When Slick Brochures featuring photos of timberline meadows and snow-dusted peaks began showing up in high-rent Colorado resort towns last summer, they seemed a parody of real estate advertising, a cheeky query of whether there really are people with more money than God.

“Room to roam,” says the text next to one glossy photo of an island of private land near timberline within the Holy Cross Wilderness Area. Snag trout “with every other cast, until your arm gets tired,” says another brochure.

Do you ski? Then have yourself helicoptered to an inholding on 13,200-foot Holy Cross Ridge, and from there plunge 2,000 vertical feet down to another private wilderness parcel. At day’s end, fly into Vail for dinner, just five minutes away. Or gather with your friends in the piano lounge of a 4,744-square-foot, five-bedroom, five-bath log home. At $4.6 million, says the brochure, this inholding deep within the Holy Cross Wilderness Area is “the perfect private property to get away from civilization.”

But wait—there’s another site several miles away, where $8 million will buy you a four-story, 9,100-square-foot model home, assuredly Colorado’s most exclusive real estate. Even former president Gerald Ford, who owns a house about seven miles away, in the Beaver Creek ski resort, lives amid less tony surroundings.

These are among eight homesites in and adjacent to wilderness areas in Colorado advertised by a firm called TDX—six of them bordering the Holy Cross Wilderness near the Vail and Beaver Creek ski resorts, meccas for the well-to-do. Other “homesites” are located in the Weminuche Wilderness Area near Durango and adjacent to the Fossil Ridge Wilderness Area near Crested Butte.

TDX also owns inholdings within the proposed Spanish Peaks Wilderness Area. And the firm is advertising three forty-acre parcels within the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument at $190,000 each. TDX paid only $80,000 for all three parcels last year.

Many see the work of a familiar hand behind these offerings—that of Tom Chapman, Colorado’s most notorious land agent. Chapman isn’t listed among the corporate officers of TDX, which is registered in Alabama. In a letter sent to newspapers this past summer, TDX claimed, “Tom Chapman is not an owner in TDX nor has he ever been.” But the company has a mailing address in Montrose, Colorado, not far from where Chapman lives. Its answering service takes messages for Chapman—calls that were not returned in the case of this report. And, according to U.S. Forest Service officials, Chapman has represented TDX in discussions about federal land issues.

The boldness of wilderness mansions fits the Chapman reputation for defiance. He first gained it fifteen years ago when he put a client aboard a bulldozer to begin blading subdivision roads into 4,200 acres of grazing lands overlooking Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument. The blustering trick succeeded in attracting widespread attention. Since then, Chapman has become ever more flamboyant, ever more brazen in converting inholdings among public lands into cash.

Chapman’s strategy is simple: He preys on the fear of land managers and citizens who worry that unless they buy him out, Chapman will build homes on pristine areas in and around federal wildernesses. To succeed, Chapman doesn’t need to find a buyer for his isolated parcels, he only needs to make the public think he can.

His style has grated on some of Colorado’s most powerful political figures. “I don’t like him. I don’t like what he is doing,” Colorado senator Wayne Allard reportedly told a gathering of outraged residents in Montrose this August. Allard has also branded Chapman’s tactics as “blackmail.”

Colorado senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell called the tactics “taxpayer terrorism,” with Chapman “holding some of our national wonders for ransom.” What Chapman is doing doesn’t look illegal, conceded the senator’s spokesman, Chris Changery. “It’s simply wrong.”

Representative Scott McInnis, a Colorado Republican, compared it to somebody finding out where a highway is being built and then buying up land along the route. He vows not to play along. “It’s not illegal. But we’re not going to allow highway robbery. We’ll offer market value” in exchange for Chapman’s inholdings.

Chapman tells the story differently. He says the federal government erred, and erred badly, in not buying out inholders when designating wilderness. “Wilderness by definition should have no inholdings,” Chapman said seven years ago, when he still occasionally talked to reporters. “You can’t have it both ways, just like you can’t be part pregnant.”

He, and the clients he represents, portray themselves as Davids, slinging stones at an imperious government. “Do the inholders have enough legal resources to challenge the goliath U.S. government and well-heeled environmental groups, or is this an insurmountable tag-team that reigns with impunity in stripping private property rights?” asked TDX president L. T. Trussell, in the letter published last summer in Colorado newspapers.

To critics, such talk is blather. Trussell and Chapman’s group, they point out, bought the inholdings only within the last several years—and for as much as three times the going rate. A public increasingly wise to the ways of Chapman is urging the government to call his bluff—let him build his mansions and then see just how many buyers he can find willing to flap a helicopter back and forth every time they want to go to a 7-Eleven.

The real issue, however, is access. The Forest Service believes it is legally obligated to provide some sort of surface access to inholdings. Wilderness advocates argue that the Forest Service caves in to demands for access too easily. But sources within the government and representatives for inholders agree that the power to decide what type of access will be provided to inholdings rests with local governments. For example, much of the Holy Cross Wilderness lies within Eagle County, Colorado, where county commissioners have enacted restrictive backcountry zoning codes. The codes do not preclude construction, but they require extensive environmental analysis. That analysis would have to address tough issues such as how a functioning sewage leach field could be contained on alpine tundra.

So far, the Chapman case has attracted little attention beyond Colorado. But he is unlikely to be the last developer to exploit wilderness inholdings, not only amid national forest lands, but also in Bureau of Land Management acreages and in national parks and monuments. The long-empty quarters of the West are filling up fast, and the pace will probably quicken as aging baby boomers search for solace along the periphery of public lands. What could be better than being surrounded by a national park or a wilderness area? The Forest Service alone acknowledges 400,000 acres of inholdings inside the wilderness areas it manages.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg, just the beginning. I think we’ll see others, not just from TDX, but from other developers,” says Bob Storch, a Forest Service official in Colorado familiar with Chapman’s tactics. “This is going to continue, not only in Colorado, but throughout the West.”

Chapman, now forty-nine, began pricking sensibilities about public lands fifteen years ago. Growing up amid the fruit orchards and coal mines of Colorado’s North Fork Valley, the tall and lanky Chapman made a name for himself as a long-distance runner at the University of Colorado. He’s also said to be an avid backpacker. In recent years, he has visited area nursing homes to play the piano.

In 1984, Chapman served as a real estate broker for rancher Richard Mott, who owned 4,200 acres of grazing land adjacent to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument. Mott had been hoping to sell the land to the National Park Service, but the agency was dragging its feet. That changed after Chapman had his client board a rented bulldozer and threaten to blade roads for a subdivision. The case ended up in court, but Mott eventually got most of the $2.5 million he had been seeking for the land.

Chapman next turned to the nearby West Elk Wilderness Area. In 1989, Robert Minerich, a Kentucky contractor, bought a 240-acre inholding in the wilderness for $1,000 an acre and hired Chapman to broker a resale. The Forest Service refused the demand of $5,000 an acre. So in 1992, Chapman and a partnership bought the holdings for $4,000 an acre (a majority of that money was loaned by Minerich) and announced plans for a 3,450-square-foot log home. Lacking permission to restore a road that was cut into the area in 1957, Chapman arranged to have building materials for the log home flown in by helicopter at a cost of $400 an hour.

The structure, on a ridge with sweeping views of the 192,000-acre wilderness—the first of several million-dollar buildings that Chapman pledged would be built on the 240 acres—was three-quarters complete when the Forest Service capitulated, agreeing to acquire the property in a land trade.

The public had been crying foul about Chapman’s wilderness building. But alarm set in when the details of the exchange became known. Government-contracted appraisers decided Chapman’s 240 acres were worth $640,000. They came up with the same value for 105 acres of national forest that Chapman wanted at a 9,000-foot location a mile south of the Telluride ski area, a resort gaining favor with such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Telluride area residents protested, quickly and loudly. The land near Telluride, they said, was worth up to $4 million. An outraged citizenry called for a federal investigation. So did Senator Campbell.

Adherents of the government-got-snookered theory believe they were validated when, two years ago, Chapman’s group unloaded its 105 acres. The initial investment of $240,000 by Minerich had only eight years later cashed out at $4.2 million, minus building expenses and attorney fees.

One of Chapman’s would-be investors came forward with a report of supposedly seamy insider details. Chapman and an ally, he said, artificially inflated the value of the wilderness inholding with the intention of getting the land exchange. They assumed, said the individual, only a few helicopter flights would be necessary to get the Forest Service to concede the land near Telluride, which they all along figured was worth three to four times more than the wilderness inholding. That allegation triggered a federal investigation, which was eventually dropped.

Today the debate continues. Telluride area resident Art Goodtimes, a county commissioner and environmental activist, alleges the Forest Service cloaked its motives. Acknowledging the true value of the West Elk inholding, he says, would have elevated the price of inholdings across the nation. Hence, the artificially low price for the Telluride land.

Chapman was soon on to new and even more ambitious undertakings. He sent letters to wilderness inholders inquiring about their interest in selling. He found some sellers, especially when he mentioned prices three to four times above the going rate.

Hunting outfitters Deb and Rudy Rudibaugh were offered $100 an acre by the Forest Service for their forty acres adjacent to Colorado’s Fossil Ridge Wilderness. They held out, and in July 1998 took the $150,000 offered by Chapman’s company. In an interview, Deb Rudibaugh said there’s no reason to get excited about Chapman or anybody else building a trophy house on the property. “Let him try to build a $5 million house up there,” she said. She offers to take reporters to inspect the site, which she refers to as “that piece of rock.”

“It’s a great, grand, beautiful view, but there’s absolutely no way to do anything, other than by helicopter, and I don’t think there are any helicopter pilots crazy enough to want to take in a propane tank.”

Another seller was the Smith family, who had picked away at a nineteenth-century gold mining claim in the mountains southwest of Vail. Even after the surrounding land was designated as the Holy Cross Wilderness Area in 1980, the family visited annually, believing that the claim contained as much as $8 million in ore. Aging family members sold the land in 1997 to a group Chapman was affiliated with called Wilderness for Americans with Disabilities. That land, and other parcels, were later conveyed from Wilderness for Americans with Disabilities to TDX.

And Chapman has returned to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument, which Congress has approved for national park designation. The National Park Service tried to buy 120 acres not far from the 2,000-foot chasm last year for $1,000 an acre. The owner instead sold to Chapman’s group, which now has a billboard asking $190,000 each for three lots with “beautiful canyon views” and “world-class sunsets.” That’s $4,750 an acre. The park service has ordered a new appraisal.

The market for wilderness inholdings has been rising across the West, in some places more than others. Some buyers want to get inholdings as trade bait for land exchanges with the federal government. In addition, the federal government has stepped up its efforts to acquire inholdings, inflating the value of those that remain in private hands.

Jon Mulford, a former real estate attorney in Aspen, retired from law to found the Wilderness Land Trust in 1991. He was seeing a growing temptation to develop wilderness inholdings near resort areas. With an ability to option land, something the Forest Service lacked, he set out to secure inholdings and then sell them to the Forest Service at cost. He concentrated first on the Holy Cross Wilderness Area, near Vail.

“When I first started buying stuff around the Holy Cross Wilderness in 1992, we were paying $700 an acre,” he says. “Now it’s about $1,200 an acre. That’s for the run-of-the-mill backcountry stuff.”

Chapman’s purchases are inflating that market. In 1998, for example, Chapman paid $2,000 an acre at Holy Cross City, an abandoned mining town adjacent to the wilderness area, compared to the $900 per acre the Wilderness Land Trust paid for nearby acreage. Elsewhere in Colorado, Chapman’s group paid $7,000 an acre for five acres in the Weminuche Wilderness Area—a price that approaches the value of raw land along valley floors and near highways.

“Over time, we have recognized a fairly large escalation of prices, from the average of about $700 an acre to $1,500 to $2,000 an acre,” says Paul Zimmerman, a retired land swap specialist with the Forest Service in Colorado.

Here and elsewhere, the question of access is confusing. Without ground access, such inholdings are worth relatively little. With such access, values appreciate rapidly.

Two principal laws are relevant: the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (ANILCA). The Wilderness Act mandates “reasonable regulations” to implement “adequate access” that is consistent with access enjoyed in similarly situated areas. ANILCA, at least in the opinion of the Forest Service, further mandates access to inholdings, although the question of whether it applies to the lower forty-eight states is disputed. George Nickas, executive director of the Missoula, Montana-based Wilderness Watch, says courts have not addressed the issue thoroughly. When the right case comes along, Nickas says, his group will challenge the assertion that ANILCA’s access provision supersedes the Wilderness Act.

Now vulnerable are the federal land agencies to Chapman and others intent on wrestling big bucks out of isolated parcels? Very vulnerable, say many agency sources and environmentalists.

“I think the Forest Service is a sitting duck unless they decide not to bite at his bait,” Suzanne Jones of the Wilderness Society says of Chapman. “I think Tom Chapman is the most egregious example I have heard of, but I imagine others will join his ranks, and in other forms.”

“As long as the agencies and the public are willing to be extorted, then we are vulnerable,” Jones continues. “Tom Chapman has played right into that fear of losing the wilderness and people’s love of wilderness.”

In the opinion of Mulford and other environmentalists, the agencies are vulnerable if they allow inholders to set the rules.

“People around the country are regularly trying to hold up the United States, but I don’t know of anything comparable to what Chapman is doing with the trophy homes in wilderness areas,” says Mulford, whose Wilderness Land Trust has purchased more than 8,000 acres in thirty wilderness areas during the last decade.

“If you look at the number of inholdings just in national forest wildernesses around the country, it’s staggering,” Nickas says. “The money isn’t there to buy them all out; and if these development proposals occur, there will be a huge impact on wildernesses.”

Nickas advises against any capitulation. “There may be times when the agencies can and should play hardball on access, and there may be times when people still end up doing some developments inside wilderness areas. That’s unfortunate, but that will be much more rare than if people start caving in to the demands of people like Chapman.”

Chapman, with his threats of trophy homes, is so far an anomaly. Mining is a more common threat. Best known is the case of the Crown Butte Mine near Yellowstone National Park. Congress appropriated $65 million to pay the landowners not to mine for gold. That has drawn the attention of many people, says Nickas, “and we’re seeing a lot of people in other areas seeing wilderness holdings as the next gold mine.”

In managing wilderness, the federal agencies have seemingly contradictory mandates: to maintain existing wilderness character and to provide reasonable access to inholders. The agencies have few tools. They are allowed to buy inholdings only at appraised value. And when it passed the Wilderness Act in 1964, Congress withheld the power of eminent domain, or condemnation, which would have allowed the government to gain land outright when deemed in the public interest.

Given Chapman’s tactics, Mulford says, “you have an entirely different situation now, when even our congressmen talk about highway robbery, blackmail and ransom.” Condemnation could be limited to cases in which people like Chapman threaten development within wilderness areas. “It seems to me it’s the politicians who need to stand up and be counted.”

Colorado representative McInnis doesn’t want to talk about condemnation. He believes that local governments can zone against buildings on wilderness inholdings and that local communities can collectively tell the Chapmans, “This is not right.”

And McInnis is not alone. Washington observers say there’s virtually no chance that Congress, in its pro­property rights zeal, will concede more power of eminent domain to federal agencies.

But could there be a middle ground? One proposal would give the Forest Service and the BLM authority to ensure that use of land that might otherwise be condemned outright is kept at the same level after wilderness designation as before. A second proposal would freeze the level of access allowed at the time that surrounding lands are designated as wilderness. If, for example, the owners of a mining claim high in the Montana Rockies had traditionally used a horse to access the claim, that would remain the allowed use even if the claim were sold by their heirs to someone who envisioned a weekend cabin and a gravel road. A third option repeatedly cited by Forest Service employees is for rigorous local zoning, using the environmental review powers possessed by county jurisdictions to minimize what can be built on inholdings.

In Colorado, Forest Service officials seem unsure in their response to Chapman. So far, their only clear reaction, contained in correspondence with Chapman’s lawyer, Aaron Clay, is to stress that access requires a special-use permit, issued by the Forest Service. Is there a danger of overreacting? Adam Poe, who makes his living doing such exchanges with the Denver-based Western Land Group, thinks so. “In the big picture, the Forest Service would become more vulnerable to things like that if they only concentrate on the few people who want to make mischief.

“If you spend too much time worrying about acquiring Tom Chapman’s parcels,” Poe continues, “that should not come at the expense of working with the people out there who are willing to sell at reasonable prices.”