Few homes in metro Denver can claim to have a million-dollar view. But a listing about to hit the market near Morrison’s Willowbrook neighborhood will test how much Colorado buyers are willing to pay up to be able to look down.
In whatever direction Liz Wilson looks out from the home she and her husband Rick built on Lyons Ridge, just north of West Belleview Avenue, she is met with amazing views and recollections that span decades.
Directly to the south, Wilson can see the home where she was born and raised and beyond that, the rolling hills leading into the Ken Caryl area. Looking straight down to the east is what is left of the Tri-B Ranch where in 1949 her grandparents started a cattle operation covering 540 acres.
From the commanding perch, the metro area rolls out for miles below, including the skyscrapers of downtown Denver. The Red Rocks Amphitheater is visible to the north, more so on summer evenings when it pulses with light, although bands aren’t loud enough to be heard unless the wind is blowing just right.
To the west, just below the ridge, is the Red Rocks Country Club with its golf course. Famed Colorado artist Vance Kirkland used a ledge on the home’s property as the lookout point for one of his designed realism works called “Near Morrison.”
A large natural amphitheater, briefly called the Bax Ranch Cave, after Wilson’s grandparents, sits up the hill further west.
It is better known as Colorow Cave for Muache Ute Indian Chief Colorow who made it a summer hangout before he and his were relocated to the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservationin August 1881. It is now called the Willowbrook Amphitheater, a private venue for the surrounding community that can host 200 people.
Wilson’s grandfather, Drew Bax, was a gentleman rancher and avid art collector fascinated with the Old West who donated or gifted about 600 pieces to the Denver Art Museum.
“In the end, he did very well for himself, but his hobby and his passion, since he was 9 years old, was collecting Native American Art,” Wilson said. “He was known for having one of the finest Plains Indian collections there was.”
Bax, after a varied career, started running cattle later in life. When he retired from that in the early 1960s, he sold most of the ranch land to developers of the Willowbrook community, leaving the family with 185 acres.
To pay estate taxes, the family had to sell all but 18 of the remaining acres when Bax died, with most of that land going for the Montane neighborhood.
Wilson and her husband, both airline pilots, scraped enough together to buy 23 acres from the estate on the ranch’s high point. They waited another 10 years, until 2005, to build their dream home in the “parkitecture style.”
“Everything in this home is custom, from the old barn wood 3/4″ pine hand-hewn flooring (from Iowa), and trestle beams from a bridge near the Great Salt Lake. The stone veneer is from the Telluride stone company, and the patio pavers are Lyons flat stone,” said Kathleen Hanvey, the listing agent on the home, which is hitting the market this month.
Hanvey and brokerage partner Todd Houghton with the Red Rocks Team at Your Castle Real Estate listed the property at $7.45 million.
At 15175 W. Belleview Ave., the home is a three-bedroom, three-bath single-level home with 3,983 square feet and a finished three-car garage. It may not be the largest or most luxuriously appointed home the Front Range offers, but its views are unrivaled and the design blends well with the surroundings.
At the same time, it is close enough to C-470 that the Wilsons could commute to Denver International Airport where they worked.
The acreage has large trees with a zip line and a spring-fed pond with large carp, bass and blue gill fish for the next owner. Deer, elk and even bobcats are regular visitors to the property.
“Deer come by and look in the windows all the time,” Wilson said.
The Bergen Ditch, an irrigation canal that runs through the property, wouldn’t be worth mentioning except that it feeds Rabbit Falls, a waterfall along the road leading up to the home that looks very similar to the logo on older versions of the Coors Banquet cans.
Wilson said Adolph Coors III, grandson of the founder of Adolph Coors Brewing, lived down the road from the ranch house and was a friend of her grandfather’s. When the waterfall was active, it would have easily been visible to those in the area
Wilson said her grandfather would walk with her along what is now West Belleview Avenue when she was young and hold up a steel Coors Banquet can and compare the logo to the waterfall.
“That’s the waterfall, Adolph told me so,” she remembers her grandfather telling her.
The waterfall was one of her favorite features on the ranch and a reason why Wilson tried to secure that acreage.
Coors Brewing, however, points to the much more majestic Fish Creek Falls near Steamboat and Milton Falls near Marble as the inspirations for its waterfall designs. Given its commitment to using “100% Rocky Mountain Water,” Coors will never acknowledge a waterfall on a Front Range irrigation ditch as the original model, Wilson said.
Adolph Coors III was seized near his home in 1960 on Turkey Bridge and murdered by escaped convict Joseph Corbett Jr. during a botched kidnapping attempt. Corbett wrote a note demanding a ransom to release Coors even though he had already killed him.
With the kids grown, and retirement looming, Wilson and her husband have already moved down to the last remaining parcel of what once was the family ranch. And for the right price, they are willing to let go of their dream home on high.
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