimated 6,500 or more by 1985–86, about four percent a year against the county’s 2.8. Permitted wells went from 518 in 1973 to 1,441 in 1985.
The pressure came from the edges. Colorado Springs approved the annexation of Briargate in 1979 and a further annexation in 1982, according to Gazette headlines of the time. In 1981 the committee, by then the Black Forest Land Use Committee of the Black Forest Community Club, held four public meetings and asked residents three questions: what they liked, what they wanted changed, and which land-use issues concerned them. The report, compiled by von Ahlefeldt, found that residents saw “the retention of 5-acre minimum zoning” as the best way to keep the forest sparsely populated. It also recorded their suspicion that “land use plans, however good or however long in existence, have been altered or discarded in favor of economic expediency.”
1987: the update
The county rewrote the plan in 1985–87 with an eleven-member Citizens’ Advisory Committee appointed by the commissioners. On August 18, 1987, the El Paso County Planning Commission adopted the Black Forest Preservation Plan Update by a vote of 9–0.
The update was specific. In the timbered area, it said, “Residential densities within this planning unit should be strictly held to an overall average of one dwelling unit per 5 acres.” Its first list of proposed actions included this: “Zone changes or variances resulting in densities which are inconsistent with the adopted Plan should be disapproved.” It asked that every land-use item in the planning area be sent to the Black Forest Land Use Committee for comment before a hearing. It told county officials, in one of its policies, not to “consider the price paid by an individual developer for land as a relevant factor.”
It also said, in its first chapter, what it was not. “This document is an advisory rather than a regulatory planning tool,” the plan stated. “This distinction, however, should not diminish its importance.”
Those two sentences frame everything that followed. The zoning was law. The plan was advice about how the county should use its discretion when someone asked to change the zoning. For as long as the county’s decision-makers chose to follow the advice, the difference did not matter much.
Discretion, 2005–2018
Von Ahlefeldt put the arrangement plainly in a 2019 report: the plan “has never been anti-development. Rather, it is a Visionary approach to guide cooperative development over time and initially depended on Developer Cooperation and Commissioner Discretion, not just Regulatory minimums.”
Several contested votes since 2005 show how the county used it.
| Date | Matter | Planning Commission | County commissioners |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sept. 1962 | County assessor’s petition for A-2 farm zoning in Black Forest, Falcon and Peyton | — | Denied, unanimous |
| Sept. 1965 | Zoning of 205 square miles of the county, including 27 square miles of Black Forest | “County planners” approved petition (198.5 sq mi), July | Approved unanimously, Sept. 9 (Resolution 434870, Sept. 21) |
| June 1966 | Black Forest Master Development Plan, written by a residents’ planning board (residents’ straw vote, 134–19) | Approved as a “recommended guide” | — |
| Aug. 1987 | Black Forest Preservation Plan Update (Res. MP-87-5) | Adopted 9–0 | Not the adopting body |
| June 1999 | Black Forest Trails Addendum (Res. MP-99-003) | Adopted 8–0 | Not the adopting body |
| 2005 | Thee Occasion event center, Shoup and Black Forest roads | Voted against (March) | Approved three months later |
| Apr. 2007 | Sanctuary in the Pines, about 390 homes on 2,378 acres | Voted for, 5–4 | Approved 3–1 |
| 2008 | Sterling Ranch sketch plan, 5,225 homes on 1,443.7 acres | Voted against initial plan (May) | Approved revised plan 4–0 |
| Jan.–Mar. 2014 | Commercial greenhouse on RR-5 land, special-use permit | Voted against, 6–2 | Approved revised plan 3–2 |
| Mar. 2018 | Retreat at TimberRidge, RR-5 to planned unit development | Voted against, 7–0 | Approved 3–2 |
| May 2021 | Your El Paso County Master Plan (Res. MP-21-001); preservation plan expires | Adopted 8–0 | Not the adopting body |
| Nov. 2022 | Flying Horse North sketch plan, up to 846 homes and a hotel | — | Approved 3–1 |
One break came in 2005, at the forest’s own crossroads. The Planning Commission voted against a wedding and events center at Shoup and Black Forest roads after hours of testimony from residents who argued it did not fit a plan that favored businesses serving the community. The county commissioners approved it three months later. Ed Bracken, who led a Black Forest incorporation committee, told the Gazette the decision showed that small area plans meant nothing to the county.
The incorporation drive was older than that fight. In April 2004, Our Community News reported, the Black Forest Community Club formed a committee to study incorporation after a county road plan showed several major roads extended through the forest. In September 2005 the committee recommended forming a city. It was a solution the forest had flirted with since 1960, when the Black Forest News printed “??Incorporate??” as one of its options: become a town and write its own rules. Earlier efforts had failed; the Gazette reported in 1970 that incorporation had become “a dead issue,” and in January 1986 that it had been “badly defeated.” On April 24, 2007, voters rejected the third effort in the newspaper record, 2,350 to 959 by the Gazette’s count. Opponents, organized as Keep Black Forest Free, argued the area did not need another layer of government or the taxes to pay for it. Von Ahlefeldt counts four attempts since the mid-1960s.
Two days after that vote, the county commissioners approved Sanctuary in the Pines. The developer planned about 390 homes on the former Pineries Ranch, 2,378 acres northeast of Vollmer and Shoup roads, and counted a 1,040-acre conservation easement toward its density. The Land Use Committee had argued the case the previous September in a letter to the Black Forest News, signed by its chair, Amy Phillips: at one home per five acres on the land outside the easement, the right number was 267. The developers, she wrote, “now say that the Preservation Plan is outdated and that 1 lot per 5 acres is not that important to people.” If the community gave ground once, the committee warned, “then we will forever be plagued by requests for other bonuses.”
The Planning Commission had already backed the project 5–4, Our Community News reported, after the county attorney advised that all 2,378 acres, easement included, could be counted toward density. County planners argued the project met the plan, which allowed some two-and-a-half-acre lots when homes were clustered. Commissioner Wayne Williams pointed to the county’s new Land Development Code, adopted the previous fall, which allowed open space to count toward density. “It’s that definition that may trump all of the arguments being made back and forth today,” he said. The vote was 3–1. The easement land, first protected by the ranch’s owners in 1985 and 1995, was transferred to the county parks department in 2010 as Pineries Open Space.
In 2008 the Planning Commission voted against the first sketch plan for Sterling Ranch, a development of more than 5,000 homes north of Woodmen Road and east of Vollmer Road, inside the Black Forest planning area, citing density transitions and the preservation plan. The applicant revised its buffers, county staff found the new version “generally consistent with the Black Forest Preservation Plan,” and the commissioners approved it 4–0. Von Ahlefeldt, testifying against it for the Black Forest Land Use Transportation Committee, told the board: “We’re planning for failure here.”
In 2014 the question went to court. The Planning Commission voted 6–2 against a special-use permit for a commercial greenhouse of more than an acre on five-acre residential land, finding it inconsistent with the preservation plan. That March the commissioners approved a revised version 3–2, after the county attorney advised them that master plans are generally only advisory. The Friends of the Black Forest Preservation Plan and sixteen residents sued, arguing that the code’s requirement that a special use be “consistent with the applicable Master Plan” had made the plan binding. In April 2016 the Colorado Court of Appeals disagreed. Because the plan was advisory, it held, the board “was free to exercise its discretion.”
The county then wrote its position into the code. In June 2016 the commissioners added a section to the Land Development Code declaring the master plan “advisory only” and preserving the board’s “considerable discretion in deciding how to apply the Master Plan in making land use decisions.” The preservation plan had said the same about itself in 1987.
In 2018 the pattern repeated in its starkest form. The Planning Commission voted 7–0 against rezoning 262.92 acres near Vollmer Road from RR-5, the five-acre residential district, to a planned unit development for the Retreat at TimberRidge. Three weeks later the commissioners approved it 3–2. Most of the lots would be less than an acre. A residents’ group, the Friends of the Black Forest Preservation Plan, took the county to court, arguing that the planned unit development did not conform to the county’s master plan, of which the preservation plan was then a part. Von Ahlefeldt, who is quoted in this article, says she was involved in the suit. The suit ended in a confidential settlement in 2019.
2019–2021: the plan expires
In May 2019, according to von Ahlefeldt’s report, the county’s consultant held a single outreach session in Black Forest for the new countywide master plan: 90 minutes on a Monday afternoon, with 45 people attending. That July, von Ahlefeldt repeated the 1981 exercise: seven meetings, 73 participants, the same three questions. The answers had not changed much. Residents again named five-acre lots as what they wanted kept. Among the things they wanted changed, they wrote “BFPP Squashed,” “BoCC does not support adopted plans” and “Zoning easily changed.” Von Ahlefeldt’s summary: “many of these concerns were expressed in 1981 but in 2019 their frequency, scale and intensity has dramatically increased.”
The Land Use Committee, by then chaired by Terry Stokka, wrote a Vision Statement asking that the new plan hold the forest at a five-acre minimum, with two-and-a-half-acre lots only in a transition zone along its southern and southeastern edge. The draft master plan instead suggested a minimum of two and a half acres in the timbered areas. “It’s an advisory plan, it’s not directive,” Stokka told the Gazette of the old preservation plan in April 2021. “But the statement that says in the timbered area lots should be no less than 5 acres per lot, that doesn’t sound very advisory to us.” Craig Dossey, then executive director of the county’s Planning and Community Development Department, answered that the new plan required development to be compatible with what was already there. “We aren’t saying that we’re going to go down to 2 ½-acre lots all across Black Forest,” he said.
On May 26, 2021, the Planning Commission adopted Your El Paso County Master Plan by a vote of 8–0. It declined the request to set a five-acre minimum. Planning Commissioner Tom Bailey noted that the plan was advisory and did not change anyone’s zoning. “Zoning can change, but it takes the people living at the property to do something about it,” he said. “If Black Forest residents want to preserve Black Forest the way it is, the way you do that is to pass your property to your children and make sure they want to live on it, and not sell it to a developer or subdivide it.”
The same resolution retired all ten of the county’s small area plans. The county’s register of expired documents now lists “Black Forest Preservation Plan Update (1987 to 5/26/21).” The Independent examined what that meant countywide in What Made Each Place Distinct. The 1987 plan ran to about a hundred pages. Its successor gives the forest three bullet points, on page 54, under the heading “Large-Lot Residential Priority Development Areas.” Careful planning is needed, it says, to promote the health of the forest “while accommodating new development for future residents.” The county should “maintain existing and expand the Large-Lot Residential placetype in this area” in a pattern that matches the character of the developed community. Commercial nodes should be considered in the northern area. The page names no lot size; elsewhere the plan defines that placetype as lots of two and a half acres or more. Von Ahlefeldt’s summary is shorter still: under the new plan, she wrote in an email in September, “Black Forest is reduced to a Map Label at the intersection of Shoup Rd and Black Forest Road.”
The approvals continued. In November 2022 the commissioners approved a sketch plan for Flying Horse North, southwest of Hodgen and Black Forest roads, that could bring the community to 846 homes and a 225-room hotel, by 3–1. Two commissioners in the majority spoke of respecting private property rights; the one dissenter said the hotel did not conform to the master plan. “What is the purpose of having a master plan if we don’t abide by it?” a resident, Kristi Correa, asked the board. In May 2023 the commissioners voted 4–0 to rezone 301 acres at Sterling Ranch from five-acre lots to RS-5000, a suburban district, for 740 homes.
What remains
The rule outlived the plan. The county is now rewriting its Land Development Code with a consultant, Clarion Associates, and its current consolidated draft of the zoning chapters merges the current RR-5 district and two others into a new district called RR1. Its minimum lot size is five acres. The exception for lots on section-line roads, 4.75 acres, carries over unchanged, and cluster development is allowed. Land zoned for five acres in Black Forest would, under the draft, still be zoned for five acres. The draft does not mention Black Forest by name. First-round written comments on it close at 5 p.m. Oct. 16, as the Independent has reported.
The map is still mostly five acres. Inside the 1987 planning area, about three-fifths of the land is zoned RR-5 today, by the Independent’s measurement of the county’s current zoning layer. About a seventh is zoned for planned unit developments.
What the draft does not carry forward is the document that told the county when not to change the zoning. That was always the plan’s job, and the plan was always advice. In 1987 the county found it had followed that advice. In four of the decisions since 2005 listed above, the county’s appointed planning commissioners said no and its elected commissioners said yes, twice to a revised version. Since 2021 there has been no separate Black Forest plan to consult, only three bullet points in a countywide one.
The committee that wrote the first plan asked, in 1972, whether five acres per house was too small, too big or about right. The residents who turned out to answer versions of that question again, in 1981 and in 2019, gave the same answer: keep the five acres. When the county’s consultants held a “Let’s Talk Zoning” session at the Black Forest fire station on September 3, von Ahlefeldt brought them six documents on the forest’s planning history, beginning in 1966. Her point, she wrote afterward, was that the forest was “not a Master Planning Void.”
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: What Made Each Place Distinct, on the 2021 retirement of the county’s ten small area plans and how neighboring counties kept theirs · El Paso County Is Rewriting the Rules the Buc-ee’s Fight Turned On, on the draft Land Development Code · The Commissioners Will Write Their Own Limits, on the discretion the new code leaves the board and the Oct. 16 comment deadline.
County record: Black Forest Preservation Plan Update (1987), text · county scan and case file, MP87005 · Planning Commission Resolution MP-87-5 · Trails Addendum case file, MP99003 (Resolution MP-99-003) · Pineries Open Space Master Plan (2010) · “Historical Documents (now expired)” · Planning Commission minutes, May 5 and May 26, 2021 · Your El Paso County Master Plan (2021) · county staff reports SF-18-021 (2019) and MS-21-006 (2021), on the 1965 zoning resolution · staff report VA-22-003 (2022), on the 1955 zoning · Friends of the Black Forest Preservation Plan v. Board of County Commissioners, 2016 COA 54 · Land Development Code rewrite and consolidated draft
Photographs: Pikes Peak Library District, Regional History & Genealogy: road, about 1927 · aerial, Aug. 21, 1960 · aerial, Nov. 6, 1971 · general store, 1976 · aerial, May 8, 1987
Map data: El Paso County consolidated zoning layer · El Paso County GIS Open Data Portal · Bureau of Land Management PLSS survey sections · OpenStreetMap contributors
Black Forest News (Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection): “What’s Black Forest’s Destination?”, Mar. 4, 1960 · editorial, Apr. 1, 1960 · “Zone change proposed for Park Forest Estates,” Nov. 30, 1978 · “Over 200 Park Foresters attend zone meeting,” Dec. 7, 1978 · Nov. 18, 1971 and Oct. 5, 1972 clippings, reproduced in von Ahlefeldt’s 2019 history
Gazette Telegraph and Gazette records, Pikes Peak Library District (1962, July 1965 and Sept. 3, 9 and 15, 1965 and June 8 and 23, 1966 read in full from microfilm scans; others index records only): Sept. 28, 1962 · July 15, 1965 · Sept. 3, 1965 · Sept. 9, 1965 · Sept. 15, 1965 · June 8, 1966 · June 23, 1966 · Apr. 7, 1970 · Jan. 10, 1979 · Sept. 15, 1982 · Jan. 15, 1986
Gazette articles: Mar. 6, 2006, Thee Occasion · Apr. 25, 2007, incorporation vote · Apr. 27, 2007, Sanctuary in the Pines · Oct. 2018, TimberRidge preliminary plan · May 2019, TimberRidge settlement · Apr. 19, 2021, master plan draft · May 2021, master plan adopted · Nov. 2022, Flying Horse North · May 2023, Sterling Ranch expansion
Our Community News: May 2004, incorporation committee formed · Oct. 2005, committee recommends incorporation · Apr. 2007, Sanctuary in the Pines at the Planning Commission
New Falcon Herald: “Sterling Ranch moves forward,” Dec. 2008 · “Litigation heats up over TimberRidge subdivision,” Aug. 2018
Community record: Black Forest Community Input for Community Planning, 1981 and 2019 (the 1981 Input Meetings Report and the 2019 supplemental report), compiled by Judith von Ahlefeldt · von Ahlefeldt, “Synoptic History of Black Forest Preservation Plan” (2019) · Black Forest Land Use Committee, Vision Statement 2020 (2019) · Black Forest Land Use Committee letter on Sanctuary in the Pines, Sept. 14, 2006
Methodology
The count of lots, parcels, wells and residents for 1958–1985 comes from Chapter II of the county’s 1987 plan, which drew on Assessor’s records and the census; the plan itself calls its population figures approximate. The Independent read the plan’s text from a privately hosted copy and checked the passages quoted here against the county’s own scan of the adopted document.
The Sept. 28, 1962 and July 15, Sept. 3, Sept. 9 and Sept. 15, 1965 and June 8 and 23, 1966 Gazette Telegraph articles were supplied as microfilm scans by the Pikes Peak Library District and read from the page images. The 1970 and 1986 items are index records: a headline, date and page, and this story describes those events only as far as the index goes. The library’s scan of the second 1966 article is stamped June 26; the index dates it June 23, a Thursday, which fits the article’s reference to a Wednesday meeting, and this story uses that date. The 1960 and 1978 Black Forest News passages were located through machine-read (OCR) text on the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection and each quotation was checked against the page image. The 1971 and 1972 Black Forest News material is from clippings reproduced in von Ahlefeldt’s 2019 history; the October 1972 article was read from the clipping image.
The 1974 plan itself was not available. Its adoption year is from the 1987 update; its alternatives and the water warning are as reproduced in von Ahlefeldt’s 2019 history. The 1987 update refers to the 1974 plan as approved by the county commissioners under the file number CPC-77-1, while von Ahlefeldt’s history says the Planning Commission adopted it in August 1974; the Independent has not resolved the difference. The count of incorporation efforts is from newspaper records of 1970, 1985–86 and 2004–07; the 1970 record is an index headline and does not say whether a vote was held. Von Ahlefeldt’s count of four is attributed to her. The 2007 tally is the Gazette’s, reported the morning after the election. Our Community News gives two dates for the incorporation committee’s founding, April 2004 in its report at the time and May 2003 in a later one; this story uses the first. The date and number of the 1965 zoning resolution are from county staff reports of 2019 and 2021; the resolution itself was not examined. The 1955 date and resolution number for the western forest are from county staff reports of 2021 and 2022 on parcels on Bridle Bit Road and Milam Road; that resolution was not examined either, and how far east it reached is taken from the 1966 newspaper account. The commissioners’ vote was reported on Sept. 9, twelve days before the date those reports give the resolution.
The zoning shares are the Independent’s measurement. The 1987 planning area was rebuilt from the township-and-section description in Planning Commission Resolution MP-87-5 using Bureau of Land Management survey sections, and checked against the plan’s own vicinity map. Where the resolution includes only portions of a section, the map outlines the whole section; the rebuilt area is 141 square miles against the plan’s stated 128. The resolution does not say which portions of those 21 sections it meant, so the exact boundary cannot be redrawn from it. RR-5 covers 60 percent of the rebuilt area and 63 percent of the sections wholly inside it. Whatever parts of the partial sections the plan took in, the RR-5 share of its 128 square miles lies between 59 and 65 percent and the planned-unit share between 13 and 16 percent; the story gives them as about three-fifths and about a seventh. Current zoning is from El Paso County’s consolidated zoning layer, whose records carry dates of Jan. 1, 2025 and Aug. 25, 2026.
Judith von Ahlefeldt’s quotations are from her published reports and from emails to the Independent in September 2026, and she approved their use before publication.
The Independent thanks the staff of the Pikes Peak Library District’s Regional History & Genealogy department, who found and scanned the Gazette Telegraph articles from the library’s microfilm, and whose digital collections supplied the historical photographs.
