Acquired for the Public: Palmer Land Conservancy Now Owns 674 Acres Below Pikes Peak

Palmer Land Conservancy has acquired Pinestone Ranch, 674 acres of forest, meadow and ridgeline at the foot of Pikes Peak that had been on the market at $5.9m as a development site. The land is to become public open space. First the conservancy must find someone to own it and raise half the purchase price, for which it has given itself three years.

WOODLAND PARK — On August 11th Palmer Land Conservancy announced that it had acquired Pinestone Ranch, 674 acres of conifer and aspen forest on the northern flank of Pikes Peak, and that the land would one day be open to the public. Both halves of that sentence are unusual for a land trust. The conservancy normally holds easements over ground that somebody else owns and works. Here it has taken title outright, and it says this is the first acquisition on this scale it has made specifically for future public access in a history that runs back to 1977.

It does not intend to keep the ranch. Palmer Land Conservancy says it will own the property temporarily while it works out, with partners, who should hold and manage it in the long run.

What it acquired had been publicly for sale as something else. Mirr Ranch Group, the Denver brokerage that handled the deal, listed the property at $5,900,000 — a mountain tract on Old Crystola Canyon Road in Teller County, adjoining national forest, ten minutes from Woodland Park and half an hour from Colorado Springs. The listing is now marked sold. Its copy sold the land in both directions at once: a “blank slate” with “numerous developable homesites” and “gentle topography along the ranch’s ridgelines” oriented toward the mountain, suited to strategies running “from low-density development to conservation incentives to long-term capital appreciation” — and, in the next section, “an ideal candidate for a conservation acquisition,” adjacent to Forest Service land and to ranches Palmer Land Conservancy had already protected. The conservation reading won.

Palmer Land Conservancy has not said what it paid. Neither the announcement nor the press release issued under embargo on August 10th carries a figure, and the conservancy describes its obligation only as a commitment to raise half the property’s cost over the next three years. So the acquisition is also, from the day it was announced, a fundraising campaign.

The money that moved quickly

Palmer Land Conservancy casts the purchase as the work of a partnership of four: itself, Great Outdoors Colorado, the H.A. & Mary K. Chapman Foundation and Mirr Ranch Group. GOCO and the Chapman Foundation supplied the up-front funding that let the conservancy move on what it calls a rare opportunity; the brokerage, in the conservancy’s telling, advanced the deal rather than merely closing it. Some of that money was already waiting.

GOCO supplied a grant and a loan, which Palmer Land Conservancy calls “the critical anchor that made acquisition possible.” The Chapman Foundation provided the early funding that, in the conservancy’s words, “brought Palmer to the table.” And earlier this year Lyda Hill Philanthropies gave the conservancy $1m, one pillar of which was seed money for a revolving loan fund built for exactly this situation. The rationale given at the time reads now like a description of Pinestone: “When an exemplary property … suddenly becomes available, the window to protect it is often measured in weeks, not years.”

GOCO is public money of an unusual kind. Colorado voters created it in 1992 by constitutional amendment, with 58% in favor, dedicating a share of state lottery proceeds to parks, trails, wildlife, rivers and open space; it remains the only such arrangement in the country, and has since put $1.7 billion into more than 5,900 projects in all 64 counties. Its independent board makes competitive grants to local governments and land trusts.

“The places that define Colorado do not stay that way by chance,” said Jackie Miller, GOCO’s executive director. “Pinestone Ranch is proof of what is possible when partners come together to protect extraordinary places and create new opportunities for generations of Coloradans to experience the outdoors.”

Woody Beardsley, a vice-president of Mirr Ranch Group, called the acquisition “such a great achievement for Colorado and the greater Woodland Park community.” The firm, he added, is “immensely fortunate to live and work in a state with amazing organizations like Palmer Land Conservancy doing the important work of keeping Colorado special.”

Rebecca Jewett, Palmer Land Conservancy’s president and chief executive, put the scarcity plainly. “There are very few chances left to create public open space at this scale on the Front Range,” she said. “When an opportunity like Pinestone Ranch comes along, you don’t just protect it. You protect everything it can become.”

What the land is

The ranch sits at roughly 8,500 feet on the foothills bench between Colorado Springs and Woodland Park: ponderosa, mixed conifer and aspen on rolling timbered ridges, grassy parks and meadows between them, and the riparian ground along Crystola Creek. It lies inside game management unit 511 and carries elk, mule deer, black bear and turkey. There is one existing residential dwelling and miles of two-track; otherwise nothing has been built on it.

Palmer Land Conservancy’s case for the purchase rests on three claims, all its own. The property, it says, connects to 100,000 acres of public land. It provides habitat for 63 species of conservation interest, including nearly half of Colorado’s highest-priority mammal species and a quarter of its highest-priority birds. And it sits close to the Pikes Peak Conservation Corridor, a 6,000-acre block of protected ranchland and open space framing the mountain’s northern slope between Woodland Park and Divide, of which the conservancy holds easements on more than 4,900 acres. That corridor took more than twenty years to assemble, one willing landowner at a time. Pinestone was assembled in a single transaction.

The recreational argument is about a gap rather than a shortage. Woodland Park is ringed by Pike National Forest and yet, as Palmer Land Conservancy puts it, has “minimal direct access to trails.” A property on the town’s doorstep is worth more to walkers than a larger one an hour away.

Chris Gonzales, founder and executive director of the Teller Trail Team, a Teller County trail-advocacy charity, framed it as a question of character rather than acreage. “As a mountain town, what drew so many of us here to begin with is the open spaces and the wild places,” he said in Palmer Land Conservancy’s announcement, “and so protecting a parcel like this not only is beneficial when you’re on the land, but it protects the defining character of the community.”

Five phases, and a gate that stays shut

Palmer Land Conservancy has published a roadmap with five phases, and only the first is complete. Phase one was securing the land. Phase two, now active, is fundraising and “visioning” — working with the community and other partners to agree on a long-term land manager and to repay the loan covering half the property’s value. Phase three would place a permanent legal protection on the ground and transfer ownership. Phase four is master planning and whatever infrastructure the public decides it needs. Phase five is opening the gate.

Until then the conservancy is blunt about it: Pinestone Ranch is not open to the public, and will not be for several years.

“Pinestone Ranch represents a new era for Palmer,” said William “BJ” Hybl, the conservancy’s board chair. “For the first time in our nearly 50-year history, we have stepped forward to acquire a property of this scale for future public use.”

The approach was not made quietly. “Palmer Land Trust Presentation” appears as the first item on the Woodland Park city council agenda for March 19th, five months before the announcement. No document was attached to the item.

Why it registers east of the divide

Woodland Park sits in Teller County, on the far side of the Rampart Range from the Tri-Lakes. Both parties to this transaction are nonetheless already familiar to readers here.

Palmer Land Conservancy is one of the two land trusts that signed “The True Cost of Buc-ee’s,” the open letter published in July arguing that a 24-hour travel center at Interstate 25 and County Line Road would lean on a shared aquifer, a regional highway and a migration corridor, none of which stop at a property line. As this newspaper reported at the time, the letter asked for a public process rather than a particular outcome, and its authors were careful to say they were not asking the county to override the site’s zoning. Three weeks later the same organization announced this purchase at the other end of the same landscape.

The funder is even more familiar. GOCO’s own account of its history still lists Greenland Ranch among the most iconic investments it has made — the July 2000 deal that permanently safeguarded more than 17,000 acres between Denver and Colorado Springs, and without which, GOCO writes, “these urban areas may have expanded enough to meet and become one continuous mega-city.” This newspaper’s account of that deal put GOCO’s grant at about $9.2m, the largest the program had made to that date. The same lottery-funded institution that helped protect the empty eight miles north of Monument has now helped acquire the timber below Pikes Peak.

For now the gate stays shut. But the ridges above Woodland Park are in conservation hands rather than a developer’s, which was the hard part. What comes next — the fundraising, the long-term owner, the master plan, the first trailhead — is a question of how the public gets in, not whether.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: Where the Easement Ends: Two Land Trusts Join the Buc-ee’s Argument — the July open letter Palmer Land Conservancy co-signed, and the organization’s history and finances · The Last Line of Defense: How Greenland Ranch Keeps Denver and Colorado Springs Apart — the 2000 GOCO-funded deal, for the scale of the program now backing Pinestone

The announcement: Palmer Land Conservancy, “Pinestone Ranch: Protected Today. One Day, Yours to Explore” · Palmer Land Conservancy, embargoed press release, “Opening a New Chapter for Outdoor Recreation in the Pikes Peak Region,” issued August 10th 2026 for release August 11th (contacts: Rose Zeldin, Palmer Land Conservancy; Rosemary Dempsey, Great Outdoors Colorado; Paul Suter, Mirr Ranch Group)

The property: Mirr Ranch Group, Pinestone Ranch listing — acreage, asking price, location, terrain and marketing description · City of Woodland Park, city council agenda, March 19th 2026

The partners: Great Outdoors Colorado, “About GOCO” — origin, lottery funding, totals and the Greenland Ranch entry · The Chapman Foundations — the H.A. and Mary K. Chapman Charitable Trust and its Colorado Springs grant-making · Mirr Ranch Group, “Our Vision” — the brokerage’s conservation practice · Palmer Land Conservancy, “Speed and Scale: How a $1 Million Investment Accelerates Palmer’s Conservation Vision” — the Lyda Hill Philanthropies grant and the revolving loan fund

Palmer Land Conservancy: Who We Are · Pikes Peak Conservation Corridor · “The True Cost of Buc-ee’s”

Other reporting: KOAA, Aidan Hulting, “More than 600 acres of public open space to come to the Woodland Park area” (August 11th 2026) · KRDO, Danielle Blyn, “Over 600 acres set to be public open space in Woodland Park” (August 11th 2026)

Methodology

This article is based on Palmer Land Conservancy’s embargoed press release, which reached this newspaper on August 10th and was published after the 8 a.m. August 11th embargo passed; on the conservancy’s own announcement page and related posts; on Mirr Ranch Group’s listing for the property; on Great Outdoors Colorado’s published description of itself; and on the City of Woodland Park’s council agenda for March 19th. Every source listed above was opened and read.

Two categories of figure should be read differently. Acreage, species counts, connectivity claims and the description of Woodland Park’s trail access come from Palmer Land Conservancy and are attributed to it; this newspaper has not independently verified them. The $5,900,000 figure is the brokerage’s asking price as published on its own listing, which is now marked sold — it is not a confirmed sale price, and none of the parties has disclosed what Palmer Land Conservancy paid. The photographs were supplied for editorial use in the media kit accompanying the release and are credited to Palmer Land Conservancy as that release requires. No one at Palmer Land Conservancy, Great Outdoors Colorado or Mirr Ranch Group was interviewed for this article; all quotations are drawn from the release and the conservancy’s published announcement, and are identified as such.