Settlers make way for Pingree Park's mountain campus

By Dan MacArthur
North Forty News

Editor's note: In the August issue, Dan MacArthur wrote about the colorful George Washington Pingree, the park's namesake. This issue continues with the stories of upper Poudre Canyon homesteaders. Read about Pingree in the August 2010 story.

Times were only slightly less trying for Pingree Park settlers who followed the pioneer trappers and tie hacks pursuing quick riches.

The homesteaders endured disease, isolation, endless winters, sparse crops and the ever-present threat of forest fires.

Hugh Ramsey, a self-taught engineer and fluent speaker of Arapaho, came across the valley around 1894 while on a hunting trip, according to Bill Bertschy. Retired after 35 years as director of the Pingree Park campus and conference center, Bertschy has extensively researched the history of the area and its inhabitants.

Ramsey found a valley still scorched from a massive 1890 forest fire that had burned for months. Bertschy said it consumed the forest between the Big Thompson and Poudre rivers down to the foothills, smothering Fort Collins in a smoky blanket for weeks.

Charles Ramsey joined his brother, and each of them staked out a 160-acre homestead in the upper valley. The brothers moved to the valley in 1897, where they subsisted on ranching and running a sawmill.

In 1912, Hugh hired Frank Koenig to help build a road over Pennock Pass. A friend of one of Ramsey's sons, Koenig had just returned from prospecting in Alaska, according to a Colorado State University historical account. Koenig stayed with the family that winter and married their daughter Hazel in 1913.

About the same time, Charles sold his homestead to his brother and returned with his family to the plains to resume his life as a trapper and nomad. Hugh, in turn, moved to the upper ranch and sold Koenig most of his homestead, save for the 40 acres he gave to Hazel as a wedding present.

Death a companion

It was a lean living for the settlers, balanced by a splendid isolation that, however, made them vulnerable to tragedies. Five stone lambs marking children's graves in a small cemetery plot testify to family heartbreak.

Three of the eight Ramsey children apparently died during a diphtheria outbreak in 1907. Using the purifying power of fire, Hugh torched the original homestead cabin to purge any remnants of the disease. The cabin was rebuilt, burned down again by accident and rebuilt once more with several later additions.

The family temporarily moved to Trilby between Fort Collins and Loveland, according to Bertschy. With the death of her mother, Druscilla, the 12-year-old Hazel became the effective matriarch of the family, assuming household duties when she, her father and five surviving brothers returned to the homestead.

Later, snowbound and unable to reach a doctor, whooping cough apparently claimed two of Frank and Hazel's seven children.

Self-sufficiency was mandatory for the families eking out a spare existence. The growing season was short and the grazing lands sparse.

"They had a tough, tough life trying to make ends meet up there," said Bertschy.

Frank landed a new source of income when he was hired as one of the original three rangers of Rocky Mountain National Park, created in 1915.

In addition to the remuneration, he was able to do George Pingree one better. The valley had unintentionally taken on the name Pingree for the pioneer guide and trapper who lived there only briefly while supplying railroad ties. But Frank took the opportunity to name several features of the park after his family, which had made a more lasting commitment – Hazeline Lake after his wife, Emmaline Lake after his mother and Ramsey Peak after his father-in-law.

University stakes claim

About that time, the wheels were put into motion for the gradual transition of Pingree Park into a mountain campus and conference center.

In 1910, Bertschy said, forestry department head B.O. Longyear, at what was then known as the Agricultural College of Colorado, spearheaded a successful effort to acquire lands for research. Congress approved special legislation authorizing the college to buy 1,600 acres of federal lands at a cost of a dollar an acre.

Poudre Canyon chronicler Stanley Case wrote in his book, "The Poudre: A Photo History," that forest supervisor N.M. Wheeler suggested acquiring some of the property at the site where almost 50 years earlier "a rugged individual named George Pingree had headed a tie-cutting gang for the Union Pacific Railroad."

In 1914, Wheeler, Gov. Elias Ammons, and college president and Koenig's cousin Charles Lory, departed on the arduous journey to Pingree Park.

They traveled by Stanley Steamer up to the Buckhorn ranger station and then by horseback over Pennock Pass into the Pingree Valley. Bertschy said the travelers stayed in the Koenig house, vacant because family was running cattle in the high country, which soon would become the national park.

According to Case, the group decided to build a lodge to serve as a summer forestry camp. It became the core of the campus. Hazel cooked for workers building the lodge, completed that fall. A civil engineering class was held there in 1915, and its students surveyed a direct road from Poudre Canyon to Pingree.

A single student was enrolled in Longyear's first forestry class in 1916. Enrollment doubled the following year.

"Immediately it started growing," Bertschy said, although classes were interrupted during the two world wars.

The Colorado Historical Society, in a series of interpretive signs, recognized Pingree Park's role as "an outdoor classroom anchoring one of the nation's leading natural resources programs."

"Colorado State produced so many U.S. Forest Service and National Park employees that it was nicknamed 'the Ranger Factory' – a training ground for latter-day George Pingrees who build forests up rather than chopping them down," one Cameron Pass placard proclaims.

As the campus grew, however, so did the conflicts with its neighbors. A shared spring dried up, forcing the university to secure another water source. The Koenigs were annoyed by all the activity. They also resented the university's seemingly endless financial resources while they, by the 1940s, were barely subsisting by renting summer cabins to tourists and fishermen, according to an account by CSU.

The university purchased most of the remaining Koenig property in 1974, and Bertschy was hired as the first full-time director of the Pingree Park campus. Still angry about the subdivision of her father's upper ranch, Hazel conditioned the sale on the firm understanding that the Koenig Ranch would never be subdivided.

She died in Loveland in 1975, followed by Frank in 1980.

Calamities a challenge

Through a series of exchanges in 1985, Bertschy said the campus boundaries were squared off to the current 1,300 contiguous acres.

As the campus has taken shape, it has developed a wide reputation for some programs, including Elderhostel for adventurous seniors and Eco Week environmental education for Poudre School District students. It also hosts a range of conferences and natural resources classes.

Most users today probably regard Pingree as a paradise, but it's still subject to the same traumas that tried earlier inhabitants.

In June 1987, a rare tornado – virtually unheard of at Pingree Park's 9,000-foot elevation – touched down in the valley. According to the university, it cut a swath hundreds of yards wide and several miles long, toppling some 1,500 trees.

Although there were no injuries or damage to conference or residence buildings, it did destroy the elaborate ropes course just completed after five years of construction. It also took years to clear the fallen trees.

The campus recovered from that catastrophe but did not fare as well in the Hourglass Fire. The lightning-caused fire started on July 1, 1994. Flames estimated at 150 feet high raced toward campus. They charred 1,275 acres, destroyed 13 buildings and damaged two others at a loss of $2.2 million. More than 600 firefighters fought the blaze for four days at a cost of $1.5 million.

"The forest literally exploded in front of me and I saw some of the larger conference buildings catch fire," Bertschy recalled in a 1995 recovery update.

"Thanks to a longstanding evacuation plan that had been revised the previous winter, the exodus was hurried but orderly. Fire officials considered it a miracle that no one was injured, but there were some close calls."

Miraculously, the fire also spared all of the historic structures on the Koenig Ranch.

In a bittersweet sense, the fire gave new life to the Pingree Park campus that grew like a Phoenix from the ashes. Insurance over time enabled CSU to rebuild new structures better suited to modern needs while maintaining the rustic character that gives the campus its appeal.

Historic preservation

In 1996, the 80-acre Koenig/Ramsey Ranch was designated a historical district as one of the few remaining examples of an early 20th century working ranch.

Starting in 2004, the state historical society awarded CSU four grants totaling $207,000 to stabilize and restore all the ranch structures. The most recent grant was used to restore the one-room school where Koenig children and others from the surrounding area were educated.

Visitors are welcome to take a walking tour of the historic buildings, self-directed by outside interpretive signage, but several buildings are in use as classrooms or staff housing and not open to the public. The homestead cabin housing a museum is not yet open to the public.

CSU celebrates preservation of the buildings as "an illustration of life in pioneer times and to allow visitors to experience the early settler way of life." But the silent buildings unfortunately can't tell the whole story of living in this enchanting but forbidding place.

The formidable Hazel Koenig perhaps explains it best. In a rare interview documented by CSU, she in plain but poignant terms discussed her childhood in Pingree Park and why she remained there all her life.

"I get to have quiet and get out and walk," she said. "You don't have to dress up, you can be on dirt, and you've got flowers that you can touch if you want to. It doesn't belong to somebody else and I can look at the mountains and the sky and call them home."