Family reunion-sized Colorado estate with campground seeks $33.5M

Property includes 12,000-square-foot main home and horse facilities

The property in Hesperus (Credit: Andy Wingerd/Ignited Imagery)
The property in Hesperus (Credit: Andy Wingerd/Ignited Imagery)

A 175-acre compound in southwest Colorado big enough to host 240-person family reunions is on the market for $33.5 million.

The property, powered by its own solar farm, includes a 12,000-square-foot four-bedroom home with a gym, greenhouse, five fireplaces and a 22-foot ceiling in the great room, according to the Wall Street Journal. It also has a campground and two barns, a corral and stables for horses, as well as riding trails.

Retired Seagate Technology executive Charles Pope and his wife, former nurse Gloria Pope, bought a 35-acre parcel in 2002 and added another four pieces over the years. While they live there now, they initially bought it only for family get-togethers.

“You couldn’t reserve anything big enough,” Charles Pope said. The gatherings, held every two years, have since broken up into smaller reunions.

Sign Up for the undefined Newsletter

They commissioned the home themselves at a cost of about $10 million. Pope said the solar farm provides almost all the electricity needed for the house and facilities.

It’s in the unincorporated community of Hesperus, at the southwest corner of Colorado, about an hour and a half from the Four Corners border with Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico and two hours from Telluride and its surrounding mountain resorts. Tom Cruise earlier this year sold his 320-acre mountain retreat in Telluride for close to his asking price of $39.5 million.

Colorado is among Western states that have attracted buyers from coastal metropolitan areas since the pandemic. That’s helped drive up prices in many parts of the state., including Hesperus, where they rose 15 percent in the last year or so, according to Zillow data reported by the Denver Post.

[WSJ] — Dennis Lynch