D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
December
2008
Scout's Honor
A bitter legal battle over a proposed Boy Scout camp near Kingston pits those who want to protect the area's quiet way of life against a developer with big dreams.
By David A. Fryxell
Photos by Lisa D. Fryxell
Pete Fust's feet rustle through the litter of yellow leaves that mark the transition between fall and early winter in the high, rough country of the Black Range. The raspy rattle of his walking forms a sort of chorus with the liquid burble of Percha Creek as it crosses the rutted road leading back to the tiny town of Kingston.
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Pete Fust stands by the dirt road
over which he was embroiled in a four-year lawsuit. |
"One day I was working out here and these two old guys pulled up," Fust is recalling. "When they got out, they walked like this." He mimics the arthritic shamble of an old man. "They'd driven all the way from Silver City to see the new Boy Scout camp."
Both men had been Boy Scouts back in the 1950s, they told Fust, when their troop had folded because of hard times in Silver City's mining industry. One man said he'd been the troop treasurer, and that he'd invested the Scouts' remaining $137 in a savings account. Just the other day, he'd given that money — now accrued to something like $1,700 — to the local Boy Scouts, to go toward the new scout camp in Kingston.
Fust tried to break the news as gently as possible that there was no new Boy Scout camp — not now, maybe not ever. In fact, the chief proponent of the camp, El Paso mortgage broker Bill Hagan, was even then suing Fust and his wife, Catherine Wanek, over access to the site along the road running through their land. Fust spared the aging ex-Boy Scouts entirely the fact that the flood-prone site for "Camp Percha" is littered with abandoned mines, not to mention the rumors that Hagan's real intent was to use the $3 million development as a hunting lodge most of the year.
That wasn't exactly, Fust guessed, what the long-ago Boy Scout had saved his troop's $137 for all these years.
The path that led from Bill Hagan showing up in Kingston to a lengthy and expensive lawsuit, from the notion of a new camp on 110 acres along Percha Creek to a bitter split among the Yucca Council that covers Boy Scouts from El Paso to Silver City, is as twisted and full of surprises as the disputed dirt road under Fust's feet.
"It's dominated my life for the last four years in a way you just don't want your life dominated," says Fust, a big, blunt-spoken man wearing a gray "New Hampshire Football" sweatshirt, dust-smeared jeans and a green ballcap. Trained as a horticulturalist, Fust and his wife now own and operate the Black Range Lodge, back up the road in Kingston.
A brown-and-white US Forest Service sign at the point where that 10-foot-wide, rutted dirt track enters the forest canopy bluntly warns, "Primitive Road. Not Maintained. Hazardous to Public Use." Fust shakes his head and tips back the bill of his cap, pondering the convoluted legal battle over the status of this road that finally petered out in June at the New Mexico Court of Appeals.
He says, "I couldn't believe how complicated it was."
At first, however, Fust and Wanek welcomed the Boy Scouts to Kingston. "We were excited and wanted to help them find a good site," says Catherine Wanek, cupping her hands around a coffee mug in the kitchen of the Black Range Lodge. "We thought maybe we could show them natural-building techniques." (A pioneer in strawbale construction, Wanek serves as co-director of Builders Without Borders, an international organization with whom she recently built a "Strawbale Eco-House" at the US Botanic Garden in Washington, DC.)
They had their doubts, though, about the site ultimately chosen for the camp: In 2003, a private company called Percha Creek Mining LLC purchased seven adjacent mining claims a mile and a half up the dirt road from the edge of Kingston, a total of 110 acres, for about $230,000. The key player behind Percha Creek Mining was Bill Hagan, executive vice president of Rocky Mountain Mortgage in El Paso and an active volunteer with the Yucca Council of the Boy Scouts; Hagan is now president of the council. Title to all but nine acres of that land was transferred, first from the company to private individuals and then almost immediately to the Yucca Council, in March 2005. Hagan and friends have since donated about 240 additional acres in the Kingston area.
Fust and Wanek already owned nine acres between the edge of town and the proposed camp site, through which the dirt road runs. They subsequently bought another 19 acres, between their property and that purchased by Hagan and company, when that owner didn't want to get involved in the lawsuit. The couple never had any problem with letting occasional campers use the road, which most people assumed was on forest-service land; maybe 10 cars a week would rattle along the track. But commercial development, that was another matter.
"Early on, they asked to buy an easement through our property," Wanek recalls. "Two different Realtors called us, but they never gave us a price. Eventually, they asked us to donate it — 'for the boys.'"
In the meantime, though, representatives of Percha Creek Mining gave a presentation to Kingston's "Spit and Whittle Club" in January 2004. Both Fust and Wanek were down with the flu that night, but they heard plenty about it from others in the closely knit community. A big map of the ambitious plan was unfurled to display the $3 million development, which included a three-story lodge. (The plan was subsequently scaled back.)
"'We're your new neighbors,'" Fust says in a heavy Texas accent, mimicking how Hagan reportedly presented the plan to the Spit and Whittle Club. "'And the first thing we're gonna do is put a locked gate on the road and build a big fence around the whole compound.'" His voice drips with disdain at that last word, "compound."
When it was pointed out that the road in question — leading to national-forest land — had been open for 120 years, the message that came across was, as Fust puts it in an exaggerated drawl, "We're from Texas. If we say we're gonna do something, we damn well do it."
Two months after the Spit and Whittle Club meeting, Fust and Wanek organized a second get-together, at their lodge, which included about 20 locals and two representatives of the forest service. Hagan attended along with the then-executive director of the Yucca Council, Paul Bonski. When quizzed about putting a locked gate on the road, Fust says, their response was, "What locked gate?"
Fust snorts. "Their attitude was, 'You're dumber than we are.'"
A June 2003 plan drawn up by the Boy Scouts of America Engineering Services clearly shows a labeled "Gateway" — on the 19 acres that now belongs to Fust and Wanek. There's no indication whether the "Gateway" could or would be locked.
Today, Hagan dismisses the question of a locked gate as an example of opponents trying to have it both ways. "Either it's a public road or it's not," he says. "If it's not, then as a private property owner I have the right to lock it because it comes across my land."
Concerned about the proposed camp's safety, the threat of fire, effects on the Percha Creek watershed and potential traffic — "a string of SUVs speeding through town," as Fust puts it — a "Percha Watershed Alliance" formed to convince the Yucca Council to pick a different site. The group wrote the council in September 2004, citing all these concerns and pointing out, "The town of Kingston has fewer than 50 residents (often fewer than 30) and no public facilities. Visitors from nearby, and those from abroad, appreciate this area for its fresh air, quiet streets and wildlife. . . . Proposed camping periods will add 300 people, with the numbers swelling even higher on weekends, as parents pick up and drop off a combined total of 400 campers."
Pulling out a copy of this letter, Wanek adds, "This is where we live. There would have been a real impact on the peace and quiet here in town."
The watershed group's letter concluded with an offer: "We propose to work with you, the community and any other interested parties to secure a site that will meet your needs and, at the same time, maintain the health of the Percha watershed and access to public lands."
It soon became clear to Fust and Wanek, however, that if the $3 million development was going to be detoured, it would be up to them. She says, "The easement issue was the only thing stopping them. We had to carry the torch for Kingston, because we were the only ones with the potential legal status to put the brakes on."
"We decided to spend what it took to stop it," Fust says.
His wife chimes in, "We had no clue, though, that it would cost us this much money."
"The crucial moment," Fust adds with a touch of drama, "came after I'd been doing a forest-thinning project. I was up there for days, and ran into Hagan a dozen times. 'Pete,' he asked me, 'is there any way we can get together on this easement thing?' Four months after that, this Blazer pulls into our yard — this is two years after they bought the property, and it's the first time Hagan sat down to talk with me."