Background on Monta Rosa

I remember when I was a young boy Dad drove us to a forested site near Heber, Arizona, where he stood and expressed to his family his dream to build a cabin for his family.  I recall standing at the foot of a small mountain thinking (dreaming) of how nice it would be to have a cabin on the mountain.  I don’t recall that Dad ever visited the site or pursued the project.  I think that a little distraction called a “family” got in the way. Dad had a higher priority project to raise seven boys and a daughter.  Like Dad, when I was a young boy, I always had the dream in my heart to have a cabin on a mountain.
  As a young professional I resurrected the dream, at least I tried to. One Saturday I went to the Wasatch County recorder’s office and obtained several maps. My criteria for a cabin lot was that it needed to be no more than one and one half ½ hours from  our home in Orem and have the  following “A’s” : 1) availability; 2) affordability; and 3) accessibility.   After years of searching I found our property, a 40 acre parcel, an “inholding” in the large Bar Diamond ranch east of Francis, Utah. I located the owner of the parcel and begin the research and negotiations to purchase the property.  The major “barrier to entry” was that the property was not for sale not for sale; furthermore,  I didn’t have the money to buy it if it were for sale!  This attempt at purchasing cabin acreage failed but I learned a lot about the achievement of dreams. It was at this time that I named my mountain cabin dream “Monticello” (“little mountain”, which was President Thomas Jefferson’s farm and retreat in Virginia).  Try as I could, I never acquired Monticello.  The dream was put on hold again for years.

In the maps that I had acquired from Wasatch County I discovered 40 and 10 acre parcels in Snake Creek Canyon. I found the real estate broker and took a ride up Snake Creek Canyon looking for the properties.  I set Matthew above me and Marc below me and we walked through the 40 acres in Section 18, looking for a one acre “bowl” on which we might construct a cabin.  I felt like Lewis and Clark trying to find Sacagawea’s Indians on the Great Divide so that they could cross the Divide and get to the new lands acquired with the Louisiana Purchase.  The brush was thick and the steep mountainside appeared to have no bowls or flat building areas.  All of a sudden Matt yelled out “Eureka”.  Matt had discovered the only one-acre buildable area in the entire 40 acre parcel.  I thought that we had found, with my “Corps of Discovery”, the cabin site on the mountain.



I started negotiations to purchase Monticello from Michael O’Toole.  The family soon assigned Pat O’Toole to work with me on the sale of the property.  Although Michael was ineffectual, Pat was good to work with and we soon grew to like each other very much and enjoyed working with one another.  There were seven O’Toole siblings spread across the U.S. Pat finally got the consent and signatures of all members of the family. And we closed on the purchase of Monticello several months before I closed on the sale of SoftSolutions to WordPerfect/Novell (pretty gutsy, or foolish, to sign an option agreement and negotiate the purchase of Monticello before WordPerfect and Novell purchased SoftSolutions).  I think I had $4,000 in my checking account on the day we closed.  Fortunately, there were contingencies required before a closing would take place several months later.

 It was now time to have surveys completed so that we could determine the feasibility of a building site and road access to the cabin site.  We engaged Francis Smith who prepared maps, flew aerials, and refined topographical maps.  I remember the sad day when Mr. Smith took us to his second floor office in Heber City and disclosed that we shared ownership of the “bowl”, on which one might, given acceptable access, construct a cabin.  There was an old utility (water) road to two springs which “Joe Gordon”, a local track hoe operator, could use to finish an access road but the last few hundreds of yards to the “bowl” site were very steep.   Joe got the road roughed in and it was nice to see how close the end of the access road was to the building site.

But now I had the huge task of trying to trade properties with Wasatch State Park (State of Utah) so that I could build a cabin.  I remember modeling the mountain and making a presentation in St. George to the entire State Parks board of directors and staff.  After pleading my case the chairman stated that they understood why I would want the exchange of property but that the State could not use public lands to benefit private citizens. I was so disappointed and felt that I had squandered $250,000 of our family proceeds from the sale of SoftSolutions to WordPerfect.  I treated my wounds and resigned myself to the fact that I was not going to ever build a cabin on the 40 acre parcel on the west side of Snake Creek Canyon (section 18).   I remember at closing that Pat O’Toole said that the “property” on the west side of Snake Creek Canyon was comprised of a  40  acre and 14 acre parcels.  Then he disclosed that there was a 9 acre parcel on the east side of Snake Creek Canyon which appeared at first look to be too steep to build on and not accessible. Pat said that the 10 (actually 9) acre parcel on the east side of Snake Canyon was “open space” for the K&J subdivision.

 

One day I thought it would be worth an afternoon and a few hundred dollars to have Ted Bien of Schuchart & Associates in Murray walk the property on the east side of the Canyon and produce a boundary survey.  Just as we got out of the car and started towards the parcel Ted asked “Hey Ken, what is the Wasatch State Parks doing with your parcel in section 17?”  I stopped ask said tell me more.” Ted said that it appeared that State Parks was developing or improving our most productive spring in section17. State Parks later admitted that they needed the water for the golf course. Every time I drive along the golf course on my way to Monte Rosa I think of where the water on the large pond comes from. After a few months of negotiations, with both parties very motivated, a major property exchange agreement was executed which permitted the following:

1.       The parties exchanged approximately 3 acres, which included the spring for the golf course, for approximately 3 acres of Duncan’s property, which included the building site for Duncan’s cabin.

2.       Duncans acquired an exclusive easement to construct a paved access road from Snake Creek Road to the building site.

3.       Duncans obtained access to a trail with a locked access (with a secured gate) from Duncan’s building site to the Wasatch State Park snowmobile trail.

In a similar property trespass, years earlier, a Wasatch County  employee on a Cat bladed a snowmobile trail across our property, resulting in our predecessor, and us, acquiring rights to two springs that used to provide culinary water to the west side of the K&J subdivision  (approximately 25 cabins).  Now, after nearly 15 years we finally had Affordability, Accessibility and Availability for a family cabin site.