Brandy turned to me, her face pale with fury. “This is a pathetic extortion attempt. We have prescriptive easement rights. We’ve used this road for two decades. My lawyers will crush you for this.” “Maybe,” I said. “But prescriptive easements require a judge’s ruling, Brandy. And until a judge tells me otherwise, this is my land. You sued me first. You slashed my tires. You tried to ruin my reputation. Now get off my property.”
She stormed off, but I could tell she was shaken. She knew Boyer had screwed up by not checking the deep history of the parcel before launching their aggressive lawsuit. That night, sitting in my kitchen, surrounded by legal documents, I looked closely at the calendar. It was late October. The Rocky Mountain winter was weeks away. I started doing some research on the infrastructure of Whispering Pines.
The homes were massive, 8, 10, 12,000 square feet. The neighborhood was so remote that it wasn’t connected to the municipal gas grid. Instead, every single one of those mansions relied on massive buried propane tanks to run their central heating, their heated driveways, their pool boilers, and their backup generators. I pulled up the specs on a commercial propane delivery truck. Fully loaded, a tanker weighed between 30 and 40,000 pounds. That’s 15 to 20 tons.
Then I looked up the county engineering report for the picturesque timber bridge at the front entrance of Whispering Pines. Maximum weight capacity: 5 tons. I sat back in my chair, the realization hitting me like a freight train. The front bridge was strictly for passenger vehicles. The HOA received all its heavy deliveries, construction materials, garbage trucks, and most importantly, the massive winter propane shipments through the back service road, my road.
If they didn’t have access to my road, the propane trucks couldn’t get in. If the propane trucks couldn’t get in, those multi-million-dollar glass houses would freeze solid by Christmas. Pipes would burst. The neighborhood would be uninhabitable. They didn’t just need my road. Their entire existence depended on it.
The next morning, I called a commercial fencing company. I ordered two massive heavy-duty steel bollards and a reinforced iron gate. I had them core-drilled directly into the asphalt at the base of the service road right between David’s neon orange stakes. I padlocked it with a chain thick enough to tow a battleship. And right in the center of the gate, I hung a bright red aluminum sign: Private Property. No Trespassing. All Unauthorized Access Strictly Prohibited.
The trap was set. Now all I had to do was wait for it to get cold. November in the Colorado Rockies doesn’t arrive quietly. It kicks the door down. The temperature plummeted into the teens during the second week of the month, and a heavy wet blizzard blanketed the foothills in over two feet of snow. For me, it meant huddling in a rented RV I had parked next to the depot, running a small electric heater, and drinking instant coffee.