In an immediate turn-around, Silver Creek has allocated 500acres of the property acquired from the bureau for a conservationeasement with the Colorado Division of Wildlife. The easementguarantees 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. "Ourmotivation was primarily to keep somebody else from ever gettinghold of this land," Murphy tells GlobeSt.com. "If somebody else hadbought it, we might not have ended up with 500 acres that willalways be open space and designated as an elk habitat."

The ski resort land has been appraised at nearly three times thevalue of other acreage in the area. As a result, the resort had totrade about three times more land for the exchange."A lot of timesdevelopers and the BLM get criticized for doing trades," Murphysays. "But what I think we have here is a pretty incredible dealfor the public. We end up buying three times as much land andgiving it to the government in exchange for 1,000 acres they hadthat was land-locked. Frankly, I don't see how they could have doneany better."