A conflict brewing in southwestern Colorado between residents and a group calling itself the Free Land Holders Committee escalated Thursday when ranchers and outdoors enthusiasts began tearing down barbed-wire fencing the group had erected around about 1,400 acres of land in the San Juan National Forest.
The Free Land Holders started building the fence on U.S. Forest Service land over the weekend. Some of the group’s members have past ties to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a polygamist sect led by the imprisoned Warren Jeffs.
Patrick Pipkin, who identified himself as a member of the Free Land Holders and who has had legal battles with the FLDS, said the group is entitled to the 1,400 acres and has the documentation to prove it.
“We come in peace and honor,” Pipkin told The Denver Post on Thursday. “People are going to see it and understand. I know the bully tactics of what they are choosing to do. That ain’t who we are.”
Angry residents — some of them carrying sidearms — cut down sections of the fence Thursday afternoon in the national forest outside the town of Mancos, about 30 miles northwest of Durango. They vowed to return Friday to remove more.
Montezuma County Sheriff Steve Nowlin had implored people to stand down to allow the dispute to be negotiated between federal agencies and the Free Land Holders. Sheriff’s deputies observed Thursday as locals rolled up the wire fencing and yanked posts out of the ground.
The fences alarmed ranchers who use the federal land for cattle grazing and those who ride mountain bikes, hike and cross-country ski in area known locally as Chicken Creek. They fear the group will cut off access to public lands.
“They couldn’t have picked a piece of ground that was more beloved by the town than that area,” said Brad Finch, a retired teacher and firefighter who lives outside Mancos and uses the national forest almost daily to hike, bike or ski.
But the sheriff insisted access has not been cut off, even though the fencing crisscrossed U.S. Forest Service property.
“There’s no public access being denied,” Nowlin said. “I’m just trying to head off all these people that have got themselves all wound up with false information.”
Nowlin, representatives of the Forest Service and the Free Land Holders spent hours Wednesday trying to negotiate a settlement. The Free Land Holders agreed to suspend their fence-building to give the federal officials time to review the title claim, Forest Service spokesman Scott Owen said.
Forest Service representatives also met with concerned residents Wednesday night to ask for patience, and the sheriff met again with about 40 community members at a Thursday afternoon protest to discuss the situation.
Forest Service records show the 1,400 acres in question have been owned by the federal government since 1927, Owen said.
“These folks are just like you and me”
The people building the fences are not members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or FLDS, Nowlin said. However, many of them were born into the sect led by Jeffs and escaped once the leader was imprisoned in Texas for rape in his role in the arranged marriage of teenage cousins, the sheriff said.
Nowlin said the newcomers assert they have rights to the Forest Service property under the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave U.S. citizens rights to land in exchange for living and working on it.
“These folks are just like you and me,” Nowlin said. “They’re normal people. They’re not any type of vigilantes or anything like that.”
Jeffs, who called himself a prophet, owned property across the southwest — including about 60 acres outside Mancos — that was put under court guardianship after his conviction, Nowlin said.
That property near Mancos, which includes three houses and nine outbuildings, was sold in 2020 to Blue Mountain Ranch LLC, whose owners are Pipkin, Claude Seth Cooke and Andrew Chatwin. They transferred the property in 2023 to PJ Sunset PLP, a revocable living trust in Baker, Nevada. The 60-acre plot, plus buildings, is worth about $1.5 million, according to Montezuma County assessor records.
Pipkin confirmed the fences were being built by his group. He said he was not baptized into the FLDS church, but he had family members who belonged to it.
Pipkin received a settlement in 2017 from the cities of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, after he, Chatwin and Cooke sued them over a wrongful arrest, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Both towns, which are across from each other along the Utah-Arizona border, were controlled by the FLDS church, and Pipkin and the other men said they were discriminated against because they were not FLDS members.
Pipkin also co-owns former Jeffs property in South Dakota.
“The Forest Service don’t own the land,” Pipkin said of the 1,400 acres. “It’s not in their name. It’s just managed by the Forest Service. I don’t think it’s mine. It’s the Free Land Holders Committee who has the jurisdiction and the authority.”
Pipkin said he wants the United States to send a diplomat to meet with the Free Land Holders because the sheriff and Forest Service cannot answer his questions.
When asked what the Free Land Holders Committee is and who its members are, Pipkin recommended reading the Declaration of Independence. He said there are “thousands of us.”
It is unclear how many people are living on the property Pipkin bought in 2020.
“They are very unpredictable”
The situation is rattling those who live in Mancos, a town of about 1,200 people that sits about 6 miles from Mesa Verde National Park.
Mancos School District Superintendent Todd Cordrey relocated Mancos High School’s annual Chicken Creek Challenge cross-country meet to a new location after the town marshal informed him of events unfolding in the national forest.
The race, which has been held in Chicken Creek since 1998, involves middle- and high-school runners from 10 schools and is a big deal in town, he said. The school district found a new location about 10 miles away because the rhetoric on social media raised concerns about the runners’ safety if they held the race in Chicken Creek on Saturday.
“We have to make sure not to put our kids in a place where there could be violence,” Cordrey said. “It was a no-brainer for us that we had to move for the security of our students and spectators.”
Finch, who said he spoke Thursday morning with another member of Pipkin’s group to ask them to take down the fence, said he is worried about how events will unfold when one group insists public land belongs to them.
“As long as they perceive it as private land, they are very unpredictable and have tremendous latitude to act in ways that are very dangerous to people,” he said.
Finch heard about the fence on Sunday and then rode his mountain bike up a trail to see it for himself. He said the fence was about 4.5 feet tall with four or five barbed wire strands running between posts. He volunteers with the Chicken Creek Nordic Association, which maintains 13 miles of trails for winter cross-country skiing, and he said the fence crosses that trail five times.
The Free Land Holders have left gaps for hikers and bicycles to pass, but Finch said they were unaware of the cross-country skiing group until he spoke to them.
The fence-builders also pulled up metal tags installed by the U.S. Department of the Interior to mark boundaries and replaced them with their own tags that say “Free Land Holder… Exclusive Equity and Sacred Honor.”
Frustrations building over lack of action
Locals are frustrated at what they see as a lack of action by the sheriff or the U.S. Forest Service, Finch said.
“These folks have clearly illegally built this fence on public land and they have negotiated an agreement that allows the fence to stay in place,” he said. “People in the community do not accept that agreement. To them, the fence is a clear violation of public land regulation and probably some sort of criminal law.”
Pipkin, however, said the people pulling up the fence are the ones breaking the law.
“It’s crime being documented of vandalism and theft of property,” he said.
The sheriff said the fence-building is pausing and the Free Land Holders have agreed to let a federal court settle the dispute. But that could take some time, as no lawsuits have yet been filed.
“I don’t want any damage done to public land or private land,” Nowlin said. “Let them work it out in court. That’s OK.”
Freelance photographer Shaun Stanley contributed to this report.
Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.
Originally Published:
