The Western War Against Barbed Wire

When Frank Lorenti of Minturn, a rustic little burg down the road from the villageopolis of Vail in the Colorado mountains, put barbed wire up to keep snowmobilers off his property last winter, the town council responded by outlawing the spiked fencing altogether. Police chief Lorenzo Martinez agreed. “Considering the damage it could do, people don’t think barbed wire is appropriate,” he reported. “There are a lot of other types of fences to use.”

No type of fence, however, tells a better story about the changing American West than barbed wire, a tool as key to the region’s settlement as the buffalo rifle, the railroad, the telegraph and the windmill.

Over the past few decades, the barbed-wire market has been shrinking because of falling demand, rising steel prices and the fact that almost 700 acres of Western sod are sectioned off, subdivided, annexed or paved over daily, according to the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust. Strip malls, 35-acre “ranchettes,” town houses, resorts, mini-mansions, water parks, you name it, are fast becoming the face of the West, much more so than rodeos, “Howdy, ma’am” manners and, well, barbed wire.

For Lorenti, who had posted NO TRESPASSING signs before erecting his small blockade, the fact that Minturn no longer buys into a sharp-fences-make-good-neighbors way of thinking left him slack-jawed. “No one ever got hurt,” says the 13-year town resident. Still, figuring he was waging a losing battle, he took down the barbed wire in June, resigned to the return of the snowmobilers.

Several other Colorado communities–including Aspen, Craig and Pueblo–have also banned barbed wire. Even outside of residential areas, environmentalists are leading a charge to replace the fencing. It may be cheap and effective at keeping cattle in, but it can be lethal to wild animals like elk and antelope.

Wildlife and rural life are already on the retreat, though, in places like Minturn, tucked under sharp cliffs at an ear-popping altitude of 7,800 ft. Developers, second-home builders and fast-money types view the old ranching-and-mining community of 1,200 as the next Vail or Jackson Hole with a more down-home bent. Main Street is torn between past and future: tin-roofed bungalows abut spanking new commercial buildings, and Volvos and BMWs with out-of-state plates honk at stray dogs.

“This place is no longer just a bunch of hippies,” says Bryan Jennings, a station manager at KLNX, Minturn’s year-old radio station. “There are ski bums and artists and out-of-towners, and between here and Vail, a heck of a lot of culture and things to do for such a small area. The entire scene is changing fast.”

Indeed, the Ginn Co., a Florida-based developer, wants to build a 5,300-acre resort with a ski hill, golf course and 1,700 units of housing on nearby Battle Mountain. Of course, local opinion is split. Some say such a big-box project will generate jobs and tax revenue. Opponents argue that it will ruin the town’s Grateful Dead–meets–Hooterville character, turning it into something more like Sun Valley or Aspen.

Rebecca Ruck Dunn and her husband moved to Minturn from Vail two years ago. The big draw: they could buy a single-family home for the $500,000 they’d pay for a condo at the Prada end of the valley, where Range Rovers and $3 million villas outnumber cattle and sheep. Growth, Dunn wistfully notes, is inevitable. “But,” she adds, “I hope we can grow gracefully. There are resort towns that were in the position Minturn is in now. It makes sense to learn from their successes as well as their mistakes. I’d like to see an effort to protect our small-town, family-oriented atmosphere.”

Too bad that no amount of barbed wire will keep the tractors and backhoes at bay any longer.