FLDS survivors fence off US forest land in Colorado, angering residents

A conflict simmering in southwest Colorado between residents and a group calling itself the Free Land Holders Committee escalated Thursday as ranchers and outdoor enthusiasts began tearing down barbed wire fences the group had erected around 1,400 acres of land in the San Juan National Forest.

The Free Land Holders began building the fence on U.S. Forest Service land over the weekend. Some members of the group had previous ties to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a polygamist sect led by the imprisoned Warren Jeffs.

Patrick Pipkin, who identified himself as a member of the Free Land Holders and has had legal disputes with the FLDS, said the group is entitled to the 1,400 acres and has the documentation to prove it.

“We come in peace and honor,” Pipkin told The Denver Post on Thursday. “People will see it and understand it. I know the bullying tactics they use. That’s not who we are.”

Angry residents – some of them carrying handguns – cut down sections of the fence Thursday afternoon in the national forest outside the town of Mancos, about 30 miles northwest of Durango. They promised to return on Friday to remove more.

Montezuma County Sheriff Steve Nowlin had called on people to resign so the dispute could be negotiated between federal authorities and the Free Land Owners. Sheriff’s deputies on Thursday watched as locals rolled up the wire fence and ripped posts out of the ground.

The fences alarmed ranchers who use the federal land to graze cattle and those who mountain bike, hike and cross-country ski in the area known locally as Chicken Creek. They fear the group will block access to public lands.

“They couldn’t have picked a piece of land that was more popular with the city than this area,” said Brad Finch, a retired teacher and firefighter who lives outside Mancos and uses the national forest almost daily to hike, bike or ski.

The sheriff, however, insisted that access was not blocked, even though the fencing crisscrossed U.S. Forest Service property.

“No public access will be denied,” Nowlin said. “I’m just trying to deter all these people who are peddling false information.”

Nowlin, representatives from the Forest Service and Free Land Holders tried for hours Wednesday to negotiate a deal. The Free Land Owners agreed to suspend fence construction to give federal officials time to review the ownership claim, Forest Service spokesman Scott Owen said.

Forest Service officials also met with concerned residents Wednesday evening to ask for their patience, and the sheriff met again with about 40 community members at a protest Thursday afternoon to discuss the situation.

Forest Service records show the 1,400 acres in question have been owned by the federal government since 1927, Owen said.

“These people are just like you and me”

The people building the fences are not members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), Nowlin said. But many of them were born into the cult led by Jeffs and fled when the leader was jailed on rape charges in his role in the arranged marriage of teenage cousins ​​in Texas, the sheriff said.

Nowlin said the newcomers claim they have rights to the Forest Service land under the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave U.S. citizens the right to live on and work on land in exchange for it.

“These people are just like you and me,” Nowlin said. “They are normal people. They’re not vigilantes or anything like that.”

Jeffs, who described himself as a prophet, owned property in the Southwest – including about 60 acres outside Mancos – that was placed under court conservatorship after his conviction, Nowlin said.

This property near Mancos, which includes three homes and nine outbuildings, was sold in 2020 to Blue Mountain Ranch LLC, owned by Pipkin, Claude Seth Cooke and Andrew Chatwin. They transferred the property in 2023 to PJ Sunset PLP, a revocable living trust in Baker, Nevada. The 60-acre property plus building is valued at about $1.5 million, according to Montezuma County appraisal records.

Pipkin confirmed that the fences were built by his group. He said he was not baptized into the FLDS church, but he has family members who belong to it.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Pipkin won a settlement with the cities of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, in 2017 after he, Chatwin and Cooke sued them for wrongful arrest. Both towns, which lie on the Utah-Arizona border, were controlled by the FLDS church, and Pipkin and the other men said they were discriminated against because they were not FLDS members.

Pipkin is also co-owner of the former Jeffs estate in South Dakota.

“The Forest Service doesn’t own the land,” Pipkin said of the 1,400 acres. “It’s not in her name. It is managed only by the Forest Service. I don’t think it’s mine. It is the Free Land Holders Committee that has jurisdiction and authority.”

Pipkin said he wants the United States to send a diplomat to meet with the Free Land Owners because the sheriff and the Forest Service cannot answer his questions.

When asked what the Free Land Holders Committee is and who its members are, Pipkin recommended reading the Declaration of Independence. He said there were “thousands of us.”

It is unclear how many people live on the property, which Pipkin purchased in 2020.

“They are very unpredictable”

The situation is shocking residents of Mancos, a town of about 1,200 people located about 6 miles from Mesa Verde National Park.

Mancos School District Superintendent Todd Cordrey moved Mancos High School’s annual Chicken Creek Challenge cross-country meet to a new location after the city marshal informed him of what was happening in the national forest.

The race, which has been held in Chicken Creek since 1998, includes middle and high school runners from 10 schools and is a big deal in the town, he said. The school district found a new location about 10 miles away because rhetoric on social media raised concerns about runners’ safety if they ran Saturday’s race in Chicken Creek.

“We need to make sure we don’t put our children in a place where there could be violence,” Cordrey said. “For us it was a given that we had to move for safety reasons.”

Finch, who said he spoke to another member of Pipkin’s group Thursday morning to urge them to tear down the fence, said he was concerned about how events would unfold if a group insisted that they be given public land belong.

“As long as they perceive it as private land, they are very unpredictable and have enormous latitude to act in ways that are very dangerous to people,” he said.

Finch heard about the fence on Sunday and then rode his mountain bike up a trail to see for himself. He said the fence was about 4.5 feet high and there were four or five strands of barbed wire running between the posts. He volunteers with the Chicken Creek Nordic Association, which maintains 13 miles of trails for winter cross-country skiing, and he said the fence crosses that trail five times.

The Free Land Owners have left gaps for hikers and bikes to pass, but Finch said they didn’t know about the cross-country skiing group until he spoke to them.

The fence builders also pulled out metal signs that the U.S. Department of the Interior had installed to mark boundaries and replaced them with signs of their own that read “Free Landowner…Exclusive Justice and Sacred Honor.”

Frustrations are mounting due to a lack of action

Locals are frustrated by what they see as a lack of action from the sheriff or the U.S. Forest Service, Finch said.