Suburbs Sprawl Where Cowboys Once Roamed

By day Dan and Bev Bumgarner enjoy a stunning vista of the snowcapped San Juan Mountains. At night the sky above their spread is awash with stars, and coyotes howl in the brown adobe hills. Last year, somebody even shot a mountain lion over at a neighbor’s place.

Pretty wild stuff for the suburbs.

The Bumgarners live in Meadow Gate, a subdivision just outside Montrose. When the couple moved in five years ago, their house was a lonely outpost on the southern edge of town.

“There was nothing out here,” Bev says. “It was really kind of scary at first.”

Now the Bumgarners live in a bona fide suburb, with custom homes going up all around them. The house across the street obscures their view of the mountains, but Dan recently added a small second floor that allows them to see over it. Barely audible in the distance, the rhythmic “chunk-chunk” of pneumatic hammers foretells more obstructed views.

This is the suburbanization of the Great American West.

In a mass quest for the good life, people are transforming the West just as profoundly as they did in the days of homesteads and covered wagons. These new Westerners are tired of living in big cities and sprawling suburbs. They’re fed up with smoggy skies, clogged highways and strip malls. Thanks to a booming economy, they have enough money to settle down and enjoy life for a change, in beautiful places far removed from crime and pollution and traffic.

As America glides into the information economy, the shift is affecting the West like nowhere else. What used to be an almost mythical land of miners, loggers and cowboys has become a place where the super-rich go to build their second homes; where prosperous baby boomers go to ski and retire; where businesses go now that the Internet and Federal Express have freed them to settle even in the most remote places.

“It’s all driven by the stock market and all the incredible wealth that people are generating in this country,” says Tom Perlic, executive director of the Western Colorado Congress, a coalition of grass-roots environmental groups.

The newcomers are revitalizing and stabilizing towns once plagued by a boom-and-bust economy. But everybody who arrives brings along a little piece of what they left behind. That means McDonalds. Wendy’s. Taco Bell. Strip malls. Suburbs.

“People come here for the things we all want. And by coming here they destroy the things they came for,” says Montrose real estate appraiser Marv Ballantyne.

Between 1990 and 1999, the population of the Mountain West grew 25.4%, faster than any other part of the country. The five fastest-growing states in the country--Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho and Colorado--are all in the region.

The effects are being felt in big cities like Denver, Phoenix and Las Vegas, where traffic and sprawl have been major headaches for years. But things are really booming in the hinterland.

Archuleta County in southern Colorado grew 70.5% between 1990 and 1998. Teton County, Idaho, grew 59.6%. Montrose County, where the Bumgarners settled, has grown 26%.

White people started settling the Montrose area in 1882, days after the native Ute tribe ceded the Uncompahgre Valley to the U.S. Army. The new settlers transformed a wilderness with rifles, railroads and barbed wire. They lived off the land, taking things of value from it and shipping them to faraway cities.

In those times, Montrose was a dusty cow town of 125 houses served irregularly by a narrow-gauge railroad. Residents could pursue drinking and gambling 24 hours a day in any of 16 saloons.

A Utah Town Reborn

Today, there are more banks in Montrose than bars. The population of the city and the surrounding county has grown to 30,000. There are golf courses and senior centers. Super Wal-Mart. Burger King. There is an airport with regular service to Denver.

There is even a new concrete skateboard park, with a scene right out of a Mountain Dew commercial.

“It’s an interesting transition,” says Steve Jenkins, executive director of the Montrose Economic Development Council.

For a look at what that transition may bring, drive west over the San Juan Mountains into the red rock canyons of Utah. Moab, the gateway to Arches National Park, is a community that has spent the last 20 years turning itself from a company mining town into the tourism capital of southern Utah.

Nearly every job in Moab disappeared the day the Atlas uranium mine closed in 1982. People moved out so fast that one house in four sat empty.

Like everybody else in town, brothers Bill and Robin Groff, a private pilot and mining engineer, needed something to do with their time now that the mine was closed. Even more than that, they needed money. So the brothers and their father put their combined life savings into a bicycle shop.

The Groffs started calling people in the fledgling mountain bike industry, inviting them to Moab. They’d take anybody who showed up for a ride on the Slickrock Trail, a 10.5-mile track just outside town.

“We spent a good three years on basically that endeavor,” Robin Groff says. “Take ‘em for rides, have cold beer waiting at the shop for when they were done.”

The Slickrock Trail got rave reviews from anybody who rode it. Breathtaking desert scenery. Lung-searing climbs, breakneck descents. Twists, bumps and dips on a smooth red sandstone surface.

Word spread. By 1995, more than 100,000 people rode the Slickrock Trail annually. In the summer, Moab filled with Lycra-clad hardbodies looking for high-speed thrills. The town also attracted tourists destined for nearby Arches National Park, where the number of visitors has climbed steadily since 1990.

Gone were the hard-drinking uranium miners and their disgruntled wives, dismayed at living in a tiny desert outpost hours from anywhere. People started moving to Moab because they wanted to be there.

The town’s population isn’t much bigger today than it was back in the uranium boom days--about 5,000. But the character of the place has changed completely.

“Moab has become a gateway community full of motels and fast-food restaurants,” gripes Charlie Peterson, who was active in local politics during the early 1990s.

Peterson spent his brief political career crusading against the unchecked tourism boom, but gave up and left town three years ago when a fast-food restaurant started going up across from his house.

He moved to Montrose.

“I think that there are very interesting differences and yet parallels between the two towns,” Peterson says.

Last fall, the federal government granted National Park status to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument, 15 miles from Montrose. Since the same thing happened at Arches in 1971, the number of annual visitors has climbed to a million.

Montrose could very well end up like Moab, with strip malls and drive-throughs and full-time residents outnumbered three to one by tourists every summer.

Old-timers in Montrose already complain about the congestion.

“People who were born here are shocked,” says Montrose Mayor Bill Patterson. “They actually have to look both ways before they pull out into traffic.”

Meanwhile, the newcomers complain about things that have always been accepted as facts of life. Slow-moving tractors on the highway, the stink of fertilizer and the racket of combines running late into the night as farmers scramble to harvest their grain.

“They only want what they saw in a picture book. They don’t want what it really is,” says Ron Courtney, a lifelong western Colorado resident who has lived in Montrose for 11 years.

These days, Montrose’s reality is up for grabs.

City planners have been trying for years to create a more diverse economic base and attract amenities like shopping and commercial air service.

Finally it’s starting to happen, and the nascent restaurant scene is proof. Kokopelli’s, which opened a few months ago in a former church, serves lobster ravioli and mahi-mahi that would be a credit to any big-city bistro. High-quality java and pastries can be found at the Coffee Trader on Main Street. The new places have done a booming business since day one.

“Every time you get a new little restaurant in town, it’s packed,” says Bev Bumgarner.

Montrose will never be Telluride, the chichi ski town 90 minutes down the road. It doesn’t have the quaint Main Street, world-class ski mountain and picturesque ranches that attract celebrity residents like Ralph Lauren, Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise.

People in Montrose like it that way.

“I can remember when I could have bought Victorian houses in Telluride for $5,000,” says Montrose Mayor Patterson. “They’re a million dollars now, and they’re not any better.”

Westerners call it Aspenization after the trendy Colorado ski resort. A little town is discovered by the rich and famous. Real estate prices skyrocket. Diners become bistros; feed stores are swallowed by gourmet groceries. Only the wealthy can afford to live there anymore.

So another class of western town has appeared on the periphery of these recreation factories to house the resort workers, to educate their children and provide their groceries.

That’s why the pickups roar to life before dawn every morning in Driggs, Idaho, yet another western community swelling with new residents. The convoy inches out of town in a train of headlights that climbs Teton Pass and snakes down Route 22 into Jackson, Wyo.

They are engaging in a ritual that many of them came here to escape--the morning commute.

And it isn’t just people. In recent years, the Chamber of Commerce and the Montrose Economic Development Council have persuaded several businesses, including a high-tech aviation firm and a composite plastics manufacturer, to move to town.

The results can be seen at the Camp Robber, a southwestern restaurant where tables of computer programmers and engineers in khakis and polo shirts gather during the lunch hour.

“You can attract the very best employees if you have the best place to live,” says Steve Jenkins, executive director of the Montrose Economic Development Council.

But how many newcomers can a community absorb before it isn’t such a special place anymore? Is there room for all the retirees, construction workers, entrepreneurs and second-home dwellers?

Strange as it may seem, the place to see the future of the West may be Florida, where the prewar generation retired. Just as Florida’s mangroves, orange groves and cane fields gave way to condominiums and amusement parks, the Old West is being invaded by ski resorts and golf courses. Not only in well-known tourist centers like Aspen and Telluride, but just about everywhere.

“The gaps are going to get filled in in western Colorado,” Peterson says. “We’ll look back 10 years from now and we’ll think, ‘My God, do you remember what this place was like in the year 2000?’ ”