Park City could soon own over 500 acres in the Iron Mountain area. The Summit Land Conservancy is now working to permanently protect the land with a conservation easement on 476 acres of it.
The effort began last December, when the Park City Council decided in a work session to pursue protections on city-owned land on Iron Mountain.
The city had already been approached by Iron Mountain Associates, the developer of The Colony subdivision in White Pine Canyon, about donating 218 acres of land. The Colony is now built out and Iron Mountain Associates was looking to offload land holdings that it couldn’t develop.
While the land will constitute a valuable gift, its maintenance will be a future expense for the city. Summit Land Conservancy Executive Director Cheryl Fox said Summit Land Conservancy needs to raise $92,000 to help fund the land purchase and pay for its future stewardship. The organization has also secured a $10,000 matching grant from an anonymous donor.
Fox said both the city and Iron Mountain Associates want to move forward.
“The reason that the city finally said yes, that sounds like a good idea is because a conservation easement held by an accredited land trust like the Summit Land Conservancy is the best way we have in the United States [to protect] open space," Fox said. "There’s law around this, it’s recorded, there are a whole lot of things that support this type of tool for land conservation.”
Fox added that none of the land on Iron Mountain contains additional access points to popular trails in the area, including Mid-Mountain Trail, which runs through the property.
Trail access has become a point of contention in the last few years between trail users and the neighborhoods where trailheads are located. Fox said although this conservation easement won’t make trails more accessible, additional trail access points could come later.
“This property doesn't solve any of that problem, but maybe it will in the future," she said. "I say this all the time to my board, we start with a project and it’s right there in the middle of all kinds of other private property. Sometimes we scratch our heads and think, ‘wow, why are we doing that? It’s not contiguous to anything.’ Well, you always have to have the first step. The first step isn’t contiguous to anything, but maybe you could have subsequent steps that are. That’s where we are with this one.”
For more information on Iron Mountain and the Summit Land Conservancy, click here.
