The new pioneers of sprawl

"I love the quietness and the naturalness," she says. "Seeing the sunset, having the land. We chose this particular thing because it's what was available."

Pagliotti is prepared for the compromises of rural living. Electricity often goes out, and when a freak snowstorm hit last year, six days passed before anyone could get into or out of their driveways.

But not everyone who moves here is as ready for the inconveniences. Highways, cellphones, and Internet access have encouraged commuters and former urbanites to go after a slice of the West, but the reality doesn't always match the ideal.

John Clarke, a former commissioner of Larimer County, remembers new residents complaining that the county hadn't plowed roads that were their own responsibility, or that the mailman wouldn't drive three miles in to a house. One man complained the county graded his road only once a year. "I did a calculation - we were getting $800 a year in property taxes from the properties abutting the road, and spending $7,000 to maintain the road once a year," says Clarke. "But he wanted more."

So as the demographic shift brings a culture clash along with a landscape transformation, the tension isn't just between lifestyles, but between reality and expectations. That's why Mr. Clarke wrote the "Code of the West" when he was commissioner, outlining realities basic to any rural resident - "unpaved roads generate dust;" "manure can cause objectionable odors" - but an unpleasant surprise for others.

"People say they want to move into rural areas," says Jim Reidhead, director of Larimer County's Rural Land Use Center. "What they want to do is superimpose an urban lifestyle on rural America. They get upset when they're on the way to Hewlett Packard and they're caught behind a combine. They don't like the smells, and God forbid their neighbor's out haying at 3 a.m. We have truly a clash of cultures."

But few can agree on the solution. Some suggest increasing the 35-acre exemption - as Montana did, to 160 acres - giving counties more say over planning and zoning when land is sold. But that's an unpopular idea among ranchers, farmers, and the state's fierce property-rights advocates, and many experts question whether it would get to the heart of the problem.

Still, Mr. Reidhead is doing his part to find solutions that work around ideologies. Unlike some, he doesn't see the 35-acre development as an unqualified evil. He's seen 35-acre tracts managed well, especially when property lines are delineated to maximize open space, cluster homes, and minimize damage caused by roads.

So instead of outlawing the ranchette, he'd like both sides - environmentalists and property-rights people - to find solutions for common goals, like preserving vast ranch and farmlands that still cover much of the West.

"The dilemma in the planning business is that everyone knows what they don't want," says Reidhead, surrounded by maps and county plans in his Fort Collins office. "It takes an entire community to preserve farmland. We're asking the farmer not to become a millionaire [by selling off his land]. We have to meet him halfway."

One of Reidhead's main projects involves helping farmers and ranchers develop less productive sections of their land - the corners that a pivot irrigation system can't reach, for instance - while keeping the vast majority of the property intact. In exchange for putting conservation easements on most of the land, the county allows the rest to be developed into parcels smaller than 35 acres, while still avoiding some of the most restrictive subdivision requirements, like sewers.

Driving out of Fort Collins, he points to a project he facilitated - six homesites, clustered along the corner of a farmer's irrigated land, taking up far less space than if he had simply subdivided and sold out. "It's a decent compromise," says Reidhead.

But farther out of town, he passes an example of the real reason he's fighting the onslaught of development: the Roberts Ranch, nearly 20,000 acres of the West the way it used to be. It stretches up from the flat plains to the rocky plateaus and ravines of the foothills, rugged red country without a house in sight. An antelope herd grazes calmly just off the road.

"This is the Western landscape right here," says Reidhead with a smile. "Some days I get a little discouraged, and I come out here and see, well, it does make a difference. This is a landscape worth fighting for."

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