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Woman Fights Eviction from Rocky Mountain NP

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Private inholdings in parks have been something the National Park Service has grappled with for decades. The agency's latest fight over a patch of parkland surrounds an Arizona woman's desire to hold onto land her late husband owned in Rocky Mountain National Park.
   Betty Dick's fight with the agency stems from a deal her late husband, Fred Dick, made with the Park Service in 1980 over 66 acres of land he bought in the 1960s. At the time, the land was outside the park boundaries. But when the park was enlarged in the late 1970s, it swallowed up his land and so the agency approached Dick about buying him out.
    Under an agreement he reached with the Park Service, Dick sold two-thirds of the land to the agency, with the understanding that he and Betty could live on the remaining acreage for the rest of their lives. Well, when the papers to seal the deal arrived in 1980, they stated that the Dicks could live on the land for only 25 years. The couple was too weary from the past legal battles to contest this wording, and figured they wouldn't live another quarter-century anyway. So they signed.
    While Fred Dick died in 1992, his 83-year-old widow is still going strong and refuses to give up the land, which she lives on during the summer months. Her battle has taken Betty all the way to Congress, where she convinced the House of Representatives to pass a bill allowing her to live on the land for the rest of her life. Now she just has to convince the Senate to go along.

   In the meantime, the Park Service has offered to let Betty stay on three acres of land that surround her house. But she's refusing to budge.

Comments

Some family owners of lands which became national park in-holdings during periods of park expansion sold their properties too early with little thought to future values and their later life elder high health costs often without professional fiduciary lawyers acting on their behalf.  Their
incentive may have been to "protect Nature's ecosystems" thinking future park managers would respect Nature vs those more common narcissistic superintendents who would prefer "building expensive monuments" on owners former private lands in celebration of their  NPS  Egos.
 
The 1968 Redwood NP, perhaps the most expensive by far for the period, and now 51 yrs. old included many 
private properties, with many owners selling way too early under the 25 year family occupancy rule considering 
these private lands were merely trashed, logged connecting links to the fragmented remaining old growth coastal 
redwood forest already secure with California State Parks via The Visionary Save-The-Redwoods League Founders.
 
Also, Consider The Murie Ranch Case within Grand Tetons NP,  a very valuable historic STS  Dude  Ranch 
77 acre (31 ha.)  purchased by the Muries in 1945.
when sadly, Mardy Murie and her extended family sold to NPS in 1968 truly too early; Mardy lived another 35 years
requiring  extra health care assistance during her elder years and passing at 101 Years of Age  in 2003.
Her son, Martin Murie passed in January 28,  2012.
 
https://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/conservationist-mardy-murie-die...
 
https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam/obituaries/december2013/m...

 
https://www.tetonscience.org/locations/murie-ranch/  


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